Cleaning lady just asked me what OS I use. "Well, Linux" I replied. Oh, she said, I'll ask my husband if he knows about it. He's also good with computers (probably tech support chap or something like that).

I figured that she might not remember the name "Linux", so I thought about writing it down. But it was so hard to resist the thought of instead writing down "btw I use Arch Linux"! 😆

110% accurate

😂😂😂

btw, i use gentoo

(i started day before yesterday and now i can't stop announcing... well i do have quite a lot of time to announce as well considering there is lot of compilation to do 😅😅🤣🤣🤣)

Does manjaro count?

So you just missed the only proper time to tell that you use arch: when somebody asked which OS you use.

@kenogo lol fair enough 🤣🤣🤣👌🏻👌🏻

@loopback no, it has a broken installer and a broken repository that inexplicably catches fire if you accidentally install an arch package from the vanilla repo.

@greyfade same thing with something like Arch and BlackArch really 🤔 different update schedules between independent repositories are a real pain when you want to use them interchangeably.

@loopback no, but antergos counts 🙃 it's literally pure arch with installer and a different logo

For a normal linux user how much does it impact? Gave up on ubuntu with Ubuntu ui, switched to ubuntu studio and now linux mint since 3 years

@lonelydev distros like Manjaro have weird breaks where something that works just fine on the original distro (in this case, Arch) will mysteriously break on Manjaro, with no sane fix. Most average users will just reinstall, only to run into a similar issue again.

Mint has similar issues where, because it mixes Ubuntu and Debian packages against the advice of both Debian and Ubuntu devs, an otherwise routine update renders the system unbootable.

@lonelydev the main advantage that I think Arch has for me is that I get to choose what's to be installed, instead of having to debloat it afterwards. Given that I've got very specific preferences in my software stack, none of the stock experiences in distributions that offer their own default software stack do it for me.

Also something that kind of drove me away from Debian-based for most things is that often when a new release comes along, things break or config files have to be manually adjusted for compatibility. More often than not, a reinstall makes more sense. Arch-based distributions on the other hand - at least in my experience - just tend to roll with the times 🙂

It's a pain in the ass to install and configure Arch, especially when you're doing it for the first time, but it's so worth it 🥰

I've been using a systemd-free fork of arch called artix for a while now. One of the design choices that they made, probably to reduce their own maintenance load, is to allow users to pull packages from the extra/community Arch repos upstream, so they dont have to package anything that doesnt require special systemd-free care. They have their own core/extra/community repos (called galaxy/system/world) which containin packages that already exist upstream. Welcome to hell.

@tokumei having been at that point with Arch and BlackArch as well (although with matching core, extra, community packages, yet different update schedules), how many issues did this Artix incur so far? So far I've experienced nothing but issues with multiple repos in Arch.

@Condor actually not many, now that I think about it. The only real issue I've encountered is a packaging error made by artix maintainers - just containerd missing from docker's dependencies, a quick manual install and it was fixed.