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?
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.
So you can tell people you use Arch btw
Some people might think you are joking, but it’s actually true
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.
I thought about this for a long while, and realised I wasn’t sure why, just that most of my work has gravitated towards Arch for a while.
Eventually, I’ve decided the reason for the move is because of three specific issues, that are really all the same problem - namely I don’t want to learn the nix config language to do the things I want to do right now.
I’ve read lots of material on flakes, even first modified then wrote a flake to get not-yet-packaged nvidia 5080 modules installed (for a corporate local llm POC-turned-PROD, was very glad I could use nix for it!) I still just don’t really get how all the pieces hang together intuitively, and my barrier is interest and time.
Lanzaboote for secure boot. I’m going to encrypt disks, and I’m going to use the TPM for unlocking after measured uki, despite the concerns of cold-boot attacks, because they aren’t a problem in my threat model. Like the nvidia flake, I don’t really get how it hangs together intuitively.
Home management and home-manager. Nix config language is something I really want to get and understand, but I’ve been maintaining my home directory since before 2010, and I have tools and methods for dealing with lots of things already. The conversion would take more time than I’m prepared to devote.
Most of the benefits of nix are things I already have in some format, like configuration management and package tracking with git/stow, ansible for deployment, btrfs for snapshots, rollback and versioning. It’s not all integrated in one system, but it is all known to me, and that makes me resistant to change.
I know that if I had a week of personal time to dig in and learn, to shake off all the old fleas and crutch methods learned for admin on systems that aren’t declarative, I’d probably come away with a whole new appreciation for what my systems actually look like, and have them all reproducible from a readable config sheet. I’m just not able to make that time investment, especially for something that doesn’t solve more problems than I’ve already solved.
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.
Funnily enough, I thought like you and was rocking Debian and various derivatives for years. Then one day, for some stupid reason (an out-of-date library for a side project in the Debian repo) and out of curiosity I tried arch.
Honestly have not looked back since for a bunch of reasons.
First, the package manager (pacman) is just awesome and extremely fast. I remember quickly ditching fedora in the past because, in part, of how goddamn slow dnf was.
Then, it’s actually much lower maintenance than I’d initially believed. I maybe had to repair something once after an update broke, and that was expected and documented so no problem there. Plus the rolling release model just makes it easier to update without having version jumps.
Talking of documentation, the wiki is really solid. It was a reference for me even before using arch anyways, so now it’s even better.
People also tend to value the customisability (it is indeed easier in a sense), the lack of bloat (like apps installed by default that you never use), and the AUR.
And, to be fair, a good share of people are probably also just memeing to death.
So I don’t know whether you’re missing something, it depends what you think Arch is like. If you believe it to be this monster of difficulty to install, where you essentially build your own system entirely etc etc… then yeah, you’re missing that it’s become much simpler than this. Otherwise if having more up-to-date software, easier ways to configure things and a rather minimal base install so you can choose exactly what you want on your system does not appeal to you, then likely arch is not going to be your thing.
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.
I don’t understand why Arch is associated with troubles. It was more complicated to fix my issues with Fedora and I don’t like Ubuntu default choices. Having the desktop that I like is much easier with Arch and its derivatives.
Because it comes with a nice BTW
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:
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Fighting bugs in old packages
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Fighting and maintaining all the manual fixes for them
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Fighting the system which does not like me rolling packages forward.
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And breaking all that for a major system update, instead of incremental ones where breakage is (as it turns out) more manageable.
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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.
This! I after two years of Debian out of habit from the past, I switched to cachyOS last year and am pretty happy with it. Completely agree that updates feel easier to manage (so far).
However, I guess hygiene also plays a role here: dont “try” multiple audio drivers and this sort of things
Yeah. I would massively emphasize this too.
Don’t mess around.
Especially don’t mess around with AUR. Discrete apps and such are fine, but AUR ‘tweaks’ that mess with the system are asking for trouble, as they have no guarantee of staying in sync with base Arch packages.
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I never found using endeavour any more trouble than using Ubuntu or fedora, and I’ve used both in school or work so, my question back to you, why do people choose corporate coded distros like fedora or Ubuntu when easy to use, up to date and free as in freedom distros like endeavour exist?
I’m going extra silly: why do you wear bikinis when swimsuits exist? Dunno, preferences. People have them.
Yepp, from where I sit Endeavour is the best of all worlds. Plus, it’s purple.
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.
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.
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.
Newer software is nice, it’s not too much trouble.
Honestly, the AUR and arch wiki are amazing. Every other distro I’ve used I’ve had to rely on out of date or unreliable support forums. Anytime I want to install something I don’t have hope it already has a package, because someone has usually already built an AUR package that either compiles from the latest source for you or comes pre-pcompiled.
Being on the most up to date version of the kernel and all software is a good thing in my book. I certainly haven’t had issues caused by this.
I’ll admit the Arch can be a struggle to set up initially, so that’s why I use EndeavourOS. EndeavourOS is just Arch with a GUI installer, a shortlist of tweaks all users would want anyway, it let’s you choose your preferred Desktop Environment during install, and it feels like any other distro in terms of getting it ready for use. It doesn’t come with any apps, other than core system tools and firefox, which is also good because you can then install whatever you want.and be free of anything you don’t want. Also, all the usual hardware gets detected and works out of the box.
I won’t go back to any other Linux.
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