• It’s amazingly stable even though it’s a rolling release.
• Up to date.
• Maintained by many many knowledgeable people.
• Arch Wiki
• 99% of software you need is packaged, and then there’s AUR too.

That’s about it, but its my daily driver on desktop and laptop.

What trouble? archinstall makes it dead simple to get on your computer, then at that point it’s not much different from any other distro?

I’d sooner ask why people choose shit like Ubuntu where you’re stuck dealing with snaps out-of-date packages, and bloat.

I used Debian and Ubuntu for like 20 years and just got sick of packages being forever out of date, and the Archwiki always having exactly what I needed.

I get to set up a system precisely how I want it to work, when an update releases for something, I get that update and I am not at the behest of a maintainer to decide for me if I need that feature or bugfix at the moment. There’s no preconfigured “opinions” on how stuff should work that differ from the defaults in most cases, which means everything usually actually just works, vs some distros were the maintainers felt they were smarter than upstream and consequently broke shit.

It isn’t any trouble. Rarely an upgraded service requires user intervention. This is usually documented and if not it is easy to search for a fix. I find arch faithfully follows upstream packages and provides a very pure linux experience. As much as I love the Debian community, their maintainers tend to add lots of patches, sometimes exposing huge security flaws. Most other distros are too small to be worthwhile or corporate controlled or change the experience too much.

I’ve just gotten used to knowing i can get the latest and greatest and AUR makes a lot of stuff easy when it comes to getting stuff not readily available on the package manager. There’s not often i can’t find something i want or need to not be on there.

I’ve used both base arch and cachyos. I’ve landed on cachyos for now because i didn’t want to fiddle with games and wine and just wanted them to work and they just do on cachyos. Laptops that i don’t expect to game on just get base arch with hyprland installed, just mostly so i can get my tinkering fix from modifying hyprland

My main reason is, it’s not a dependengy hell. If I want to build software, I don’t have to go through 5 iterations of being told something is missing, figuring out what that is (most annoying part), installing that and retrying. On Arch-based distros, it’s 2 or less, if it even happens.

Also, AUR.

Other points include

• Small install (I use archinstall though, because more convenient.)
• rolling release.
• Arch wiki

My installs never broke either, so it doesn’t feel unstable to me.

I like it more than ther distros because

• Debian is a dependency hell, otherwise fine. Older packages. I still use raspian though.
• Fedora has too much defaults that differ from my preferences. I don’t want btrfs, I don’t want a seperate home partition, dnf is the only package manager that selects No by default. dnf is also the slowest package manager I’ve seen. Always needs several seconds between steps for seemingly no reason at all. Feels like you can watch it thinking “Okay, so I’ve downloaded all these packages, so they are on the disk. That means - let’s slow down here and get this right - that means, I should install what I downloaded, right. Okay that makes sense, so let’s do that. Here we go installing after downloading”. I also got into dependency hell when trying something once, which having to use dnf makes it even worse. - I guess you can tell I don’t like Fedora.
• Love the concept of NixOS, don’t like the lack of documentation

Because it is less trouble.

I read comments here all the time. People say Linux does not work with the Wifi on their Macs. Works with mine I say. Wayland does not work and lacks this feature or this and this. What software versions are you using I wonder, it has been fixed for me for ages.

Or how about missing software. Am I downloading tarballs to compile myself? No. Am I finding some random PPA? No. Is that PPA conflicting with a PPA I installed last year? No. Am I fighting the sandboxing on Flatpak? No. M I install everything on my system through the package manager.

Am I trying to do development and discovering that I need newer libraries than my distro ships? No. Am I installing newer software and breaking my package manager? No.

Is my system an unstable house of cards because of all the ways I have had to work around the limitations of my distro? No.

When I read about new software with new features, am I trying it out on my system in a couple days. Yes.

After using Arch, everything else just seems so complicated, limited, and frankly unstable.

I have no idea why people think it is harder. To install maybe. If that is your issue, use EndeavourOS.

Arch is great for reasons ppl already mentioned, but if i’d start over i’d go with Endevour, purely because its so much easier to install

Its like buying a pre-built PC vs a custom PC.

They do the same things at the end of the day, but the the custom PC converts the extra time investment into a result that gives better performance and is more suited to your needs.

The more you want it to work your way, the less you want a prebuilt solution, and the more you want a rock solid package management system and repo setup. Debian derivatives work in a pinch, or for a server, not so great for a PC you want to do a lot of things on.

Ease of use.

I’ve run the same CachyOS partition for 2 (3?) years, and I don’t do a freaking thing to it anymore. No fixes, no tweaking. It just works.

…Because the tweaks and rapid updates are constantly coming down the pipe for me. I pay attention to them and any errors, but it’s all just done for me! Whenever I run into an issue, a system update fixes it 90% of the time, and if it doesn’t it’s either coming or my own stupid mistake.

On Ubuntu and some other “slow” distros I was constantly:

• Fighting bugs in old packages

• Fighting and maintaining all the manual fixes for them

• Fighting the system which does not like me rolling packages forward.

• And breaking all that for a major system update, instead of incremental ones where breakage is (as it turns out) more manageable.

• I’d often be consulting the Arch wiki, but it wasn’t really applicable to my system.

I could go on and on, but it was miserable and high maintenance.

I avoided Fedora because of the 3rd party Nvidia support, given how much trouble I already had with Nvidia.

…It seems like a misconception that it’s always “a la carte” too. The big distros like Endeavor and Cachy and such pick the subsystems for you. And there are big application groups like KDE that install a bunch of stuff at once.

1. Because I like to. 2. Because it still has the best flexibility for packages. 3. I like using cutting edge releases.

It is also extremely overblown just how “hard” arch is. Either way I know a lot more about my system and how it functions now.

It works well for me.

Actually, I am a long-term Debian user (for 15 years) and use it in parallel with Arch, since about ten years, and I had less trouble with Arch: When upgrading from Debian 10 to 12, GNOME broke for me so that I could not log in any more. I spent a day or so to search for the cause - it is related to the user configuration but I could not figure out what it was and I had to time-box the effort, and switched to StumpWM (a tiling window manager, which I had been using before). I had no such problem with Arch, and on top of that I could just install GNOME’s PaperWM extension just to give it a try.

You could argue that my failure to upgrade was GNOME’s fault, not Debians, and in a way this is true. Especially, GNOME should not hide configuration in inscrutinable unreadable files, and of course it should parse for errors coming from backwards-compatible breaking changes.

But the thing is, for software making many small changes is very often much easier than a few big changes. For example because it is far easier to narrow down the source of a problem. So, it is likely that GNOME on Arch had the same problem between minor upgrades, and fixed it without much fuss.

But you also need to see that Arch is primarily a Desktop/end user system, while Debian is, for example, also a server system. Debian is designed for a far larger range of applications and purposes, and having many small breaking upgrades would likely not work well for these.

It’s the IKEA effect. You tend to like something more if you built it yourself.