Also why does everyone seem to hate on Ubuntu?
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The shortest answer -
Arch has really good documentation and a release style that works for a lot of people.
Ubuntu is coorporitized and less reliable Debian with features that many people dont need or want.
Can you elaborate a bit on don’t need or want software?
like forcing snap or amazon search ads back in the day
Or mir, or pulseaudio before it was ready, or deprecating ffmpeg for half a year… Etc etc
In some release they removed gdebi package installer so it made unavailable to install deb files with gui
deprecating ffmpeg for half a year
wut
It’s true, and it was a huge pain in the ass:
Interesting read. It sounds like that issue came upstream from Debian not Ubuntu though.
At the time, canonical was throwing its weight around and essentially bullying Debian upstream repos. Around this time, there was a mass exodus of the Debian leadership over this kind of thing.
The old guard of Debian wasn’t as… enthusiastic about systemd either, but look what they use now.
They pushed systemd really early too, right?
I think so. I lost count of the little things, it really was death by a thousand paper cuts.
I was a pretty rabid fan of Ubuntu, still have an x86 and ppc CD of 5.04 somewhere.
But by the time snaps started appearing, and then Ubuntu pro, Ubuntu decided to revert some of my customized configs in /etc after an upgrade, I had had enough. When snaps were reinstalled after an upgrade in 2021, I just flipped over to Debian, which has come a long way in being usable out of the box.
They pushed their own init system, Upstart, before jumping onto the systems bandwagon.
“Bloat” the less system there is (while still working as a modern system) the better. If i need something i can install it myself.
The biggest one: Snaps.
I switched from Ubuntu to Debian, and it’s basically the same thing, just faster since it uses native packages instead of Snaps. Ubuntu might as well run all it’s apps in Docker containers.
You could rebrand Debian to Ubuntu and most users wouldn’t even notice.
I agree, I switched from Ubuntu to MX Linux in 2016 or so, MX is based on Debian, always up to date, just works, Xfce, .deb, no snap, etc
These days it’s mainly snap and how you can type apt install and the system will do snap install instead, for firefox for example.
Firefox has instructions on their website for adding their PPA and pinning it over Ubuntu’s. I find it interesting that they made an official response that seems to say “yeah nonconsensual snaps are bad, here’s another option”
I like arch because:
- it is rolling release and I like having up to date software and not having to deal with distro upgrades breaking things
- it is community run and not beholden to a company
- packages are mostly unmodified from their upstream
- the wiki and forums are the best of any distro
:: Searching AUR for notes... -> Missing AUR Packages: SideNote there is nothing to readthe wiki
and forumsare the best of any distroIf you don’t participate in it that is.
If you veer only a little off of their strict rules,
then Arch forum will ban you and they won’t allow you to even read the forum.
About 10 years ago it was The Distro for first time linux users to prove they were a True Linux Enjoyer. Think a bunch of channers bragging about how they are the true linux master race because they edited a grub config.
Before Arch that role belonged to Gentoo. Since then that role has transitioned to NixOS who aren’t nearly as toxic but still culty. “Way of the future” etc.
All three of have high bars of entry so everyone has to take pride in the effort they put in to learn how to install their distro. Like getting hazed into a frat except you actually learn something.
The Ubuntu hatred is completely unrelated. That has to do with them being a corporate distro that keep making bad design decisions. And their ubiquity means everyone has to deal with their bad decisions. (snap bad)
Before Arch that role belonged to Gentoo.
To add, before the change the Gentoo wiki was a top resource when it came to Linux questions. Even if you didn’t use Gentoo you could find detailed information on how various parts of Linux worked.
One day the Gentoo wiki died. It got temporary mirrors quickly, but it took a long time to get up and working again. This left a huge opening for another wiki, the Arch wiki, to become the new top resource.
I suspect, for a number of reasons, Arch was always going to replace Gentoo as the “True Linux Explorer”, but the wiki outage accelerated it.
This is it mostly for sure. I used to be that True Linux Enjoyer. I still install arch sometimes but I only ever use an arch-derived distribution now that comes with an installer. I already feel like there’s not enough time in the day without having to manually copy files off a USB stick
None of the usual installers can do what I want unfortunately, so I’m stuck doing it myself.
I gotta ask, what is it you want that the installer doesn’t provide?
Not them but for me its LUKS on LVM for desktops. For laptops,
archinstallwith LVM on LUKS is sufficient.I have a similar need for a “niche” install. I need Arch for it. I’m doing a laptop installation with LUKS2, TPM2, Secure Boot, systemd-boot with UKI, BTFRS, Apparmor and it has a Oculink eGPU dock station.
BTRFS with LUKS (OpenSUSE gets close), but using rEFInd as bootloader. Snapper snapshots, Zram.
I’m actually thinking about switching to systemd-boot with Secure Boot, TPM2 and stuff, so even further from mainstream installers.
Last time I used EndeavourOS, I managed to get the graphical installer to install BTRFS on LUKS, it did require custom partitioning in the graphical installer, snapper just worked after that.
Zram (or was it Zswap?) was pretty easy to enable after installatiok
The bootloader might be beyond what the graphical installer can do though… I never really bothered switching…
Ah shit. I use NIX 😂
*btw
And here I am, just planning on going to Mint or something whenever win 10 support finally actually ends. I had Ubuntu like 15 years ago for a while, but I’m at a point where I want to do less learning about my operating system.
Mint is honestly perfect. I’ve distro hopped a lot and can tell you none are more refined as mint. Go for it!
Normal people who use Arch don’t bring it up much, because they’re all sick of the memes and are really, REALLY tired of immediately being called rude elitist neckbeard cultists every time they mention it.
The Ubuntu hate is because Canonical has a long history of making weird, controversial decisions that split the Linux community for no good reason.
What decisions for example?
Amazon, Mir, Unity, Snap etc.
Unity would be the first example, and although Unity was actually a good DE,
it was too bloated and almost non-modifiable.People jumped ship to Linux Mint that had its priorities straight.
Mir and Snap were bigger issues though
as Wayland and Flatpak were great replacements for
X11 and AppImage and did not need another competitor.But the privacy issues were the straw that broke the camel’s back.
People left windows for linux so they wouldn’t have to deal with this kind of nonsense.I actually jumped when Ubuntu jumped to Gnome 3.
Gnome 3 was too bloated for me and it looked ugly.I decided to see what Arch Linux was about
and eventually settled for Manjaro Linux.
Arch + Xfce for the win.I left Ubuntu after Unity, it could have been the greatest thing ever, but Canonical deciding what was best for me felt too much like Microsoft just shoving whatever garbage they wanted to my system.
I tried Ubuntu on a laptop, and when i saw the Amazon logo, I did a double take. I actually got a bit dizzy, and had to evaluate what I had just done.
Shame on me though, because I installed Ubuntu on a vps, and got spam in my ssh session. “Get Ubuntu pro now!”
Sigh.
I don’t really have a concise answer, but allow me to ramble from personal experience for a bit:
I’m a sysadmin that was VERY heavily invested in the Microsoft ecosystem. It was all I worked with professionally and really all I had ever used personally as well. I grew up with Windows 3.1 and just kept on from there, although I did mess with Linux from time to time.
Microsoft continues to enshittify Windows in many well-documented ways. From small things like not letting you customize the Start menu and task bar, to things like microstuttering from all the data it’s trying to load over the web, to the ads it keeps trying to shove into various corners. A million little splinters that add up over time. Still, I considered myself a power user, someone able to make registry tweaks and PowerShell scripts to suit my needs.
Arch isn’t particularly difficult for anyone who is comfortable with OSes and has excellent documentation. After installation it is extremely minimal, coming with a relatively bare set of applications to keep it functioning. Using the documentation to make small decisions for yourself like which photo viewer or paint app to install feels empowering. Having all those splinters from Windows disappear at once and be replaced with a system that feels both personal and trustworthy does, in a weird way, kind of border on an almost religious experience. You can laugh, but these are the tools that a lot of us live our daily lives on, for both work and play. Removing a bloated corporation from that chain of trust does feel liberating.
As to why particularly Arch? I think it’s just that level of control. I admit it’s not for everyone, but again, if you’re at least somewhat technically inclined, I absolutely believe it can be a great first distro, especially for learning. Ubuntu has made some bad decisions recently, but even before that, I always found myself tinkering with every install until it became some sort of Franken-Debian monster. And I like pacman way better than apt, fight me, nerds.
No idea, but ArchWiki has some of the best linux documentation around.
That is the main reason I use Arch. I am not a Linux expert but I am able to solve most of my problems reading the wiki. I used to use Ubuntu and Mint but those ended with me copy pasting stuff into the terminal and not really learning anything. When I switched back to Linux this time I went with Arch.
It is the gold standard.
“I run Arch btw” became a meme because until install scripts became commonplace you had to have a reasonable understanding of the terminal and ability to read and follow instructions to install Arch Linux to a usable state. “Look at my l33t skills.”
Dislike of Ubuntu comes from Canonical…well…petting the cat backwards. They go against the grain a lot. They’re increasingly corporate, they did a sketchy sponsorship thing with Amazon at one point, around ten years ago they were in the midst of this whole “Not Invented Here” thing; all tech had to be invented in-house, instead of systemd they made and abandoned Upstart, instead of working on Wayland they pissed away time on Mir, instead of Gnome or KDE they made Unity, and instead of APT they decided to build Snap. Which is the one they’re still clinging to.
For desktop users there are a lot better distros than Ubuntu these days.
Arch is better because…
- pacman, seriously, I don’t hear enough of how great pacman is.
Being able to search easily for files within a package is a godsend when some app refuses to work giving you an error message “lib_obscure.so.1 cannot be found”.
I haven’t had such issues in a long time, but when I do, I don’t have to worry about doing a ten hour search, if I’m lucky, for where this obscure library file is supposed to be located and in what package it should be part of. - rolling release. Non-rolling Ubuntu half-year releases have broken my OS in the past around 33% of the time. And lots of apps in the past had essential updates I needed, but required me to wait 5 months for the OS to catch up.
- AUR. Some apps can’t be found anywhere but AUR.
- Their wiki is the best of all Linuxes
The “cult” is mostly gushing over AUR.
Hmm, finding what package a file is in is absolutely possible on Ubuntu/Debian too. You can use the online Ubuntu/Debian packages search, or use apt-file.
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- pacman, seriously, I don’t hear enough of how great pacman is.
I just think it’s neat.
Arch Being cult like is stereotypical. Far from reality.
“oh no I took the memes literal”
This ain’t 2010 anymore. Community is great.
vocal peope on social media ≠ everyone
IMO Despite some unjustified rumors Arch is a very stable distro. For me it feels the same as Debian stability wise while still being on the cutting edge side. The Arch wiki is the second most important reason.
Personally for me Arch on my system has been more stable & faster than both Debian & Fedora…
Apt just loves to break or remove stuff
The problem there is that stable vs unstable distro uses a slightly different meaning of the word stable than you would use to talk about a stable vs unstable system.
In distro speak, a stable distro is one that changes very little over time, and an unstable one is one that changes constantly. That’s sort of tangentially related to reliability, in that if your system is reliable and doesn’t change then it’s likely to stay that way, but it’s not the same thing as reliability.
Ok, I think I can provide some insight into this that I think it’s missed on other replies.
I switched to Arch back when Arch had an installer, yup, that’s right, Arch used to have an installer, then they removed it and you had to do most of the process manually (yes, I know
pacstrapis technically an installer, but I’m talking about the original ncurses installer here).After Arch removed its installer it began to attract more purists, and with that the meme was born, people online would be discussing stuff and someone would explain something simple and the other would reply with “I use arch BTW”, which meant you didn’t need to explain trivial stuff because the person had a good idea on how their system works.
Then Arch started to suffer from being too good of a distro, see those of us that were using it consistently saw posts with people complaining about issues on their distros that never affected us, so a sort of “it doesn’t happen on my distro” effect started to grow, putting that together with the excellent wiki that people were linking left and right (even for non Arch users) and lots of people became interested.
This new wave of users was relatively new to Linux, they thought that by following a tutorial and running a couple of command lines when installing arch they had become complete experts in Linux, and they saw the “I use Arch btw” replies and thought they meant “I know more than you because I use Arch”, so they started to repeat that. And it became common to see posts with people being L337 H4ck3r5 with no clue whatsoever using “I use Arch btw”.
That’s when the sort of cult mentality formed, you had experienced people who liked Arch because it was a good distro that didn’t break on its own with good documentation to help when you screw up, these people suffered a bit from this and told newbies that they should use Arch. Together with that you had the other group who thought because they installed Arch they were hackers telling people Arch was waaaay too hard, and that only true Linux experts should use it. From the outside this must have felt that we were hiding something, you had several people telling you to come to our side or they couldn’t help you, or pointing at documentation that looked specific for their distro, and others saying you weren’t cool enough for it probably felt like a cult recruiting.
At the end of the day Arch is a very cool distro, I’ve tried lots of them but prefer Arch because it’s a breeze to maintain in the long run. And the installation process is not something you want to throw at a person who just wants to install Linux to check it out, but it’s also not complicated at all. There are experts using Ubuntu or other “noob” distros because at the end of the day it’s all the same under the hood, using Arch will not make you better at Linux, it will just force you to learn basic concepts to finish the installation that if you had been using Linux for a while you probably already know them (e.g. fstab or locale).
As for Ubuntu, part of it stems from the same “I use Arch btw” guys dumping on Ubuntu for being “noob”, other part is because Canonical has a history of not adoption community stuff and instead try to develop their own thing, also they sent your search queries to Amazon at some point which obviously went very badly for their image in the community.
Great explanation
I used Ubuntu as my first distro out of curiosity sometime around 2006. I’ve tried others (Mint, Pop OS, Debian, Fedora) but mostly settled with Ubuntu because it was just kind of ok for me and as another user said, there was a lot of articles that helped with getting things working because it became popular.
I had heard of Arch and to your point the it’s complicated thing very much kept me away from it even though I have been using computers for around 30 years and was comfortable using a terminal.
The other thing is gaming, I consistently had problems with the nvidia cards that I’ve had over the years and never really cared to dig into trying to get things to work so Linux was kind of my testing ground for other things and just general learning about how things work.
Then I finally just had enough of Windows a couple of years ago, and with gaming support getting better I went back to Ubuntu and it just didn’t feel good, I wanted something different that was setup how I wanted it so I looked into Arch.
I tried a couple of times to manually install it but my attention span (ADHD) kept me from focusing on the documentation enough to actually learn what I was doing. In comes the archinstall script, it was basic enough for me to follow and understand to get my system up and running.
I went through roughly 3-4 installs using it and testing stuff after I had it running and breaking stuff and just doing a fresh install since the script made it very easy. Since then I have learned a good bit more, and honestly don’t think I will ever use another distro for my desktop. Just the ability to make it exactly what you want and things just work. Not to mention the documentation is massive and the AUR is awesome.
I do use Pop OS on my wife’s laptop since it decided to automatically upgrade to W11 which crippled it and I just wanted something that I could just drop on there that would work with no real configuration since the only thing it needs is Citrix which works ootb and she can use all her office tools through that and has libre office if she wants to do something locally.
I do have a separate drive with W11 on my desktop, its used for one thing, SolidWorks. Which I use enough to merit having windows.
Arch was and still kind of is seen as the “I use Arch BTW” crowd, but it really shouldn’t be that way. The install script isn’t fancy, but it works. I think that would be one of the biggest barriers to break that mindset and open it to more people that are still fresh to Linux. I think that having even the most basic “GUI” for installing Arch would do wonders.
I installed arch before there was the official install script. It’s not that is was THAT difficult, but it does provide a great sense of accomplishment, you learn a lot, customize everything, and you literally only install things you know you want. (Fun story: I had to start over twice: the first time I forgot to install sudo, the second I forgot to install the package needed to have an internet connection)
All of this combined mean that the users have a sense of pride for being an arch user so they talk about it more that the rest. There is no pride in clicking your way though an installer that makes all the choices for you
Endeavour OS installer provides a smidge of pride LOL
Fedoras too. But for the wrong reasons. I’ve never been so confused by an installer
Is it really? I’ve always understood the cult around it as a joke.
But seriously, RTFM.
