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this post was submitted on 08 Aug 2023
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I ran Arch on my gaming machine for a few years.
It's a great learning experience, but impractical as hell. I remember the exact moment I decided to stop daily driving it. I was using my laptop for work, trying to convince my boss to let me keep using my Linux box instead of the windows horseshit they wanted to make me use. I was on a Slack huddle and trying to use my Bluetooth headphones, but they wouldn't even connect. Over an hour later I had figured out that Bluetooth didn't start by default and required being started manually from systemd. Nothing in the GNOME UI indicated any of this. Soon I was using a Windows computer that could at least connect to fucking Bluetooth out of the box 😐
I love Arch. It made me a much better Linux dev. It's impractical as hell for a daily driver.
I've only been using it for a few months and it's been the most stable distribution I've ever used. We'll see as time goes on.
Agree, it's great for gaming or using custom kernels and such. It's an excellent base because it generally goes with the defaults provided by package maintainers.
These strengths are also weaknesses though, because oh my god I just want to connect my Bluetooth headphones and use them for the most obvious use case without needing to look up and enter commands in the terminal.
And I say this as a lifelong hobby amateur computer scientist. It's not that I'm afraid of the CLI, it's just that defaults are kind of nice sometimes. Arch is great because it's an un-opinionated Linux install, but it also refuses to make anything "plug and play" which is more than a little painful.
I've used an Arch-derived distro for some years now, and it's frankly by far the most stable computer(s) I've ever used.
I had some issues with Bluetooth and I think maybe the WiFi controller at first too, but I followed the instructions on the Arch wiki and I think installed an AUR package or something like that, and ever since then it's worked perfectly.
Compared to previous non-rolling distros, nothing has ever really broken directly due to the fault of an update, especially since I got rid of GNOME and their janky self-destructive user-hostile control freak extensions-reliant mess. And within the same time, one of the two Windows installations I had by comparison just suddenly stopped accepting keyboard input one day— On a laptop, with no way to fix or even investigate the issue— While the Arch-derived Linux distro on the same machine still worked perfectly.
I'm talking about an Arch-derived distro, and I didn't go through the Arch-from-scratch route, though.