The Arch Way

i am using arch mostly as a server os and it works very well. if you want to quickly setup a working desktop i can recommend antergos.com, its essentially arch with a nice installer.

I have to give it to Arch, The Wiki is the single most helpful and well-written wiki I have ever seen. I wish Debian had a similarly exhaustive collection of information. I don't ever recall having to go off hunting for additional resources; the info was either on or linked to from the Wiki. Like others have mentioned, I too greatly appreciate the AUR and the ease with which one can put a package up for others to use.

The thing that turned me away from Arch is that, after having installed it four or five times, I really got tired of having to do things like manually modify configuration files for everything I install, manually configure every service I want to start at boot, and look up instructions for support for my specific hardware (not which packages are needed, but how to configure those packages to work at all), whereas with Debian, I can just run through the Debian installer and the basic system is good to go, networking and all, even for some of my obscure-branded wifi cards. I could make a script to do this, but it's been different for every machine I have, so there'd be a script for every machine. I like Debian because it has sensible defaults (at least for my definition of "sensible"), and the "testing" release is extremely stable in my experience but also has pretty recent software in the standard repositories (g++ 4.9.1, etc), which is one of my strict requirements for a Linux distribution.

Also, if you're using Arch, reading the news announcements on their website is not optional. You're just one `pacman -Syu` from a(n) [nigh-]unbootable system at all times, and you may have to run some commands by hand to upgrade smoothly. This kind of breakage happened twice or thrice to me when I was using Arch, and at least once it was very difficult to apply a fix after the fact. Linus help you if you happen to upgrade before a fix for the issue (which probably happened because of your specific configuration and so was not caught by the developers in testing) is widely disseminated. Debian, at least for me, has never become difficult to use from an `apt-get [dist-]upgrade`.

In short, I respect and admire Arch and the people who make it happen, but it was just too time-consuming (for me) to administer and upgrading has too much potential to knock out the system I depend on for daily work. It was great for learning "how to Linux" because the system does relatively little for you, but for a work-machine that needs to keep on trucking without much upkeep while still giving great performance (sorry, but -- bad ubuntu! bad!), I personally prefer another, specifically Debian. Arch is a really important distro that fills a certain niche for people that need it, but I don't think everyone fits in that niche (but is there any niche that fits everyone?).

I love arch. I stopped running it as my main OS when after updating it rebooted and couldn't reach the internet, even with an ethernet cord. Didn't feel like diagnosing the problem without easy access to google so I switched away.

I want to switch back, never before was it so easy to install any piece of software or as simple to have the exact set up I wanted. I am fairly sure this could have been avoided by signing up for the arch-announce mailing and watching for "manual intervention needed". If anyone wants to make the jump I would recommend following that mailing list.

>Unlike other distributions, on Arch you’re not forced to use a specific Window Manager, a Desktop Environment, a File Manager, and so on.

Excuse me?