(No provocation)
I see these reasons:
- newbie
- lazy (don’t wanna edit config files etc.)
- unique features (like assistant/toolbox, some optimizations like in cachyos)
- wanna check how different systems are set up (that’s rather distrohopping)
Personally, I used manjaro i3 when I was beigginer and wanted to see how tiling WM should be configured (check out ranger config, for example). But after some time, I don’t see reasons why not to just customize pure arch (same with debian and debian-based distros).
Why do people say to keep Arch healthy you must follow the mailing list for needed manual changes for some upgrades? It that a misconception?
That’s not a misconception, but with a slight modification. Stick around:
First of all, you can decide to do an upgrade at your own leisure. There’s no need to run it 10 times a day as some memes will have you believe. I upgrade probably once a week, but I feel like that’s a lot. If nothing is broken, no need to upgrade. Of course, I want to keep up with security updates and browser updates, so when those happen, I tend to upgrade too. So probably once every six weeks should be enough (keep up with the browser schedule).
Anyway, the modification I mentioned is that you don’t need to follow anything. The only thing you should to do is to check archlinux.org for any news items before you upgrade. It’s extremely rare that there are manual actions needed, and when there are, it’s even more seldom for a package that I personally have installed. I think maybe once or twice in a decade I’ve had to actually do anything, and it’s been minor. It always has the exact command or tells you exactly what to do. They never leave you on your own with these things.
A lot less maintenance than Windows back when I was running that, I’ll tell you that much.
Thanks for the response and the clarification.
I haven’t run Windows in 25 years and I no plans to. I’ve actually been using linux for my desktop all that time, including gentoo for several years. Personally, I think people should use whatever os they like and the more choices the better!
Definitely, fully agree. Gentoo I can imagine is more maintenance than Arch, even. At least a lot more waiting around. 😅 But maybe that’s a misconception, too!
But yeah, definitely use whatever you like. I just want to clear up the misconception that Arch is heavy on maintenance. It most definitely is not, unless you want it to be.
I originally switched to Gentoo when I got my first AMD64 workstation. Gentoo was the only distro with full support and optimization for a little while.
For a big build I would kick it off at bed time :)