Been using the same vanilla Arch with KDE Plasma installation for the last approx 6 years now, installed """by hand""" (before the archinstall script, but not "by hand" in the way veterans seem to remember Arch). I had just tried Proton and decided it was time to get rid of my Windows partition. I hated having to boot into Windows and dealing with it breaking every few months was a nightmare. I came from a MacBook Pro dual-booted with Linux where I primarily used Linux over OS X, and hadn't used Windows on a machine I owned since Windows XP. The partition was very much only around for gaming, and Proton killed it back with Proton 3.16.

When I was dual-booting Windows, I was using Antergos at the time but it became defunct around that time iirc, so I planned to try out endeavourOS, but its installer kept crashing, so I went with vanilla Arch (fwiw endeavourOS works flawlessly these days, the problems I had were literal years ago!!). I had installed Arch on a laptop for school some time before so I had an idea of what I was getting into. I had every intention of continuing to distro hop at my usual pace, but I never did. Now, Arch is my go-to for new hardware.

I think I really just like Arch because it's familiar to me and I know how to configure it the way I like. The AUR is fantastic, just gotta be careful about what you install and manage your dependencies.

As for something I don't like about Arch, minor breakages can be annoying, although they're almost always my fault. A package I installed 4 years ago suddenly broke controller support and I had to spend a long time figuring that out. Also, while I love the flexibility pacman, I still need to look up the flags for less-common actions after all these years. They just don't stay in my head.

The biggest issue I had with this installation was that a few years back, the kernel package went missing and Arch wouldn't boot, so I had to install the `linux` package again from a live session (I think I had to use arch-chroot? I don't remember the details). The Arch Wiki helped immensely. I have had the same issue on other distros (Ubuntu GNOME back in the day broke for me) and while there was probably an equally straightforward way to fix it, I felt like the Arch wiki docs made it much easier. Then again, it all comes down to your search-fu.

I like my Arch install, I have become very fond of it.

Last edited by sonic2kk on 2 August 2024 at 2:34 am UTC

For the past year, I think, I've been using ChimeraOS, mostly because it was immutable, so less chance of me screwing it up. However, I occasionally try to migrate to vanilla Arch, every time with KDE, hoping that I'll like it, but I quickly get reminded that some things in Plasma are done in the most unintuitive way possible. Like, in order to enable autologin, I have to go to Appearance & Style, then Colors & Themes, then Login Screen (SDDM), then Behavior... Long story short, I'm installing Arch GNOME right now, gonna see how long it'll last.

Quoting: Avehicle7887I've started to hit a few walls recently and it's requiring me to learn new stuff.

Do you have some examples?

Quoting: Cyril

Quoting: Avehicle7887I've started to hit a few walls recently and it's requiring me to learn new stuff.

Do you have some examples?

The Nvidia NVK driver comes to mind where it requires a more recent version of Rust than my system does. Another example would be the OpenMW engine requiring a modern version of Qt. Both of these 2 examples require me to compile the Rust and Qt toolchains themselves before attempting to compile the projects depending on them. I'm yet to succeed with these 2

For the most part it's just a matter of integrating newer libraries into the system before compiling the actual project. Getting newer Mesa drivers on this system was probably the biggest of them all. I had to compile (LLVM toolchain, newer GCC, newer Python as well as some small libraries which Mesa depends on). As of recently I had to learn how to properly compile, configure and integrate a newer version of Xorg server as it was too old to run the Zink driver.

I could do away with all of this by installing a modern distro or a rolling release version, however I wouldn't learn much doing so.

Last edited by Avehicle7887 on 3 August 2024 at 11:19 am UTC

As a noob that used Linux since June 18 i use Fedora Linux KDE Plasma. Because it looks like Windows and it's up-to-date and stable at the same time. It's same as Windows for me.