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Why go through the trouble to use Arch? (lemmy.world)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/linux@lemmy.ml
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May be a mean sounding question, but I’m genuinely wondering why people would choose Arch/Endevour/whatever (NOT on steam hardware) over another all-in-one distro related to Fedora or Ubuntu. Is it shown that there are significant performance benefits to installing daemons and utilities à la carte? Is there something else I’m missing? Is it because arch users are enthusiasts that enjoy trying to optimize their system?

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[–] 16 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Is it shown that there are significant performance benefits to installing daemons and utilities à la carte?

No, not really.

Is it because arch users are enthusiasts that enjoy trying to optimize their system?

This is IMHO the most important aspect. The thing they're trying to optimize isn't performance, though, it's more "usability", i.e. making the system work for you. When you get down to it and understand all the components of the OS, and all the moving parts within, you can set it up however you prefer and then combine them in novel ways to solve your tasks more quickly.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    This is the most important thing. Over time, you develop opinions about software and methods of solving problems. I have strong opinions on how I want to manage a system, but almost no opinions on flags I want to switch when I compile software. This is why I'm on arch not gentoo. I'm sure I'll make the leap eventually...

    Before I switched back to Arch for my daily driver, I'd frankensteined my Fedora install on my laptop to replace power management, all the GUI bits, most of the networking stack and a fair chunk of the package system. Fedora, and Gnome in that case is opinionated software. That's a good thing as far as I'm concerned, having a unified vision helps give the system direction and a unique feel. These days, I have my own opinions that differ in some ways from available distros.

    I wanted certain bits to work a certain way, and I kept having to replace other parts to match the bits I was changing. When you ask the question, can I swap daemon X out for Y, the answer on fedora was, sure, but you'll have to replace a, b and c too, and figure out the rest for yourself. Good luck when updates come along.

    The answer on arch is, yeah, sure, you can do that - and here's a high level wiki naming some gotchas you'll want to watch out for.

    I've also reached a stage in my computer usage that I don't want things to happen automatically for me unless I've agreed them or designed them. For example, machines don't auto-mount usb drives, even in gui user sessions, or auto connect to dhcp. I understand what needs to be done, and do it the way I want to do it, because I have opinions on networking and usb mounting.

    My work laptop is a living build that I just keep adding to and changing every day. Btrfs snapshots are available for rollback...

    I've got two backup machines - beelink mini me's running reproducible builds created using archinstall. It's running on internal emmc, and they have have a 6 disk zfs raidz2 on internal nvme drives, all of which are locked behind luks encryption,with the keys in the fTPM module, without the damn Microsoft key shim. On is off site. Trying to get secureboot working on Debian was an exercise in frustration.

    I've modified a version of that same build for my main docker host on another mini PC.

    My desktop runs nixos, but will be transfered to arch next rebuild.

    I've got a steamdeck, which runs an arch based distro.

    I used to run raspberry pi's on arch because the image to flash the SD cards used to be way smaller than what was offered by the default pi is.

    That's all using arch. It's flexible, has the tool sets I need, and almost never tells me 'No, you can't do that'.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    My desktop runs nixos, but will be transfered to arch next rebuild.

    That's interesting; any particular reason? I went the other way around (Arch for multiple years -> Gentoo for a year or so -> NixOS for over a decade now), and never looked back.

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  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago

    I thought about this for a long while, and realised I wasn't sure why, just that most of my work has gravitated towards Arch for a while.

    Eventually, I've decided the reason for the move is because of three specific issues, that are really all the same problem - namely I don't want to learn the nix config language to do the things I want to do right now.

    I've read lots of material on flakes, even first modified then wrote a flake to get not-yet-packaged nvidia 5080 modules installed (for a corporate local llm POC-turned-PROD, was very glad I could use nix for it!) I still just don't really get how all the pieces hang together intuitively, and my barrier is interest and time.

    Lanzaboote for secure boot. I'm going to encrypt disks, and I'm going to use the TPM for unlocking after measured uki, despite the concerns of cold-boot attacks, because they aren't a problem in my threat model. Like the nvidia flake, I don't really get how it hangs together intuitively.

    Home management and home-manager. Nix config language is something I really want to get and understand, but I've been maintaining my home directory since before 2010, and I have tools and methods for dealing with lots of things already. The conversion would take more time than I'm prepared to devote.

    Most of the benefits of nix are things I already have in some format, like configuration management and package tracking with git/stow, ansible for deployment, btrfs for snapshots, rollback and versioning. It's not all integrated in one system, but it is all known to me, and that makes me resistant to change.

    I know that if I had a week of personal time to dig in and learn, to shake off all the old fleas and crutch methods learned for admin on systems that aren't declarative, I'd probably come away with a whole new appreciation for what my systems actually look like, and have them all reproducible from a readable config sheet. I'm just not able to make that time investment, especially for something that doesn't solve more problems than I've already solved.

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    you can set it up however you prefer and then combine them in novel ways to solve your tasks more quickly

    Can you think of a quick example, out of curiosity?

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago

    For context, I'm using NixOS, not Arch, but it's a similar enough idea. I have a tiling/tabbed WM configured just the way I like it, and a window switcher thingy, and it makes juggling hundreds of windows really easy and quick. Combined with a terminal-based editor, a custom setup for my shell, and direnv for easy environment switching, I can be switching between a dozen different projects within a single day (sadly a requirement for my work right now).

    Whenever I look at how my colleagues with KDE/Gnome are managing their workflows, it makes me appreciate the work I put into my setup a lot.

    Also, I have a whole bunch of shell aliases and scripts for tasks I do often.

    Sure, you can configure any distro to do that, but things like Ubuntu or Fedora would get in the way. At some point, when you want to choose (or even write) every component of the system and configure it yourself, it's easier to just build from scratch rather than start with a lot of pre-configured software and remove parts.

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