I used linux intermittently in the last 15 or so years, migrating from early Ubuntu versions, to Manjaro, Pop!_OS, Debian, etc. And decided to give Arch a try just recently; with all the memes around its high entry point, I was really expecting to struggle for a long time to set it up just as I want.
Disclaimer: your mileage may vary. I’ve been using some sort of unix CLI since the time I learned to pee standing (last year?), and in case of Arch this prerequisite makes the whole process a lot simpler.
Learning curve
The installation process itself was quite simple. Perhaps the most complicated part was the disk partitioning and setting up the bootloader, as I’ve never done it myself. But then again — on any other OS you kind of have to do the same, except maybe through the GUI and not CLI.
One thing you quickly learn when using Arch — is you always should consult their wiki. Actually, “consult” is an understatement; let me put it this way, on the hierarchy of usefulness: there’s reddit, then stackexchange, then random “how-to” websites, then your logic, and then there is the Arch wiki. Exactly in that order, since your logic may betray you, but not the Wiki. Jokes aside though, they’ve somehow managed to document every minute detail, with specific troubleshooting for almost any combination of hardware out there. This is incredible, and as a person who also spends a lot of time writing documentations — hats off to the devs and the community.
Once you learn how the daemons work, how pacman and AUR packages work — the rest is actually quite similar to any other OS. Except that Arch, even with a bloated DE is frigging fast and eats very little battery. I actually use CLI package installation also in Windows (winget) or MacOS (brew), so learning to use another package manager was not too steep.
Drivers
The main caveats actually come when you want specific drivers for your specific hardware. For instance, the out-of-the-box drivers for my laptop speakers were horrible, with the sound seemingly coming from someone’s redacted (never checked, perhaps it was). But that could quickly be tweaked with the “pipewire/easyeffects” with custom profiles which you may find on the web.
GPU drivers were not really that much of an issue for me (if I actually read the wiki properly). Enabling GPU acceleration in some of the apps (like Blender) required the AMD HIP toolkit installed (they have Arch support) with some minor tweaks in the Blender configs. Similarly, the camera, mic and bluetooth drivers were available as AURs or even native pacman packages.
Caveats
Caveats that come with Arch are actually shared among almost all linux distros (or more specifically — DEs). Support of Wayland, while improving gradually over the years (with a great leap forward in Plasma 6), still sucks majestically. Luckily, for many of the most popular apps (slack, zoom), there are third-party AUR packages supporting Wayland natively (I spent a lot of time looking for exactly that on Debian with no success)! All of the apps I needed I actually found with the Wayland support in AURs, but, again, your mileage may vary.
Takeaways
I’d say if you just bought a fresh out-of-store laptop with no data on it to worry about — you should definitely give Arch a try, even if you’re a beginner. Once you fail a couple of times (like I did), you’ll not only learn a lot more about the behind-the-scenes working of your own computer, but will end up having one of the fastest and efficient OS-es out there, which you will now be able to configure to your exact liking.
Unfortunately, I’ve never been able to really daily-drive Linux (and this Arch experiment is no exception). Don’t get me wrong: I love linux and the idea of having independent open-source and infinitely customizable OS. But unfortunately I professionally rely on some of the apps, that have no viable alternatives for Linux (PowerPoint, Photoshop, Illustrator, Proton Drive).
PS. “but what about GIMP, or Krita, or Inkscape, or OpenOffice, or using rsync for cloud storage, or <YOUR_FAVORITE_TOOL>?” you may ask. Trust me, I tried it all. Every last presentation, raster/vector graphics software out there. Regardless of how much I hate Adobe, their software is top tier, and until GIMP becomes the Blender of graphic design, I can’t really rely use it for most of my purposes :(
As a casual Linux user this confirms exactly what I always thought about Arch: there are significant benefits that I would appreciate but I cannot afford the time and energy investment.
If I didn’t have a job, I would absolutely make it happen. But in the limited time available to me I just have too many other things I’d rather be doing
Then just use endeavour os. It’s basically Arch but with a preset configuration already decided for you.
Installing Arch is the least of its issues, and endeavour doesn’t help you with anything else.
Disagree, actually. The Endeavour defaults are really good and they have a really helpful, newbie-friendly forum.
Plus I have personally found the stereotype of Arch being difficult to maintain to not be true at all. I just installed the linux-lts kernel package and setup btrfs-assistant for system restore and it’s been quite low-maintenance. I had way more issues with Fedora, come to think of it.
I use endeavouros. It’s great after you set it up. It doesn’t really give much help. It’s still barebones almost like arch. I even had to install bluez on KDE to get my Bluetooth working. Best thing about it is the installer. In case things go south, you can easily reinstall. And now that arch the install script, it shouldn’t be an issue.
Just install arch using archinstall (cli app to install arch automatically) and after that use yay instead of pacman
Don’t know how that needs more time than any other OS to be honest.
If it’s that simple to solve every time-sink mentioned in the OP, why isn’t that available by default? Or why isn’t there a distro flavor that is just that?
I don’t know how much EOS is helping with the drivers that don’t come with kernel or need proprietary firmware files, but you can easily get them from AUR. Most difficult part is installing yay from AUR because you don’t have yay yet to install yay vom AUR using yay, lol.
With my answer prior I wanted to tell, that you do not have to spend a lot of time installing arch if you use archinstall (it is ready to use in the archISO)
If it’s that simple to solve every time-sink mentioned in the OP, why isn’t that available by default?
Because a lot of people like setting everything up themselves and having full control over everything they install.
Or why isn’t there a distro flavor that is just that?
There is, Manjaro or EOS.
totally understand it. it took me about a full day to setup everything the way i liked (i’m also quite picky when it comes to usability), but honestly the next time i do it, i can probably do it in a couple of hours, since i now know all the ins and outs.
I’d be interested to hear from someone like you on their “one month later” experience re: upkeep and compatibility
This has been some time ago. Because of the apps I mentioned I had to transit after a week of usage. But in that week, it was kinda nice. I don’t think from the upkeep standpoint it’s too different from other distros. Like I said, the main hard-to-overcome issues come from hardware support, often due to vendors unwilling to release drivers for Linux. But most of the major vendors (intel, amd, nvidia, etc.) have decent linux support nowadays, even not considering the myriad of open-source drivers.
I was also genuinely surprised with how well DEs nowadays support touchpads, and how customizable the gestures can be. That being said, ofc like I said, some of the apps do not release Wayland support (mainly the electron-based ones).
In short, lots of things are a bit more complicated than on Mac or Windows, but a lot of other things are much more straightforward and customizable.
Arch is for people who want to fiddle around with computers during their free time.
Source: was one of those people for a long time and still am occasionally. I use Arch on an old laptop and it’s pretty awesome. But I use Pop on my gaming desktop because it’s stupid simple.
That’s what EndeavourOS is for. Essentially it is just Arch with a fancy install, plus some minor tweaks and packages you’d probably install in Arch anyway.
The AUR and the wiki is what makes iArch so good. All other Linux distros rely on good forums and public guides, which means you need to be on Ubuntu or Debian for there to be enough content out there to help you if you get stuck. But with Arch most stuff is answered by the wiki or with a package from the AUR. Also the community is generally very helpful and direct in forums and Reddit posts making finding solutions much easier, in my experience, than other distros.
Anyway, I love Arch.
