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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Not gonna comment on elitism or disgust. I think I’m not really up to date on whatever sorts of social media or discussion forums are out there for Linux distributions to experience that.
As far as what makes Arch unique compared to more common Linux distros, consider what a distro is. You need Linux itself, a bootloader, an init system, a shell, some set of core utilities at least reasonably close to fitting the POSIX standard, a basic filesystem somewhat close conforming to the Linux Filesystem Hierarchy Standard, and a package manager. On top of that, for personal use systems, you’re usually going to want things like a graphical window manager, desktop environment, soundsystem support, networking support. Most Linux distros are fairly prescriptive about these things. They’ll give you a graphical or ncurses based installer that makes the bulk of the decisions for you. You’re getting GNOME and Pipewire and you’re going to have WiFi and Bluetooth support. You’ll probably even get things like a calendar, e-reader, weather app, things you might expect to be built into a smartphone OS or Windows.
Arch gives you almost none of this out of the box. There is no installer. To install Arch, you mount a minimal Arch from a USB stick, and then run all of the commands to create disk partitions with filesystems on them and install the packages you need. If you follow the Wiki instructions, you’ll get Linux, some firmware for common devices, and the base package that gives you most POSIX utilties in the form of GNU coreutils, sed, grep, and what not. After that, you choose what you want. I’m pretty sure officially only systemd is supported as an init system, but there are plenty of examples using others if you want to do that. No bootloader is prescribed and you can choose whichever you want. Shell is up to you. Text editor up to you. Desktop environment, and exactly what graphical apps you want that usually come with it, up to you.
Accordingly, it is loved by power users because it makes almost no decisions for you. For people used to the convenience you get from any mainstream operating system, not so much. There are no Arch-provided graphical tools for doing anything. Get used to using the shell. You want Internet to work? Write out text files in your shell and then tell the init system to start a service that uses them. If you’re used to getting a wizard that does most of that for you, or even a system that just sets up the Internet for you without asking for input other than maybe which WiFi network to connect to, you might hate that. If you’re running a system on a very minimal PC that doesn’t even need WiFi or Bluetooth because it has no radio capability, you might love it, because it won’t force you to install anything you don’t actually need and won’t use.
Another defining characteristic, but less in the realm of completely unique, is that Arch uses a rolling release model. That means you will always have something very close to the latest version of all upstream packages. As soon as Pipewire releases a new version, you’ll get it maybe a day or two later at most. No waiting six months for a Debian or Redhat release cycle and always being a version or two behind. The upside is you always have the latest and greatest up-to-date features and the maintainers don’t have to backport critical bug fixes and security patches. The downside is your system is quite a bit less stable. In practice, I personally think rolling release is ideal for desktop PCs, but stable point releases are ideal for servers. It’s a matter of opinion, though, but people on the Internet tend to have very strong opinions.
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