1·
1 year agoThat’s great and all, but this is a federated comm, it appeared on my home page under active. I don’t know if it matters if I personally shared my XMonad config and custom volume widget or commented on yet another custom tiling wm. I always exclusively lurked on the subreddit. I lurk on this one too. Discussion isn’t usually that insightful besides “wow!” and “theme?”.
This time, there was actual discussion and I decided to join in. Much more interesting than the 900th i3 gaps with an 18 pixel gap and 15 lines of code visible in the terminal.
I’m gonna comment and say that’s the point.
You start out with bare minimum and install what you need. As you go you generally have an idea of what is and isn’t on your system. It’s not as annoying as Gentoo with all source compiling, not as anal as nix.
If something breaks, you go to ArchLinux.org and 95% of the time it’s mentioned on the front page so you follow the instructions and move on. It’s a very transparent distro, little drama to follow unlike Ubuntu/canonical or fedora/redhat.
It used to be harder to install and which gave some street cred, but they simplified it a bit which is nice.
The Stans give an unbalanced look at arch. I use arch because I want the latest packages, I don’t want to segment my packages between my repos and tarballs when there’s a game stopping missing feature on a package pinned to a 2yo version. I don’t want to learn a whole scripting language to carefully craft my OS like nix either. I want a current OS that’s easy to fix and easy to install packages so I can go back to what I was doing.