Fourteen: Why Arch?

In my previous post, I documented the difficult story of how I wiped my entire hard drive trying to dual boot Arch and Windows 11. However, I never went over exactly why I chose Arch to dualboot, instead of a distro like NixOS or a stable choice like Debian. Here was my reasoning:

Reason 1: Package repository, Wiki, Community

Arch has a massive package repository, all of which are continually updated and maintained by the community. The Arch Wiki is also a treasure trove of incredibly useful information, given in understandable and bite-sized sections. I cannot overstate how useful the Arch Wiki has been in my time with Arch (through VMs and bare metal installations). The community, while somewhat toxic (a bunch of smart asses saying “go read the docs”), is extremely helpful. Any issue that you have run into, they have found a solution. The community is bustling and involved.

Reason 2: Daily Driver usage

Since Arch has such a massive repository and is a primary Linux distribution, there is a bunch of support for your daily driver needs. Many packages and applications and software are all available on Arch. It is not a stable distribution like Debian, but that makes it more inviting because stable is boring. Arch is fit to be a daily driver. I decided not to choose NixOS because I don’t want to use it as a daily driver; while the community and package manager are great, it simply does not have good enough documentation, nor does it have great support for oddball software (if you want to download software not provided by the NixOS repository, you’re pretty much screwed. However, I may be wrong about this!). NixOS was not suited as well as Arch to be a daily driver.

Reason 3: No bloat

Arch, unlike many distributions (I’m looking at you: Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, etc.), does not include much bloat. It’s pretty bare bones from the get go, so you don’t have to deal with unnecessary software that you don’t even know exists, and you don’t have to deal with hunting for and uninstalling said software. With Arch, your machine is truly personalized to you. As a bonus (I’m looking at you, Windows) you don’t get ads in your literal operating system, and your data isn’t getting mined with every click.

The real reason

I can now say, with verity: I use arch, btw.