Using arch btw

[CitricScion]

@PossiblyAxolotl it was cool reading your blog post on installing Arch for the first time! How has it been? Do you still see yourself sticking with Arch on that machine or somewhere else?

I've thought about installing Arch at some point, but I still get intimidated. Even when you learn how to install Linux, that's still very different from installing Arch or similar distros.

Anyone else use Arch? How long have you been using it? What do you like about it? What unique thing have you done with your system? I guess we can make this the Arch love thread lol

Blog post: https://blog.possiblyaxolotl.com/2025/0 ... -arch-btw/

[PossiblyAxolotl]

It's honestly overall been the most reliable distro I've used, and I weirdly really like getting a very barebones distro where I assemble all the tools I use on it. I think I will still stick with Arch for the forseeable future, as I also want to get into ricing the Niri wayland compositor and some other stuff. I actually just now had my first "Arch Linux moment" where I updated and then suddenly my internet connection was gone, but I worked through it and am probably gonna blog about it tomorrow lol. I am also curious about bare Debian as I've almost exclusively used Debian based distros prior to trying Arch and it seems fairly barebones and customizable compared to something more common like Mint or Ubuntu, but for now I'm happy just messing with it in virtual machines and pretty happy with my current setup overall. It's definitely easier to install and also comes pretty empty, and I noticed that in the installer they actually give you the choice of what desktop environment you want with it which I think is really neat.

[CitricScion]

How did you prepare for installing Arch? Did you just follow the wiki and work with any recommendations there, or did you need to have a list of what exactly you wanted beforehand for anything that needed to be done before you're done installing?

[PossiblyAxolotl]

How did you prepare for installing Arch? Did you just follow the wiki and work with any recommendations there, or did you need to have a list of what exactly you wanted beforehand for anything that needed to be done before you're done installing?

I didn't really have much of a plan, I just knew I wanted to install KDE Plasma and followed the wiki, and gradually over time I've been installing more stuff as needed like printer drivers and that.

[Crazyroostereye]

I have been a long time Arch user. The Installation Process, as long as you don't try something Funky, is actually fairly Straight forward and well Documented on the Arch Wiki. So trying it isn't too difficult, and you learn some neat things that will help you save your System when it fails.

My Personal Experience with Arch has been really Good, my PC installation is currently 1 Year Old, and has been running really well. But I have a tendency to reinstall my System regularly. But what I like about Arch is the expansive Repository, and the Bare-bones Nature, which gave ample Opportunity to build my OS the way I want it. So give it a try and on your Journey will teach you many things that are interesting.

[Fireye]

Arch linux is great! been using it for a bit more than a year or so and a couple breaking updates aside, it's been awesome. The flexibility and customizability is unparalelled, and I love how well it's propelled me into involving myself in various open source communities.

I do find myself looking at nixos pretty frequently though, as I really love how reproducable environments are over there, which comes in super handy for handling programming projects without using virtual environments or conda-like tools, as well as duplicating system state between computers, which will come in super handy when i make edits or install something on my laptop and want to duplicate them to my desktop. Even more impressively, the nix package repository is bigger than the AUR which is straight up bonkers lmao (https://repology.org/repositories/statistics/total). Further, the one problem i've had with arch, that being the breaking updates every once in a while, is completely remedied on nix, due to its central versioning system which by default doesn't actually enable the system upgrades unless the whole upgrade process went well, and also keeps old snapshots of your system (which is pretty storage trivial, as the system is represented in one central config file), which allows you to revert state and fix problems from a functional OS rather than the broken one.

Switching over is gonna be a pain in the ass though so I'm probably gonna wait haha.

What is everyone runnning though? Here's what I have currently:

Arch,
Niri WM (xwayland satellite breaks a bit more than standard xwayland but gamescope and xwayland-run work fine as workarounds),
Custom vertical waybar,
pretty vanilla tofi runner,
kitty terminal emulator (thinking about swapping sometime lemme know if anyone has suggestions!),
mako for notifs,
tuned-adm for performance/battery tuning (over power-profiles daemon as it's more customizable https://docs.redhat.com/en/documentatio ... -tuned_adm)
and here are a few common apps i'm running: btop for system stats, spotify-player for music (hoping to get a media server working soon but I have to get my self hosted vpn up first gah), gurk for signal, nvim for text editing and programming IDE (using lazy vim as a base right now, but I hear lunar is good too).