Arch Linux. What makes it different from the other distributions? Why is there some weird elitism paralleled by disgust around it?
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It’s a very bare-bones experience with minimal hand holding. You have to really understand your system in order to get everything functional, because you’re hunting down drivers for basically everything. Have an uncommon component in your system? You might be compiling drivers yourself.
This has become less true over the years, but that was the gist of it when I put together my first Arch system about a decade ago.
The elitism comes from the fact that you don’t really reach for arch unless you have a very specific use case, want the learning experience, or see it as a flex. You’re not going to hear from the previous two scenarios often.
The disgust comes from people who’s interactions have been with the people trying to flex, with a light sprinkling of people who have tried to put together an arch system and turned away with nothing but frustration.
As part of a society that uses computers for nearly every facet of daily life, we typically know astonishingly little about how they operate. Arch Linux breaks up all the fixtures of computer operation into manageable chunks to be put together (assuming it’s user knows how they work) so that if anything ever goes wrong, there is a small presumption it can be repaired (for excellent ego points).
However, this is like building your own home in a way. You may be able to go on the Sears catalog (or Menards catalog for this century) and get all the parts of a house delivered, but putting it together and having a house you’re proud of that seems stable and pretty to other people isn’t always possible if you don’t care to learn how houses work. Many people would just like a house to be built by professionals because they would rather everything work without them knowing how than try to fix a magnitude more problems that they do know (usually) how to fix.
Gentoo is the next level deeper. If Arch Linux is an apprentice carpenter, then Gentoo is the journeyman. Masters would be the distro developer.
Ubuntu is like a full option car. Things are easy to fix, it mostly works, if something breaks you can just get an off the shelf component.Arch is like a kit car, without a manual. it’s got headlights, but you gotta make the cable that connects them to the battery or hunt it down in some really obscure corner shop that only sees 5 customers / year.
It’s a rolling release, for starters – meaning you don’t have specific versions of the OS, but rather a constant stream of updates as software packages get new versions. This can break things sometimes (though it’s been pretty rare for me the last few years). Second, their approach to dependencies and meta-packages is pretty lightweight. I don’t want to say it’s just to be difficult, but their idea of “you can make this whatever you want” means you get a system that kinda requires some knowledge to get into a working state.
It’s not as hardcore as it used to be, and they’ve gotten better about holding updates for core packages to avoid breaking bugs. The archinstall script is pretty decent if you want a standard desktop install without the hassle of manually configuring everything. But it’s still easy to wind up in a state where one little thing doesn’t work right because you forgot an optional dependency.
As for the elitism…I think that kinda stems from a portion of the community just being toxic and elitist. Obviously you gotta use a “real” Linux distribution like Arch or you’re just not skilled enough! If it wasn’t Arch, it’d be something else like Gentoo. It’s a meme at this point.
This, IMO, intersects with the kind of people who’d judge you for playing games on Story Mode or whatever. Just assholes looking for any reason to feel above another person, and giving the rest of the community headaches in the process.
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True ELI5:
It’s like how people get super elitist over camping.
Arch is the equivalent of someone refusing to live in a house they haven’t personally logged the trees for and built by hand.
If you want to learn how operating systems work, and you don’t mind taking a computer out of action for a bit, it’s definitely worth the experience!
Otherwise, unless you already have years of know-how and stubbornness behind you, every little task is enormous effort, and you’ll find yourself sleeping under leaves as a “temporary solution, before you have a UI”.
Seriously, I tried it on my MacBook a few years ago, and I was using a text browser through all of it. It took me 2 weeks to figure out how to get the WiFi working
Let’s equate computers to cars:
MacOS is a Tesla. Shiny and fully featured, but little user customization outside what they give you. And you probably have to take it to a repair shop for anything more than the most minor issue.
Windows is a 1995 Ford Taurus. Basic and reliable, a lot of ways the user can maintain it, but most people still take it to a repair shop for most things.
Debian and it’s derivatives are Honda Civics. Folks who use these can range anywhere from basic users to car enthusiasts who want to know and control as much as possible. Folks who own this car probably have at least the ability to do oil changes, replace engine parts, etc.
Arch is a ratrod. This is a car built up from a very basic base, customized to the gills, and probably contains parts made specifically for that one car. There is a strong community of rat rodders who share knowledge and experience, but still like the personal challenge of learning everything they can about their car.
Are the Slackware people dead? Installing Arch is like going to Disneyland where as we had to install Slackware from a magazine without internet. That is if we were lucky enough to have a magazine.
It’s like when kids brags about lacing their own shoes. It is a big deal for them because it took a little more effort. But there are other kids who prefers laceless shoes, and it doesn’t mean that they don’t know how to tie a knot, but prefer simple things.
Speaking about arch, it’s a distro that has no versioning, so you’ll never have a major release (on the contrary of Ubuntu having one or two major releases per year, or Windows itself having Windows 8, 10, 11, etc). This means that with a simple command you’ll have your system up to date.
Also their package system is very efficient and fast (they use zstd for package compression). And if a package is not on their repositories, you can go to aur.archlinux to find a package “template” and build/install it with a single command, unlike debian/ubuntu which is more complicated to build a package from scratch.
Arch Linux users are basically bug testing bleeding edge software for the rest of the Linux community, so everyone lets them feel special for running an unstable OS that’s held together with duct tape.
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