May be a mean sounding question, but I’m genuinely wondering why people would choose Arch/Endevour/whatever (NOT on steam hardware) over another all-in-one distro related to Fedora or Ubuntu. Is it shown that there are significant performance benefits to installing daemons and utilities à la carte? Is there something else I’m missing? Is it because arch users are enthusiasts that enjoy trying to optimize their system?
After using Debian, mint and Ubuntu off and on for years. I am so much happier running endeavoros. I’ve had no issues with it. It’s stable. I don’t feel like I’m dealing with dependencies and random config battles that I did on mint. It’s been great.
I had much more trouble with keeping my debian/ubuntu installs running for years back in the days. And it was always out of date. Whenever there was a bug, I would search for it, see that it was already fixed upstream and be frustrated that I’d only get that fix in half a year. And then after half a year, dist-upgrade borked my whole install and I had to reinstall from scratch.
With arch, I’ve broken it a couple times in the first 2 months, while doing my ideal setup. But now I have been on the same install for about 10 years. It survived being cloned to multiple new computers and laptops and just keeps updating and working. Rarely do I have to do a minor fix. 2024 was kind of bad iirc, there were 3-4 manual interventions I had to do. 2025 was mostly super smooth sailing, iirc I had to do 1 or at most 2 small fixes that took less than 20minutes each.
I wanted a rolling release distro, and Arch has an amazing wiki. That’s why I chose it. Though I ultimately moved on to CachyOS (Arch based), because it’s a lot more pre configured than Arch.
People swear there’s secret sauce in the Cachy kernel too.
Placebo is a hell of a phenomenon though lol
There are some benefits, but its situational and only affects you while your hardware is very new. Eventually the base kernel catches up in most cases.
I’ve observed some notable improvements when benchmarking with the CachyOS kernel on NixOS via Chaotic’s Nyx using moderately old hardware:
https://programming.dev/post/38304031
Haven’t yet tried replicating the same comparison on newer hardware, but would be interested to see what others have tested. Any observations?
I think for many people, whether they’re tinkerers or programmers or whoever, enjoy the freedom that comes with Arch.
I am a software developer, on work computers I have debian, on my personal I have arch.
I would never use fedora as I am not here to troubleshoot bullshit for red hat, and would never use ubuntu because of their snap bullshit. It can be avoided but in both cases it is an indicator of the motivations of the company that controls them not being aligned with my interests.
I like arch because of the rolling release and because I like to control and understand all that happens on my machine. Optimization is not my main motivator.
I have almost nothing à la carte, i bulk-installed all that my DE wanted and use that plus alacritty and steam.
It’s not “trouble” if you’re already familiar with Linux. It’s not the way I would go as a user of 20+ years, but it’s not just for desktop use.
If you’re looking to build a platform for something, it’s perfect. Look at why Valve switched to use to for SteamOS. You have an underlying framework of a stable system, and you just create automation to slap it all together into the base layer of all the things you want without having to worry about specific things breaking the stack you’re building on top of it.
It’s like a blank page instead of a notebook with line guides.
It helps make more sense if you think of everything you’ve got to build on it already existing in a git repo. Merge > Build > Release. Makes perfect sense, and you save yourself creating an entire distro to maintain from scratch.
It’s the IKEA effect. You tend to like something more if you built it yourself.
spoiler
… and you understand it more when you build something by yourself, so it’s easier for you to fix it when it’s broken.
you understand it more when you build something by yourself, so it’s easier for you to fix it when it’s broken.
For me, this is a big selling point. Instead of trying to figure out why someone did something or wrestling with their decisions, I know what I did, why I did it, and if necessary, and I can change it.
In a perfect world, yes.
In reality, i knew what i did and why i did it, two years ago, after which i never had to touch it again until now, and it takes me 2 hours of searching/fiddling until i remember that weird thing i did 2 years ago…
and it’s still totally worth it
Oh or e.g. random env vars in .profile that I’m sure where needed for nvidia on wayland at some point, no clue if they’re still necessary but i won’t touch them unless something breaks. and half of them were probably not neccessary to begin with, but trying all differen’t combinations is tedious…
i knew what i did and why i did it, two years ago, after which i never had to touch it again until now
Hahaha, true. This is why I try to keep as many notes as possible, leave lots of comments, add READMEs, links, and otherwise document what I did and why.
It’s not perfect, it’s often tedious, and I don’t always do it, but when I come back 2 years later wondering why I set some random option, it’s pretty nice having at least some hint.
deleted by creator
I don’t think that currently there is much difference in terms of performance, unless you are using a very bloated distro.
Personally I prefer Arch compared to Ubuntu, Fedora or similar (including Endeavor, Manjaro etc…) because I simply want to build my OS, piece by piece.
There is basically nothing else about it, I just like feeling the system I am running as something I created (kinda) and knowing exactly what is running and why it’s there.
Obviously you could achieve the same with other distros (and even go deeper with things like Gentoo or Guix) but Arch makes it very easy to do it.
EDIT: oh and being rolling release too, as another user mentioned. I would never go back to a fixed release distro.
Honestly it’s the most problem-free distribution I’ve used. I’ve used fedora, ubuntu, opensuse, and they all are way easier to break and way harder to fix. Once you get arch working it works really reliably and when it occasionally breaks it’s easy to fix. I used nixos for a while, and it is more reliable but it’s just a little too much effort.
A rolling release means you get new versions of software almost as soon as þey’re released, instead of waiting for 6 mos for þe distribution to package and release it.
Even Arch’s LTS kernel is updated more frequently þan Debian’s. Þe trade-off is rebooting more frequently. I have personally also experienced less breakage upgrading software frequently þan big, all-in-one-shot upgrades. I won’t claim þis is þe common experience, but “dependency hell” for me was always Redhat, and þen Debian.
Is it shown that there are significant performance benefits to installing daemons and utilities à la carte?
No, not really.
Is it because arch users are enthusiasts that enjoy trying to optimize their system?
This is IMHO the most important aspect. The thing they’re trying to optimize isn’t performance, though, it’s more “usability”, i.e. making the system work for you. When you get down to it and understand all the components of the OS, and all the moving parts within, you can set it up however you prefer and then combine them in novel ways to solve your tasks more quickly.
This is the most important thing. Over time, you develop opinions about software and methods of solving problems. I have strong opinions on how I want to manage a system, but almost no opinions on flags I want to switch when I compile software. This is why I’m on arch not gentoo. I’m sure I’ll make the leap eventually…
Before I switched back to Arch for my daily driver, I’d frankensteined my Fedora install on my laptop to replace power management, all the GUI bits, most of the networking stack and a fair chunk of the package system. Fedora, and Gnome in that case is opinionated software. That’s a good thing as far as I’m concerned, having a unified vision helps give the system direction and a unique feel. These days, I have my own opinions that differ in some ways from available distros.
I wanted certain bits to work a certain way, and I kept having to replace other parts to match the bits I was changing. When you ask the question, can I swap daemon X out for Y, the answer on fedora was, sure, but you’ll have to replace a, b and c too, and figure out the rest for yourself. Good luck when updates come along.
The answer on arch is, yeah, sure, you can do that - and here’s a high level wiki naming some gotchas you’ll want to watch out for.
I’ve also reached a stage in my computer usage that I don’t want things to happen automatically for me unless I’ve agreed them or designed them. For example, machines don’t auto-mount usb drives, even in gui user sessions, or auto connect to dhcp. I understand what needs to be done, and do it the way I want to do it, because I have opinions on networking and usb mounting.
My work laptop is a living build that I just keep adding to and changing every day. Btrfs snapshots are available for rollback…
I’ve got two backup machines - beelink mini me’s running reproducible builds created using archinstall. It’s running on internal emmc, and they have have a 6 disk zfs raidz2 on internal nvme drives, all of which are locked behind luks encryption,with the keys in the fTPM module, without the damn Microsoft key shim. On is off site. Trying to get secureboot working on Debian was an exercise in frustration.
I’ve modified a version of that same build for my main docker host on another mini PC.
My desktop runs nixos, but will be transfered to arch next rebuild.
I’ve got a steamdeck, which runs an arch based distro.
I used to run raspberry pi’s on arch because the image to flash the SD cards used to be way smaller than what was offered by the default pi is.
That’s all using arch. It’s flexible, has the tool sets I need, and almost never tells me ‘No, you can’t do that’.
My desktop runs nixos, but will be transfered to arch next rebuild.
That’s interesting; any particular reason? I went the other way around (Arch for multiple years -> Gentoo for a year or so -> NixOS for over a decade now), and never looked back.
you can set it up however you prefer and then combine them in novel ways to solve your tasks more quickly
Can you think of a quick example, out of curiosity?
For context, I’m using NixOS, not Arch, but it’s a similar enough idea. I have a tiling/tabbed WM configured just the way I like it, and a window switcher thingy, and it makes juggling hundreds of windows really easy and quick. Combined with a terminal-based editor, a custom setup for my shell, and direnv for easy environment switching, I can be switching between a dozen different projects within a single day (sadly a requirement for my work right now).
Whenever I look at how my colleagues with KDE/Gnome are managing their workflows, it makes me appreciate the work I put into my setup a lot.
Also, I have a whole bunch of shell aliases and scripts for tasks I do often.
Sure, you can configure any distro to do that, but things like Ubuntu or Fedora would get in the way. At some point, when you want to choose (or even write) every component of the system and configure it yourself, it’s easier to just build from scratch rather than start with a lot of pre-configured software and remove parts.
I currently use bazzite, but I learned more about Linux by installing arch from scratch than anything else I’ve ever done with my PC. It was a beautiful experience and I will never forget it.
I recently got a new laptop, and I’m considering installing arch again on the old one again to have a system available that is less restrictive. I’d probably use an installer this time around…but maybe not.
So you can tell people you use Arch btw
Some people might think you are joking, but it’s actually true
to me the main difference was having to use a different package manager. so no biggie really. and arch has an awesome wiki. the documentation made things too easy so now I use nixos BTW
