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Comment by peakaboo | Hacker News Reader

Yeah that hour installing Arch to get the best Linux distro on the planet...tough decision!

I'm a long time Arch user and it's just the best system there is. Pacman with the Aur has literally everything in its latest version. When I need anything at all to be installed, it takes me 10 seconds to type a single command and then I have it.

But sure, if you think the install is difficult despite the billions of user guides, Pop OS would be my second choice. It's really really stable and beautiful and fast.

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> if you think the install is difficult despite the billions of user guides

I've installed Arch from scratch many a time. It's not the setup, it's keeping it working that's the interesting bit.

In the last ~eight years of using arch I can count the number of times it's broken on one hand.

This was my experience too. In that time I would have had to reinstall most LTS distros a couple of times or regular distros many times.

I have heard that in-place upgrades are getting better but back in my Ubuntu days I never had luck. It seems like you are always going to slowly accumulate cruft that the installer doesn't fix.

My distro journey started with Red Hat 5.2, Mandrake, Mandriva, Ubuntu, Debian, and settled on Arch. It's by far the most stable system I've used. I managed to bork a Debian stable's dpkg two months ago, I've absolutely never been able to make pacman break.

I used to be a big fan of Ubuntu, up until apps just stopped working because the UI refused to function. Something something pixbuf something. Never had the issue once since taking the time to get acquainted with Arch. So glad Ubuntu broke for me.

Starting with Arch taught me way more about Linux than anything, and also had a factor in starting me on the path of using Emacs, and a tiling window manager.

I've only ever broken arch once and it was totally my fault. I broke Debian and Ubuntu a lot more.

Void [1] gives Arch a run for its money, particularly if you want musl-libc or non-systemd init. I’m a long-time user of both.

Chimera [2] is also worth watching.

[1]: https://voidlinux.org/

[2]: https://chimera-linux.org/

musl sounds like too much of a hassle. Too much stuff out there depends on glibc, if you don't know what software you are going to be running, that sounds like a world of pain.

I'm running void musl, but have glibc musl chroot for problematic apps or use flatpak for stuff like steam.

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