Is Arch Linux Still a Good Distro?

24 thoughts on “Is Arch Linux Still a Good Distro?”

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  [time stamps]
  0:00 Intro
  1:27 Our Week in FOSS
  1:34 Matt's Week in FOSS
  11:21 Tyler's Week in FOSS
  20:16 Is Arch Still a Good Distro?
  1:22:02 Nuggies of the Week
  1:22:05 Tyler's Nuggie
  1:24:07 Matt's Nuggie
  1:28:05 Contact Info and Goodbyes

• I think this was a really great discussion. You certainly didn't piss me off. Arch will probably always be an old staple for me. But Linux has always ment freedom to me. I don't mean monetary freedom. I mean the freedom to choose. I made up my mind a long time ago to help whoever I could regardless of distro. If I can help I will provide it. But the AUR affords me a ton of freedom to choose and that is why I like it so much. But lately, Tyler has got me curious about Nix. I think I'm going to give NixOS a fair shot. You sold me Mr. Zane 👍

• Steve is turning his OS into a script, and Tyler is turning his script into an OS

• Workspace -1337? Sounds like some l337 h4x0r troll "easter egg"

• i am using rhino linux an ubuntu rolling release it is not at all crusty

• Oh boo hoo you do not feel special anymore grow up

• Neckbeards

• One of the first distros i used was Debian, and to get video working, you had to create an xorg.conf by hand

• thank you for timestamps sir

• For me archlinux is the best distro out there.

• I find it strange where these Linux channels go. First there was UNIX. Then came commercial Unixes. Then came GNU and BSD. Then there was Linux, and it was good, because we could all use a UNIXoids instead of having to use Atari ST, Amiga or PCs or pay 5K for a license. This is how I look at Linux, because I'm an old fart. For me there is no really bad Linux distro, except perhaps those things that you install and then when a new version comes out, you have to reinstall it. Today there are barely commercial Unixes left or even a UNIX brand. UNIX became a niche and all that UNIX had to offer, Linux (and the BSDs) offer in a much better way. More than that, depending on your use case, you can avoid having to use spyware such as Windows or Macos by using certain Linuxes and not so much others. Things are good in Linux land, for quite a long while now.

  Over the decades I gravitated to using Debian or one of the derivatives (for a long time Ubuntu), because they annoyed me least and allowed me to focus on whatever it was I was doing with a computer at any point in time. I also spend many years on Windows and Mac, because I'm a developer and that's where I made a living. Now I'm back to Linux and I became a bit dogmatic about it because I find it abhorrent what commercial OS vendors are doing. For the same reason I avoid using Linux made by RedHat or Canonical, since they became too similar to Apple and Microsoft.

  My current setting is based on Pop-OS for WSs, because I get a DE that supports my workflow not perfectly but really well. It's based on Ubuntu, but thanks to virtualization and distrobox, I really only use a minimal setup and encapsulate all software in containers or VMs. Even so, I stripped the PopOS part down to the desktop, drivers, and virtualization. It looks a lot like a Debian now, just enough Pop to get regular updates for Cosmic and NVidia.

  I'm using Arch for containers providing apps, because Arch does a great job to make installing software with customizations as needed very painless. I use Debian for servers and services, because they usually just work and I often already know how to use it for that purpose.

  So I optimized my choice of Linux distros for my particular use case and taste. But I can actually point out in each case why exactly I choose a distro for a purpose and what I gain from the choice.

  You guys are giving your audience inspiration. A lot of people start using Linux because of what you show them. But your sole use case seems to be video editing and ricing window managers (that you're using to tile shells and full-screen apps). That seems to be a very particular use case for me. You're not developing software (which is probably what most real Linux users do), you're not a typical home computer user – if that is still a thing at all. If you rate Linux, you either do it by which version of a particular DE it supports or how easy the installation process is.

  You say Arch is no longer hot. But the hotness is purely defined by you guys. It has little to nothing to do with Arch. Arch, very much like Debian and other community distributions is made by Linux users who are very different from you, at least it looks a lot like you are not the same people. These people spend time getting something to run on Arch and then they spend years keeping it running there. They answer bug reports, they update build scripts. You do that kind of thing if you need or want that software you're maintaining on the Linux you're using.

  They care little for the hotness of their particular degree of spiciness. If they would, there was no Arch Linux and no Nixos either, there would be some more Linux videos complaining about 30+ year old Debian's slow release cycles or the color scheme of an installer. Don't get me wrong, I am regularly watching your channel among many others. I have to thank you for pointing me to awesome or helpful tools I missed out on. At the same time, I find this trend hunting and hysterical quest for hotness a bit ridiculous.

  Criticizing Arch for not being hot or spicy enough, what does the latter even mean? You can rice a Windows to look like a C64 if you care enough. How is Arch standing in the way of you expressing your creativity here. Use whatever Linux you prefer, that's fine. But I don't think that your critique based on these criteria has any substance and I wonder what that does to the part of your audience that is looking for advice from you.

• It was just wild yall moved arch down for not being for everyone and then placed NixOS above arch. No consistency whatsoever 😂

• 0:33: 💬 Discussion on the relevance of Arch Linux and potential changes to the channel's name.
  6:58: 💻 Challenges of transitioning to Wayland on Arch Linux and frustrations with buggy software.
  14:16: ⚙️ Enhancing NixOS with user-friendly tools for configuration and compatibility across different environments.
  20:52: 💬 Controversial opinions on a podcast led to a surge in subscribers and offended viewers.
  28:38: 💻 Evolution of Arch Linux appeal: installation difficulty, rolling release, vast Community repository.
  35:15: ⚙️ Advocating for a rolling release model with delayed updates and testing for stability.
  42:40: 💻 Different Linux distros offer varied user experiences based on individual needs and preferences.
  49:18: ⚠️ Promoting personal preferences in the Linux community is unfairly criticized and should be encouraged.
  56:53: 💡 The evolution of Arch Linux from being a hot topic to a normalized system due to familiarity and being taken for granted.
  1:03:59: ⛔️ Negative community attitude towards Arch Linux derivatives.
  1:11:28: ⚙️ The culture around using Arch Linux and similar systems fosters a sense of superiority.
  1:18:07: 💻 Evaluation of Arch Linux's current status in the tier list and acknowledgment of lack of authority in the tech community.
  1:24:55: ⭐ Praise for responsive proprietary developer of an application, Bookshelf, with quick bug fixes and feature updates.

  Timestamps by Tammy AI

• You can say whatever you want about arch but the wiki however, the wiki is probably one of the best

• Arch is a fantastic distro. ❤❤❤❤❤❤

• How do you like Coffee Linux..? Is it just Arch with an easier installer? 🤔

• John 3:16

• 45:55 "OpenSUSE Tumbleweed is the most stable distro I have ever used". That kind of objectively nuts statement is why your distro rankings got so many comments. 😂

  I used Tumbleweed every day for two years. I was involved in the actual development. I was a huge, excited champion for the distro. I was friends with their project chairman. But after a while, I couldn't stand the instability and constant breakages anymore, and left.

  Just look at "opensuse tumbleweed broken". It's not hard to see.

  It is a pretty stable distro for what it attempts to do: Running the latest versions of everything. But unfortunately, that means that you will run into constant bugs, broken libraries, incompatibilities etc. Especially breakages between different versions of libraries which were not expecting to encounter the newest version of each other yet, because the library authors weren't even aware of something so new as what openSUSE uses. It's just the nature of using the latest as soon as it's released.

  The release method for Tumbleweed is simple: Automatically pull in the latest upstream code. Run OpenQA automated tests. If they don't catch issues in the specific things they look for, the update goes live.

  It catches a lot of things, and it's why Tumbleweed is a good distro. But it still misses so many little things. It only looks for issues that it was programmed to look for.

  During my two years on openSUSE, there were about 5 big breakages per year. Thankfully it uses Snapper to allow rollbacks or it would have been entirely unusable.

  Another huge issue is the configuration drift. Due to using bleeding edge packages, the configurations changes a lot. I remember having to remake my pipewire config a dozen times due to each update.

  All of this was between 2020-2022. Linux has gotten better since then, but it will absolutely never be the most stable distro ever. Tumbleweed's whole philosophy is "roll forwards, encounter the new bugs, and fix them upstream".

  Their previous chairman, Richard Brown, has given several talks on this topic.

• 34:13 "There's problems that you're going to run into that are inherent Arch problems"
  36:12 "Arch breaks GRUB all the time"
  Those are pretty big statements, but nothing to back it up. I've been using Arch for ~7 years and I have never encountered an "Arch specific issue" like Tyler mentions. I have seen one issue with GRUB where you had to redo grub-install if you were going to change the config (which is not a common thing to do). I guess that is what Matt is talking about. But still a fairly light/specific issue IMO. I'm running my personal PC, work laptop, media center, a VPS, 2 backup servers in different businesses and 2 other media center for family members all on Arch and I've never had a breaking issue with them.
  All these computers combined, I might be using 10 AUR packages total.
  I'm starting to think the "issues" stated here are more user-related problems than because of the distro itself; If you bloat your PC with garbage and you tweak every imaginable thing on it, chances are you'll break something. Keep it clean, as vanilla as possible and you'll have a rock solid setup.

• i installed arch a couple of years ago and i can't be arsed to change to something else. That's my reason for using Arch.

• On my Waybar the audio widget stops working every time my PC screens turn off due to extended inactivity, but there is no alternative I know of that would work nearly as well as a vertical bar. As a workaround I made a widget that restarts Waybar.

  Speaking of Termite, AUR has a still maintained fork of it. (well kind of maintained at any rate)
  Can you install that on OpenSuse without cloning the relevant git repo and manually building?

• Arch has morphed from a fun build-your-own distro to a boring homogeneous blob where everyone just cargo cults all their package choices and that's ok.

• I'm sure we can all agree. At the end of the day, Linux is just for nerds and hobbyists, and Windows is vastly superior in Every. Single. Way.

• Nice video and BTW, I use Arch

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