• Community run distro

• Very stable, and can run the bleeding edge through Snap/Flatpack/Appimages, Distrobox, or VMs/Containers

I love debian because it’s always there for you.

• Compatible with more devices than many distros

Low resource footprint — smaller than EndeavourOS on my laptop. Stability is fantastic. Bookworm practically just came out, so the packages are all much newer than they were in Bullseye, making it a viable option for someone who wants an uneventful Linux distro that fades into the background and lets you get stuff done.

Lightweight.

The new release bookworm solves most hardware/software problems

• Extremely customizable

Great wiki

The AUR

I do real work. Dont have time to waste

PKGBUILDs

I was distrohopping for like a year or two when I first got into Linux desktop. As soon as I installed Arch for the first time that stopped. Now the thought of a distro pre-installing packages gives me the heebie jeebies. You don’t get to tell me how I sync with NTP servers!

pacman goes brrrr

I had to scroll waaaaay down to find this. Mindboggling how underrated this distro is!

The big advantage IMHO, is the out of the box BTRFS set up that lets you simply roll back to a non-broken state, right from the grub menu, should an update break your system. I haven’t had to use it yet, but it is a huge source of comfort knowing it is there.

Also, many people coming to opensuse remark how much snappier it is than other distros.

It’s rolling and reliable

Everything just works

It’s incredibly well put together

Security by default. Firewall is set up blocking ports for UDP etc. so you are protected out of the box.

It is up to date so you can often get newer hardware working due to newer kernels.

YaST

We cannot forget about the wiki, which is a great resource for not only the Arch distro, but for any Linux install.

Seriously, the ease of installing any and all programs from the main repo’s or the AUR is such an extreme advantage over all other distros!

And it makes keeping your system and programs updated a breeze.

Seriously, I realize this every time I have to install something on my server (running AlmaLinux). Now I’ve manually set up a personal LURE repo for some software that I use.

Manjaro is my main distro too! The package manager is great!

Switched to Manjaro after running vanilla Arch for several years and haven’t looked back. I appreciate the slightly less bleeding edge updates and extra added stability around it.

Easy installs are probably less of a big deal nowadays after Arch overhauled their installation process.

Only FOSS software and repositories unless otherwise enabled

Stable

Cutting edge application releases so I get the newest toys after they’ve been decently tested

Uses the latest tech in linux e.g wayland and pipewire.

Applies patches for better programs work under Wayland (SDDM with git patches before long awaited 0.20.0 release).

Slackware gets a lot of hate, especially from the btw bros. People are spooked about having to manage their own dependencies. But I couldn’t agree with you more on simplicity and stability. I’ve been daily driving slackware since 99 or 00, and I don’t think I’ve ever broken something I couldn’t immediately roll back and fix.

I tried to install Ubuntu on a sbc recently. And within an hour of installing this and that with all the different dependencies, I had a completely unusable system. And I had no idea how to fix it. It was totally my fault but reminded me what I love about slackware.

Slack got me through undergrad on an IBM 600e ThinkPad (which was really old even then — around the time of the early 2.6 series kernels iirc). Great distro, fond memories.

I’m on it right now. Got a new Thinkpad a couple weeks ago and just wasn’t in the mood to install Arch the normal way when I finally had alone time at 11pm, gave Endeavour a shot and was like oh, this is convenient 🤩

Endeavour has been my default for a long while now, using Plasma KDE. It supports the flexibility needed to customise and make my own themes for as a low-vision user, and smooths a lot of the rough edges of pure Arch. I had Arch installed previously, but again, having that additional helping hand, coupled with a truly wonderful community, really made all the difference. I left Windows after the mess that was 8, I couldn’t go back…

Does Endeavour get funky like Manjaro does wrt AUR and configs?

Also on endeavor. I like arch, but it’s too much work. Endeavor is good enough for me.

• Packages are kept up to date so it’s often the first distro to support new hardware, APIs, etc.
• AUR provides a huge library of software that isn’t often in package manager repos.
• Rolling release so you don’t have to deal with repository upgrades every 6 months to 2 years.
• btw

My current isn’t vanilla arch, but Endeavour OS, because as an unexperienced user I wanted to have the least trouble while installing, … I regret it ever since, because I began with a Plasma desktop and ended up with i3, mainly because of tiling, problems with some utilities, keyboard switching, etc. In the end, I still love the system, one can get quite minimal with it.

My favorite too. For me on other distros I was typically running into bugs that I’d find had already been fixed upstream months previously - and then I had to either live with the bug or do some hack to manually install the newer version. Somewhat related to this, but as Linux gamer it was also frustrating to have the older Mesa drivers all the time because it couldn’t support the older kernel version the distro shipped or something.

Perfect for running servers

The Arch Wiki is in a language made by users for users. Meaning that its easy to understand because the wiki allows to talk about issues, alternatives and more hints about each small topic, every other wiki has some structure where important details are missing or not taken seriously.

Arch and KDE as a DE because I’m a borderline-obsessive tinkerer.

Although NixOS is tempting me, but I haven’t moved past the virtual-machine-specimen-jar phase with that yet lol.

Starting with a blank slate is so refreshing. It takes time to build everything up from scratch and I understand that you can get a great experience out of the box with other distros, but I love the simplicity of not having any bullshit I didn’t install myself.

I always am going to run into heavy issues when using Debian, Ubuntu or Fedora. On Arch, things also aren’t always smooth, but the issues are mild, always solvable and transparent.

I’m currently doing my second pass of Nix after diving deep into it last time and coming out unsatisfied. The same problems that I had before with it are problems I’m seeing again:

• disjointed configs pulled from random source or build repos on the internet
• unintuitive grammars with parameters that require you to download an autocompletion spec
• flakes that aren’t immediately easy to grok

Contrast that with my last Guix experience:

• Lisp form, super easy to understand grammar
• Recipes are so trivial that I’ve written three on my first day
• Source tree is included and you are expected to add branches to it

The only problem with Guix that I can see is that it’s not as popular

dupe

Easy config with archinstall script if you want to choose options from a list when installing

AUR offers a lot of resources for a straightforward way to install software that isn’t in the main repositories

Comments in the AUR can be a helpful troubleshooting source or indicate the quality of a package hosted there

Build the system from the ground up choosing how you want it to work

Pacman package manager works well and PKGBUILD files are simple enough to edit if you want to alter how a package builds

Up to date packages

Extensive documentation with useful troubleshooting sections for many articles

AUR’s developer change hands faster than british prime ministers that it gets harder and to trust upstream devs

Incredibly easy to hack with it’s no-security by default policy