I think there’s benefits with more recent packages, the package manager (pacman) and the AUR. But if you’re new or don’t have much experience then something like Ubuntu or Mint is a more sensible distro to begin with. At least they start with some applications and such so you know what’s out there and how some things work.
If you just want to fire up your system with arguably sane defaults and use it, no there really isn’t. Where Arch shines is in providing a mostly blank slate for people with opinions about how their system should be set up. It provides the tools and documentation then mostly stays out of the admin’s way.
Single most concise description of Arch on the internet right here.
You learn more about the components of your system, and therefore learn more about fixing things or debugging what could be wrong. Arch is only difficult once.
I wanted to say exactly this.
I started out on Ubuntu and it was this scary thing that just worked. If something broke id run to google and see what I did wrong and blindly follow answers that added a lot of crap to my system. I was so afraid of poking anything that lay outside my /home.
Eventually I hopped around a bit and landed on Arch after a few other systems that never really seemed right.
3 years later If I break something I can actually understand why most of the time and if I cant, the Arch forums explain what I need.
Using arch made me slow down trying to fix stuff because there was less to break. And if something broke, it was something that I installed myself and thus knew about. (Apart from some really horrible python and js that refused to be purged back to the fires of hell)
All in all Id never go back to a hand- holdy system, Its my system, yes its wonky as hell sometimes, but I know whats going on there and on tge off chance something vreaks on a deadline, ive got an arch stick with all my important scripts to reinstall my system if needs be.
Very well phrased, thanks for sharing your story :)
It depends what you want out of your system. If you just want a “plug and play” machine that will do most things reasonably well, by all means stick with Ubuntu.
If you want complete knowledge of exactly what you’ve got installed (and just as importantly what’s not been installed) and how it’s been set up, and tuned and tweaked to your ideal requirements, Arch is a great choice.
Figuring out what you actually want or need is part of the distrohopping journey. Most people should start with Ubuntu, Mint, Debian, Frdora or something like that.
Starting with Arch is difficult to recommend unless you know the person really well. If you know they might be the kind of person who tends to require very specific things and is willing to put the time and effort into getting exactly that, then Arch might be the right starting point. Otherwise, starting with a more main stream distro would be a better option.
Hyprland. :)
Yes, several, but there are also several reasons to use Ubuntu over Arch. One thing that tend to fly over most people head is that under the hood all Linux are the same, there are two main differences between distros: Package Manager and philosophy.
Package Manager
Ubuntu is Debian based, so it uses
apt, whereas Arch uses it’s own package manager calledpacman. If there’s a package you want that is not available in the official channels on Ubuntu you would need to either download a.debfile or add an extra repository of packages calledPPAto have that available. On Arch there’s a User Repository calledAURwhere users create scripts to install packages that are not available on the main repos, this usually involves compiling or downloading a.deb,.rpm(RedHat installation format) or tarball (essentially zipped files), extracting the files and putting them in the correct place. Arch is easier to install extra content because of this, almost anything you wish to install is in the AUR, and that’s one of the main reasons I use it, whereas in Ubuntu you need to find which PPA has the package you want to install.Philosophy
This is the main difference between most distros. Ubuntu is a user-friendly, stable versioned release distro. Arch is a bare-bones, bleeding edge rolling release distro.
User-friendly vs Bare-bones
Ubuntu will provide a lot of what you’ll need out of the box, after finishing the installation, which is an easy next,next,next type of thing you will be able to browse the web, write documents, play games, or most of what you like to do in your computer, there might be stuff you’ll never use already installed because other people might find it useful, but you can uninstall them. And if you want something extra like a photo editor you can easily install it using a GUI (Graphical Users Interface, i.e. things you use with your mouse), and the system will let you know when there are updates with a handy notification that you can click to install said updates.
Arch is as minimal as possible, the installation will drop you to a command line and you need to manually do a lot of the steps to get your system working, after finishing the installation you’ll be dropped into another command line interface with an installation that is so minimal that it’s essentially useless for anything other than writing
.txtfiles. You need yo build your system up from that point, you need to choose which Graphical backend you will use, which desktop manager, which browser and install all of them. Unless you install something it won’t be there, so unless you know and install a GUI package manager you’ll need to use the terminal for that. In short you need to build from the ground up. If you like everything else in Arch but prefer a less bare bones distro you can check Manjaro.Stable vs Bleeding edge
Ubuntu has some packages that are mostly stable and only receive security updates, this makes it harder for things to break, but it also makes it difficult to get the latest version of things.
Arch on the other hand gets the latest version of everything every day. This can cause problems if for example a library gets updated but programs don’t support that version. To be fair this is rare, but it does happen, and you’re expected to know how to downgrade the library until the program gets updated as well.
Versioned vs Rolling release
Ubuntu has versions that get released every 6 months but are supported for longer, this means that if you want to always be on the latest version of everything you need to upgrade the system version every six months, not unlike how you would update windows versions from 7 to 8 to 10, etc.
Arch does not have versions, instead packages get updated, and that keeps going until everything is updated naturally. If you like the idea of a Rolling release but would like something more stable than Arch check out Debian.
I always say I started using arch for the “nerd cred” and stuck with it because of the package manager.
My main reasons for me to use arch are:
- I can configure my system as I want it and if something breaks later I know how things fit together so I can fix them. Arch taught me a lot about Linux in general
- The rolling release getting you new packages quite fast and not requiring you to do one big possibly breaking update once every year/two years (Ubuntu updates used to break for me a lot, I know that’s much better now)
- The package manager makes sense to me in so many ways. Especially compared with the apt-get, apt-cache, apt-key … stuff you used to need. These days just using “apt” makes stuff much easier on Ubuntu as well.
If your new is still recommend Ubuntu as a starting point since installation is quite hassle free and most “Linux” tutorials online are geared toward Ubuntu. And then once you learned some Linux and you know what annoys you in ubuntu you can still switch “fixing” those things in your arch install. If you do go with arch were sure all happy to help.
Nothing is enabled after installation. While it can be a daunting task to manually hook up your PC to the wifi manually, this philosophy lets you hand-pick the services which you actually want to run, catering for a very personalised and clearly defined system.
I started using Arch a few months ago. Before I would always go for Ubuntu or Fedora, then saw a video of a guy on YouTube installing Arch using archinstall and setting up his HyprLand setup. It was super thorough so I gave it a shot, and came to the conclusion that even though distros like Ubuntu and Fedora are easier to install and get going, once you get to a program or utility that doesn’t have a maintained package for your distro, you’re no better off than anyone else, maybe even worse off as you’ll probably be using an old guide or trying to follow some post that isn’t 100% relevant to their case. The AUR is incredible and there’s something truly awesome about installing that fresh git version with no fuss.
Arch is a rolling release that gets the newest software once it’s available. Ubuntus is Debian-based and it’s also following the principle of stability over modernity so there’s a big difference between how recent software you’re gonna run on those two types of distros. But if you want to try the rolling approach you doesn’t have to go directly for arch, you can use some Arch-based distro like M*****o (not recommended due to justified controversy). I know there are also Arco, Artix and Garuda that are arch based but I didn’t test them. You could use them, experience pacman and aur but without struggle of setting up arch and once you get comfortable you may want to give arch a try
No recommending manjarno :(
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DDOSed the aur: 2 times
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Let their SSL certificate expire: 3 time
I might have got my numbers wrong
Stuff that actually affect users:
Manjaro holds back regular packages by one day but not aur packages, leading to dependency issues
Good call out I’ll update the comments. From my reading it also seems like they take a lot from arch sources but don’t really contribute so another downside here
Their devs also broke asahi linux by pushing untested code, swapping out a part, which broke XORG. This, after trying to ship the project with a random dev build when the developers were clear, it’s not working. All while claiming “manjaro finally works on the m1 macbook” This could have broke users systems. Also, their ssl 3xpired at least four times. Something which should not have happened once, auto renewal takes about 10 minutes to set up.
Also, they don’t properly convey the danger that the AUR poses. It’s the linux equivalent of randomly downloading an exe from sourceforge but every time you update. We’ve seen fork bombs, malware, and on a large package hateful callouts to people who can “go fuck themselves” before calling an IP logger twice. All I wanted was to play wii fit man. The AUR is powerful, awesome, but ultimately dangerous. You need to read, and understand, the pkgbuild. It absolutely should not be enabled right next to flat packs.
I could go on. They’re not good at helping new users, they damage the open source community, they suggest dangerous things to new users, they ship broken tools without dev knowlage or consultation, etc.
To reiterate your comment, do not reccomend manjaro
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I want to point out that stable in this context doesn’t necessarily mean less buggy but means that the system changes less.
Right, from my experience it means that you just have to wait much longer for the bug fix to reach your device. From PC perspective I like the rolling approach much more as I feel much more up to date with the software that I’m using especially when it’s mostly foss where I browse the open issues and release notes on a regular basis
I’ve used Garuda and I think it’s great. It has bootable Snapper snapshots enabled by default, a post-install wizard for software, and a custom update script that’s not too customized but does a couple neat things like warn you if Grub has been updated. It’s biggest criticism is bloat, but on modern hardware it’s fine. Still runs better than Windows.
Archwiki is probably the best Linux documentation in existance. It greatly lowers the barrier of entry.
Seems like you answered your own question. Arch is not for people who want something that works out of box. If you want a GUI, suspend on lid close, sleep on idle, etc. by default, don’t do Arch. You have to be prepared to debug issues, configure lower level OS features, and read a lot through the wiki and web searches of you are going to use Arch.
I’m new to Arch, and one of the standout features is it’s a lights out Linux distribution option. I’ve learnt more on Linux in a few days because of switching to Arch for my next PC. Linux Mint affords far less involvement for example.
Main reasons:
- rolling release
- access to more packages than most distros
- It just works™
In my opinion Arch is much easier to configure than something like Debian. Just use the archinstall script. Once installed (optional: including yay), you practically only need to remember 2 (4) commands: “sudo pacman -Syu”, “sudo pacman -S (package name)” and optionally “yay -Syu” / “yay -S (AUR-package)”.
- Stability (yes, Arch is more stable than Ubuntu, at least in my anecdotal experience)
- The most recent package versions (no more running ancient stuff with the only way of upgrading is compiling from source, which then may break something your distro relies on)
- AUR (also know as “anything you ever need installable in a quick and easy way”)
- Learning experience (you learn new things faster if you’re an intermediate Linux enthusiast)
