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?
Ease of use.
I’ve run the same CachyOS partition for 2 (3?) years, and I don’t do a freaking thing to it anymore. No fixes, no tweaking. It just works.
…Because the tweaks and rapid updates are constantly coming down the pipe for me. I pay attention to them and any errors, but it’s all just done for me! Whenever I run into an issue, a system update fixes it 90% of the time, and if it doesn’t it’s either coming or my own stupid mistake.
On Ubuntu and some other “slow” distros I was constantly:
Fighting bugs in old packages
Fighting and maintaining all the manual fixes for them
Fighting the system which does not like me rolling packages forward.
And breaking all that for a major system update, instead of incremental ones where breakage is (as it turns out) more manageable.
I’d often be consulting the Arch wiki, but it wasn’t really applicable to my system.
I could go on and on, but it was miserable and high maintenance.
I avoided Fedora because of the 3rd party Nvidia support, given how much trouble I already had with Nvidia.
…It seems like a misconception that it’s always “a la carte” too. The big distros like Endeavor and Cachy and such pick the subsystems for you. And there are big application groups like KDE that install a bunch of stuff at once.
This! I after two years of Debian out of habit from the past, I switched to cachyOS last year and am pretty happy with it. Completely agree that updates feel easier to manage (so far).
However, I guess hygiene also plays a role here: dont “try” multiple audio drivers and this sort of things
Yeah. I would massively emphasize this too.
Don’t mess around.
Especially don’t mess around with AUR. Discrete apps and such are fine, but AUR ‘tweaks’ that mess with the system are asking for trouble, as they have no guarantee of staying in sync with base Arch packages.