I never found using endeavour any more trouble than using Ubuntu or fedora, and I’ve used both in school or work so, my question back to you, why do people choose corporate coded distros like fedora or Ubuntu when easy to use, up to date and free as in freedom distros like endeavour exist?

I’m going extra silly: why do you wear bikinis when swimsuits exist? Dunno, preferences. People have them.

I daily drive Debian now, but several years ago when a couple of my computers were still very new, I used Arch since it has bleeding-edge support for new hardware while being still thoroughly documented in the Arch Wiki.

The sheer volume of packages on the official repo and the AUR made it great for discovering which desktop environment I wanted to use and for software-hopping in general too. You can have as much or as little on your system as you want and nothing is forced on you.

Funnily enough, I thought like you and was rocking Debian and various derivatives for years. Then one day, for some stupid reason (an out-of-date library for a side project in the Debian repo) and out of curiosity I tried arch.

Honestly have not looked back since for a bunch of reasons.

First, the package manager (pacman) is just awesome and extremely fast. I remember quickly ditching fedora in the past because, in part, of how goddamn slow dnf was.

Then, it’s actually much lower maintenance than I’d initially believed. I maybe had to repair something once after an update broke, and that was expected and documented so no problem there. Plus the rolling release model just makes it easier to update without having version jumps.

Talking of documentation, the wiki is really solid. It was a reference for me even before using arch anyways, so now it’s even better.

People also tend to value the customisability (it is indeed easier in a sense), the lack of bloat (like apps installed by default that you never use), and the AUR.

And, to be fair, a good share of people are probably also just memeing to death.

So I don’t know whether you’re missing something, it depends what you think Arch is like. If you believe it to be this monster of difficulty to install, where you essentially build your own system entirely etc etc… then yeah, you’re missing that it’s become much simpler than this. Otherwise if having more up-to-date software, easier ways to configure things and a rather minimal base install so you can choose exactly what you want on your system does not appeal to you, then likely arch is not going to be your thing.

It’s not really trouble. I use it since 2012 with a few intermediate installs of Debian and Fedora, but I really don’t have many issues I can’t solve in a few minutes. Rolling release means I never have to do huge upgrades.

Then again, I’m a studied CS expert with 20 years of Linux experience. Wouldn’t recommend Arch to people who don’t want to exactly know how their system works.

Because it comes with a nice BTW

The Arch Wiki is probably the sungle most useful documentation for any Linux user; I don’t even use Arch and it’s still extremely helpful.

I could see the benefits of using Arch just so almost every function my system has is near-perfectly documented in Arch Wiki.

As for the distro itself, it has the newest packages, and often good repos with interesting packages that Debian and others may lack. It also expects you to choose and install the components you want, whereas the Debian installer will usually just install defaults; you can use Debootstrap for a minimal Debian install, but that’s not as well supported for installing Debian due to the way tools as set up on the install medium.

The reason I choose Debian over Arch is because if I don’t use a device for several months and have to install updates (like my school laptop over the summer), Debian Stable is more likely to survive that than Arch; I’ve destroyed several Arch VMs by trying to update them after not using them for months. I’m sure I could have salvaged them if I tried, but I’d rather just make a new VM.

I boot my laptop. it takes seconds, the memory footprint is like 600mb

With sway everything feels snappy and insanely responsive.

I haven’t had any issues with arch on my laptop for like 5 years now.

Why would I use anything else ?

The thing stopping me from using Arch is that most programs come out as debs and you have to wait for them to show up in the AUR. Example: when Mullvad VPN first came out it was only available as a deb. How long did it take to show up in the AUR? Who made that available? Was it the Mullvad folks or someone else? That’s the kind of thing that concerns me.

I’ve tried several distros before, none of them feel the same as arch linux, I keep coming back to it. It is simple and just works. The other distros feel too bloated out of the box, which immediately demotivates me. I don’t want to go through the hassle of removing everything I don’t need by hand, so arch is just perfect.

Though I think I shouldn’t have went with arch in my vps. I miss the automated security updates of Fedora.

It’s a misconception that is any “trouble”. I’m using CachyOS, which is basically Arch but with additionally optimized repositories and settings. You just install it an use it, like Mint or Ubuntu. It just works, but it’s also faster for performance related tasks (especially gaming, but also others), importantly and explicitly without any tinkering.

Quite the opposite, actually: there much less tinkering required to get gaming specific things to “just work”, as the tweaks are all there by default. This includes running Windows programs often considered hard to run (through Wine).

I do happen to enjoy and want a rolling release. There’s a new kernel released, and I can install it like a day later. New KDE comes out, update is there for me in a few hours. Software is generally up to date, which was such a refreshing experience as I’m used to running Debian server side. Oh what a contrast.

It meets their needs and preferences, simple as that. I tried Arch in like 2008, and thought people were crazy for all the trouble it took back then. Nowadays there’s a lot of nice distros built on it, so you can get the benefits (such as they may be) without all the low-level tinkering.

So you can tell people you use Arch btw

It’s the IKEA effect. You tend to like something more if you built it yourself.

Is it shown that there are significant performance benefits to installing daemons and utilities à la carte?

No, not really.

Is it because arch users are enthusiasts that enjoy trying to optimize their system?

This is IMHO the most important aspect. The thing they’re trying to optimize isn’t performance, though, it’s more “usability”, i.e. making the system work for you. When you get down to it and understand all the components of the OS, and all the moving parts within, you can set it up however you prefer and then combine them in novel ways to solve your tasks more quickly.

Arch really isn’t very difficult to use these days for someone with a few years debian or similar use (don’t try and use it when first trying linux).

Installing it is straightforward, and you can access preferences via the settings app.