For over a decade I never heard anything good about Arch. The most common pitch was something like "it's fun to fix when it breaks", so I was completely blindsided when Valve based SteamOS off it. What did they see in it? I was due for a new SSD, so I decided I'd run it for a week or two. The moment it started being a nuisance, I'd wipe the drive.
That was years ago and I'm still on it.
> For over a decade I never heard anything good about Arch.
Probably from people who have never used it.
I run multiple arch systems and multiple Debian systems in my house.
Debian is great if what you want to do, is something that has been easy for 5 years. You set it up and forget it.
Debian breaks down whenever you try to do something new that requires some new dependency. Oh you want to run a Go program written in 2023? Now you have to download and install the new version yourself because the latest version in apt is 1.19. On arch stuff like that is generally not a problem. It's the best supported distro after the Debian based ones.
Trixie now has go1.24 - including the upstream default GOTOOLCHAIN value to automatically download new compiler versions straight from go.dev if the go.mod wants them.
I was a bit surprised this is not a Debian Policy violation (and any Debian patches for security support may no longer apply), but at least the user experience will "just work". Cross-reference https://bugs.debian.org/1040507 .
That is both neat and surprising.
That said while my specific example perhaps is obsolete, the general class of problem I described is not.
Don't know if you responded to the right person since I didn't mention Debian, but I did try it and the other major distributions a long time ago. Honestly, distros mostly felt the same to me apart from their repositories. Debian soured me by keeping its repo perpetually out of date. It's nice to never get burned by an improperly tested package, but never having the latest features and non-security fixes is less nice.
> It's nice to never get burned by an improperly tested package, but never having the latest features and non-security fixes is less nice.
That’s stable for you, even the ‘less nice’ parts are a feature of the distribution if you’re running a fleet. On desktops people have been running testing or unstable for this reason since forever.
Hardware support in the last years has really improved significantly. I was using arch a lot back around 2016, and it was a nightmare. On every kernel update had to recompile a kernel driver cause my laptops chipset was something bizarre, nvidia drivers were mostly half working and it all just felt like a fragile card house.
Ubuntu was by far the best option to actually use my system rather being constantly distracted by another little piece that fell out the wall