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Comment by namibj | Hacker News Reader

Arch has two major differences from Ubuntu and other non-rolling distributions.

1. You're using latest upstream, after it passed through the archlinux-testing repository. This means you won't have to install software from somewhere else just because the repos are outdated. (nighly builds of software are different)

2. Sometimes you have to sys-upgrade to install/fix something, and you don't have much say in when that happens. Typically you need to preemptively do this about once a week to not potentially get interrupted by manual intervention at a bad time. Yes, you will need to do manual intervention, but you won't spend much time on it. It's far less work than getting up-to-date software running on your debian stable.

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my favorite part of arch is using the AUR and customizing PKGBUILDS to suit my needs. I recently was messing around trying to get the emacs native-comp development branch built on my machine. I was running into some issues, then tried in an ubuntu container. Eventually I just fired up my Arch VM, found an AUR package for it, tweaked the PKGBUILD options and dependencies for my needs, and then had it compile on the first try. The build worked great, and once I'd native-compiled everything in my emacs configs, it was super fast to start up even in the VM.

Arch will give you small issues every now and then, but it gives you the tolls to fix them and makes it easy to do things that are much more difficult on other distros.

I can't really agree, to be fair it's been about 5 years since I stopped using Arch so things may very well have improved. But my experience using it as my daily driver on my work ThinkPad was that I kept running into quite a lot of problems every other week from upgrades breaking things, it was of course always fixable but probably spent a few hours every month just on maintenance, this is fine for me on a hobby machine at home but not really something I want in a worn environment. I'm not particular fond of Ubuntu either, it was fine in the 00s but then they lost it, nowadays I primarily use 3 operating systems, FreeBSD, Debian and macOS, they all are somewhat "boring" but also tends to mostly keep working without bothering me to much and most things are easy to look up and well documented.

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