Also why does everyone seem to hate on Ubuntu?

  •  Feyd   ( @Feyd@programming.dev ) 
    41·
    6 months ago

    I like arch because:

    • it is rolling release and I like having up to date software and not having to deal with distro upgrades breaking things
    • it is community run and not beholden to a company
    • packages are mostly unmodified from their upstream
    • the wiki and forums are the best of any distro

    Side note:

  •  sudo   ( @sudo@programming.dev ) 
    40·
    6 months ago

    About 10 years ago it was The Distro for first time linux users to prove they were a True Linux Enjoyer. Think a bunch of channers bragging about how they are the true linux master race because they edited a grub config.

    Before Arch that role belonged to Gentoo. Since then that role has transitioned to NixOS who aren’t nearly as toxic but still culty. “Way of the future” etc.

    All three of have high bars of entry so everyone has to take pride in the effort they put in to learn how to install their distro. Like getting hazed into a frat except you actually learn something.

    The Ubuntu hatred is completely unrelated. That has to do with them being a corporate distro that keep making bad design decisions. And their ubiquity means everyone has to deal with their bad decisions. (snap bad)

        •  folaht   ( @folaht@lemmy.ml ) 
          10·
          6 months ago

          Unity would be the first example, and although Unity was actually a good DE,
          it was too bloated and almost non-modifiable.

          People jumped ship to Linux Mint that had its priorities straight.

          Mir and Snap were bigger issues though
          as Wayland and Flatpak were great replacements for
          X11 and AppImage and did not need another competitor.

          But the privacy issues were the straw that broke the camel’s back.
          People left windows for linux so they wouldn’t have to deal with this kind of nonsense.

          I actually jumped when Ubuntu jumped to Gnome 3.
          Gnome 3 was too bloated for me and it looked ugly.

          I decided to see what Arch Linux was about
          and eventually settled for Manjaro Linux.
          Arch + Xfce for the win.

          •  BunScientist   ( @BunScientist@lemmy.zip ) English
            3·
            6 months ago

            I left Ubuntu after Unity, it could have been the greatest thing ever, but Canonical deciding what was best for me felt too much like Microsoft just shoving whatever garbage they wanted to my system.

  •  audaxdreik   ( @audaxdreik@pawb.social ) English
    30·
    6 months ago

    I don’t really have a concise answer, but allow me to ramble from personal experience for a bit:

    I’m a sysadmin that was VERY heavily invested in the Microsoft ecosystem. It was all I worked with professionally and really all I had ever used personally as well. I grew up with Windows 3.1 and just kept on from there, although I did mess with Linux from time to time.

    Microsoft continues to enshittify Windows in many well-documented ways. From small things like not letting you customize the Start menu and task bar, to things like microstuttering from all the data it’s trying to load over the web, to the ads it keeps trying to shove into various corners. A million little splinters that add up over time. Still, I considered myself a power user, someone able to make registry tweaks and PowerShell scripts to suit my needs.

    Arch isn’t particularly difficult for anyone who is comfortable with OSes and has excellent documentation. After installation it is extremely minimal, coming with a relatively bare set of applications to keep it functioning. Using the documentation to make small decisions for yourself like which photo viewer or paint app to install feels empowering. Having all those splinters from Windows disappear at once and be replaced with a system that feels both personal and trustworthy does, in a weird way, kind of border on an almost religious experience. You can laugh, but these are the tools that a lot of us live our daily lives on, for both work and play. Removing a bloated corporation from that chain of trust does feel liberating.

    As to why particularly Arch? I think it’s just that level of control. I admit it’s not for everyone, but again, if you’re at least somewhat technically inclined, I absolutely believe it can be a great first distro, especially for learning. Ubuntu has made some bad decisions recently, but even before that, I always found myself tinkering with every install until it became some sort of Franken-Debian monster. And I like pacman way better than apt, fight me, nerds.

  •  folaht   ( @folaht@lemmy.ml ) 
    23·
    6 months ago

    Arch is better because…

    • pacman, seriously, I don’t hear enough of how great pacman is.
      Being able to search easily for files within a package is a godsend when some app refuses to work giving you an error message “lib_obscure.so.1 cannot be found”.
      I haven’t had such issues in a long time, but when I do, I don’t have to worry about doing a ten hour search, if I’m lucky, for where this obscure library file is supposed to be located and in what package it should be part of.
    • rolling release. Non-rolling Ubuntu half-year releases have broken my OS in the past around 33% of the time. And lots of apps in the past had essential updates I needed, but required me to wait 5 months for the OS to catch up.
    • AUR. Some apps can’t be found anywhere but AUR.
    • Their wiki is the best of all Linuxes

    The “cult” is mostly gushing over AUR.

  •  blob42   ( @blob42@lemmy.ml ) 
    18·
    6 months ago

    IMO Despite some unjustified rumors Arch is a very stable distro. For me it feels the same as Debian stability wise while still being on the cutting edge side. The Arch wiki is the second most important reason.

  •  Chewy   ( @Chewy7324@discuss.tchncs.de ) 
    14·
    6 months ago

    Arch requires reading the manual to install it, so installing it successfully is an accomplishment.

    It’s rolling release with a large repo which fits perfectly for regularly used systems which require up-to-date drivers. In that sense it’s quite unique as e.g. OpenSUSE Tumbleweed has less packages.

    It has basically any desktop available without any preference or customisations by default.

    They have a great short name and solid logo.

    Arch is community-based and is quite pragmatic when it comes to packaging. E.g. they don’t remove proprietary codecs like e.g. Fedora.

    Ubuntu is made by a company and Canonical wants to shape their OS and user experience as they think is best. This makes them develop things like snap to work for them (as it’s their project) instead of using e.g. flatpak (which is only an alternative for a subset of snaps features). This corporate mindset clashes with the terminally online Linux desktop community.

    Also, they seem to focus more on their enterprise server experience, as that is where their income stream comes from.

    But like always, people with strong opinions are those voicing them loudly. Most Linux users don’t care and use what works best for them. For that crowd Ubuntu is a good default without any major downsides.

    Edit: A major advantage of Ubuntu are their extended security updates not found on any other distro (others simply do not patch them). Those are locked behind a subscription for companies and a free account for a few devices for personal use.

    •  Aatube   ( @Aatube@kbin.melroy.org ) 
      4·
      6 months ago

      installing it successfully is an accomplishment

      Not really with archiinstall, but indeed as you say reading the manual is an expectation. Their philosophy is “creating an environment that is straightforward and relatively easy for the user to understand directly, rather than providing polished point-and-click style management tools”, as well-summarized by Wikipedia.

      wants to shape their OS and user experience as they think is best

      tbh that goes for every distro. It’s just that Canonical is more hands-on with its approach. The major complaint with Snap besides performance issues is Canonical making it so that only the Snap versions of popular apps (most famously, the bundled Firefox) are available by default.

  •  notarobot   ( @notarobot@lemmy.zip ) 
    13·
    6 months ago

    I installed arch before there was the official install script. It’s not that is was THAT difficult, but it does provide a great sense of accomplishment, you learn a lot, customize everything, and you literally only install things you know you want. (Fun story: I had to start over twice: the first time I forgot to install sudo, the second I forgot to install the package needed to have an internet connection)

    All of this combined mean that the users have a sense of pride for being an arch user so they talk about it more that the rest. There is no pride in clicking your way though an installer that makes all the choices for you

    •  OhVenus_Baby   ( @OhVenus_Baby@lemmy.ml ) 
      6·
      6 months ago

      Nix is great but not the saving grace I thought it would be. I daily it. Like it. Run cinnamon coming from Mint. But to be fair. It takes real effort and time to setup your config file, comment it thoroughly and then master the system. Once it’s fully automated backups and all you can hop machine to machine and it’s like you never left your OG machine. There’s pros and cons for sure.

  •  shirro   ( @shirro@aussie.zone ) English
    10·
    6 months ago

    I had moved from Slackware to Debian but by 2004 the long release cycles of Debian were making it very hard to use any Debian with current hardware or desktop environments. I was using Sid and dealing with the breakages. Ubuntu promised a reskinned Debian with 6 month release cycles synced to Gnome. Then they over delivered with a live cd and easy installation and it was a deserved phenomenon. I very enthusiastically installed Warty Warthog. Even bought some merch.

    When Ubuntu launched it was promoted as a community distro, “humanity towards others” etc despite being privately funded. Naked people holding hands. Lots of very good community outreach etc.

    The problem for Ubuntu was it wasn’t really a community distro at all. It was Canonical building on the hard work of Debian volunteers. Unlike Redhat, Canonical had a bad case of not invented here projects that never got adopted elsewhere like upstart, unity, mir, snaps and leaving their users with half-arsed experiments that then got dropped. Also Mint exists so you can have the Ubuntu usability enhancements of Debian run by a community like Debian. I guess there is a perception now that Ubuntu is a mid corpo-linux stuck between two great community deb-based systems so from the perspective of others in the Linux community a lot of us don’t get why people would use it.

    Arch would be just another community distro but for a lot of people they got the formula right. Great documentation, reasonably painless rolling release, and very little deviation from upstream. Debian maintainers have a very nasty habit of adding lots of patches even to gold standard security projects from openbsd . They broke ssh key generation. Then they linked ssh with systemd libs making vulnerable to a state actor via the xz backdoor. Arch maintainers don’t do this bullshit.

    Everything else is stereotypes. Always feeling like you have to justify using arch, which is a very nice stable, pure linux experience, just because it doesn’t have a super friendly installer. Or having to justify Ubuntu which just works for a lot of people despite it not really being all that popular with the rest of the linux community.