honestly once you learn how to install Gentoo and/or NetBSD every other install is an absolute cake walk.

Really though like you said it's valuable knowledge to learn.

Dammit, that makes me want to steal a laptop just to fuck with arch

If it's your first time with Arch. Because if it's your first time with Linux there's no point.

"Hey, I tried the recommended GUI package manager and everything got messed up. Is anyone looking into this?"
"lol just use pacman -Syu in terminal"
"...k, guess I will, but I'm not about to recommend this to anyone else"

Well if you're moving from Windows, you can just nuke the entire thing with automatic partitioning and it feels so damn good

But since that was a long time ago, these days I keep my / and /home on not just separate partitions but separate drives since all my SSDs are only 1 TB. The installer can do whatever the hell it wants to / but /home has to stay untouched.

Me. Not worth my effort. I've reached a point where I just can't be bothered to be 1337 anymore.

Everything that matters is backed up to 3 different places, my pathetic little repurposed laptop home server and 2 cloud services. And one of those is literally on the other side of the planet from me.

I sleep well. As much as the doctor prescribed medications and cpap machine allow for anyway.

I (struggle to) use arch (in disposable VMs, not my actual machine) btw

It does have its merits, but the hype is pretty much "cool kids go hard"

my jokey response was already said by Allero, so I'll tell you what I think draws people to it.

1. Early packages. As soon as the packages are shipped, arch tries to get them in the repo, stability and interoperability be damned
2. Related to the above, AUR. You can't be bothered to build something? Get it from the AUR from someone who an be bothered to build it, but can't be bothered to be the maintainer of that package. This then leads to the issue recently with malware.
3. Minimalism. Arch only gives you what you need and you need to set up everything else.
4. No automated help, thus, total control and responsibility over your system. Installed a flatpak? Set up the executable in the application launcher yourself. (NB : your mileage may vary, I'm comparing LXQT arch with LXQT debian)

I'm using it in VMs only, and because setting it up is faster for me than setting up debian, which is my daily driver. Like I said many times in this thread, I slop it on using archinstall since it just needs the initial config, and I just walk away. The deb installer uses a wizard that "does stuff" while I go through it, so I have to stop and start. I'm only doing defaults anyway , so I don't have to change much in the installer.

I think I get what you're saying, but you might want to fix up the way you said it to be clearer, for your own clarity of expression.

My current copy of arch on my laptop was manually installed by using pacstrap running on my previous nixos installation because i didn't have a usb drive with me. i don't really recommend that route it isnt very well supported

It was* (before archinstall) usually bragged about in a tongue and cheek way...I thought. Be pretty stupid to brag you're literate enough to just follow directions. Waste of time.

it's the one you use to access wikifeet

Tbh gatekeeping Arch by keeping an area of pestilent neckbeards around it is good actually. I mean there's nothing hard or elite about Arch really but newbies should never be exposed to the AUR (see recent events) when they have no clue what they're doing and the risks associated with AUR use.

I need more popcorn and that you deeply for posting this

buy me a drink first

you can use arch with the cachyos kernel and repositories to (afaik) get most of that performance boost while keeping the arch experience, that's what i'm doing on my main computer at the moment

https://wiki.cachyos.org/features/optimized_repos/#adding-our-repositories-to-an-existing-arch-linux-install

An illegal site that you should totally never use as there you can find free movies, series, and other stuff to torrent

Leet