RX14 wrote:
Backlash wrote:
Here's my question: Why use anything other than Ubuntu and its variants?
I mean sure, Arch is customizable, but I hear it's a bit of a chore to set up. When the OS itself becomes a hobby; isn't that somewhat counterproductive?
Arch is a chore to set up, but it's not that hard to maintain. This means that because arch is barely more effort to use after initial setup than ubuntu, arch only has to be a bit better to pay off long-term. For non-programmers, there's not really any reason to use arch over ubuntu. However for me, arch is a huge win because the packages are up to date. Because Debian and Ubuntu are stable distributions, their packages tend to be months to years out of date. It ends up that eventually you do need the latest version of X, Y, and Z and it turns into a pain in the ass to install. On arch, living on the bleeding edge is a lot easier, and the packages are a whole lot more up to date by default.
I also enjoyed setting up arch, and it taught me a lot about linux. This knowledge is transferrable to any linux distro, including debian and ubuntu.
This pretty much.
I love the process of installing arch. The people that say that bleeding edge is unstable are wrong. It's incredibly rare that an update to anything with break something.
Another primary reason to install something like Arch is purely that it has 0 bloat. Something like Ubuntu has a fuckload of pre-installed packages that you don't necessarily want or use.
Sure, they make an entirely usable desktop OS, but for a lot of users they won't use even half of the packages it comes with.
If you just want something that "just werks" then Ubuntu is fine, but personally I want to set up my system to work efficiently using only the packages necessary to do so.
You have other options than Arch if you want to achieve that, such as the Manjaro Net Install seeing as Manjaro is basically Arch just without the need to fuck around with manually setting up the base installation.
Oh and another negative for some is that Ubuntu isn't FSF compliant, people don't like that a large for-profit company develops Ubuntu, and it comes with some things that heavily invade privacy out of the box.
I think they can be disabled in the settings, however they're switched on by default and most don't know they're on unless they stumble across them in the settings.
Arch has non-FSF compliant packages in its repositories, but the OS itself is FSF compliant as far as I know.
