I’m a little bit underwhelmed, I thought that based off the fact so many people seem to make using this distro their personality I expected… well, more I guess?

Once the basic stuff is set-up, like wifi, a few basic packages, a desktop environment/window manager, and a bit of desktop environment and terminal customisation, then that’s it. Nothing special, just a Linux distribution with less default programs and occasionally having to look up how to install a hardware driver or something if you need to use bluetooth for the first time or something like that.

Am I missing something? How can I make using Arch Linux my personality when once it’s set up it’s just like any other computer?

What exactly is it that people obsess over? The desktop environment and terminal customisation? Setting up NetworkManager with nmcli? Using Vim to edit a .conf file?

  • Laser
    7·
    1 month ago

    No longer using Arch, but I can tell you what I liked about it:

    • it basically only does what you explicitly tell it to, making the setup very flexible. There’s no stuff the OS hides behind its own tools really (resulting in little to none “DO NOT EDIT THIS FILE” situations).
    • It is very up to date and the rolling release generally works well, there’s no pain with changing releases or anything.
    • The package manager, including creating your own packages, is dead easy and fast. Caveat is that once you look deeper into it, it gets more complex as you need to keep a container for clean building around. Still, with the right tooling, it’s very manageable.
    • As already mentioned, the documentation is very good.
    • Packages are very close to upstream, in most cases just being something like “./configure; make; make install”.
    • Generally very unopinionated.