 Hey everyone, so later today. I'm gonna be having a arch Linux install video come out as requested So in this video, I wanted to talk about some of the reasons that some of the reasons to use arch Linux I'm not gonna say it's my favorite distribution I don't have a favorite distribution and I don't think arch would actually be my favorite distribution if you forced me to choose But I keep coming back to it for a lot of reasons. It's not like there's one Knockdown reason to use it, but there are a whole bunch of things that sort of circulate like little Little issues that sort of mean something that make it a really usable distribution for someone like me and probably most of my subscribers So let's get some stuff out of the way about arch So if you've never used it so misunderstandings a lot of people meme about it saying it's Breaks all the time. It's unusable. You have to do everything yourself. It's not actually the case So arch Linux of course does have a minimal install You do have to install it yourself. They're all are actually scripts for doing it But you're expected to install it yourself So pretty much every our arch Linux user has done that now That's actually one of the reasons that I started using arch and that's not just to make it difficult for myself It was that whenever I used another distribution that came with a desktop environment and a bunch of other software You know, I would install Ubuntu or install manjaro or something else and you know that it works fine but I'd always want to make my own setup and I started building my own setup gradually over the course of a couple weeks or months and I'd be in the situation where I'd install it on Ubuntu and then I have to go through Uninstalling all the stuff that Ubuntu installs that I'm not going to use and I don't need sometimes it gets in my way Sometimes it's a little annoying So I wanted to build a setup that just does the things that I wanted to do and not necessarily anything else and arch is basically One of the best distributions you can do for this the fact that it's a minimal install. That's a huge sell for me I like that. I think it's it's very useful You know in that you can pretty much you have to do everything yourself at the beginning now That's not to say it's a difficult district to manage. It actually it really isn't It is of course a rolling release distribution meaning You can choose to update basically every day. There are always new packages coming out new updates for those things A lot of people think rolling release, you know it since arch is a rolling release distro It's really great to have I don't really I'm not a I'm not gonna say I dislike it But I don't think I've benefited from it that much. It's nice to have relatively new software I don't need it, you know as soon as it comes out or something like that, but every once in a while It does matter I'll just say that's not a huge sell for me that some people really like arch because it's rolling release I'm just not a big fan of it. Of course, you don't have to totally reinstall it You know whenever arch 5.0 or whatever comes out because of course arch 5.0 doesn't exist It's all it all happens gradually every day So one misunderstanding that of course is part of the meme is that arch breaks all the time So you're gonna be spending all your time, you know fixing programs that met mess up in the last update or something like that Now that just doesn't happen Or it's happened Well, we'll put it this way if if you're gonna use arch Linux You should check up on the arch Linux website or subscribe to the arch Linux RSS feed because every couple of months Something will go wrong. I mean something expected will go wrong where you have to manually change something That Pac-Man the package manager isn't gonna do automatically. So in that situation It's nice to keep track of what's going on on the arch Linux website And they'll tell you if you actually need to manually fix anything, but that only happens like maybe once or twice a year It's relatively rare And mostly it's for like a specific program that you're not even necessarily using So that's one thing you need to keep in mind, but generally arch Linux does not just spontaneously break Or you you should put the agency where it belongs like if you're installing a system from the bottom up and you did it yourself I Don't want to blame the user and anything But a lot of times it is because you might have jiggered with something in way ways You weren't really spoke were were supposed to or you know You didn't know how to do it the conventional way. So you did something wild or something like that and you messed up, you know your root Partition or something like that But generally arch Linux does just it doesn't break that the whole meme. I mean, it's just the meme So one thing about arch Linux that I think is worth talking about is is arch a Minimalist distribution and that depends on what you mean by a minimalist distribution. So arch as I said, it has a minimalist install But it's not necessarily minimalist in the sense that you know, a lot of people use the word to mean it only pulls those Packages you absolutely need for dependencies and it all it minimizes the amount of space you're using To store programs by having as few that you need as possible Now compare that with a void void Linux is a distribution that I use this well That I think is truly minimal in the sense that it only installs exactly what you tell it to and only those programs that are Needed to get the basic functionality of those programs One comparison between arch and void would be Void when you when when you want to compile a program in a particular computer language You usually have to install a specific development package on void to do that and that can be sort of an annoyance I mean you really just install one package But it doesn't just pull everything by default if you just say I want to develop stuff Arch Linux does work that way you can't just say I want all the development stuff or Basically all the you get all the full functionality of each program pulled automatically when you get arch Linux So that's not minimalist in the sense that you're gonna be using a little more hard drive space to store all these extra packages But it's nice. I think in practice. It's very nice unless you're just economizing on disk space or you have some Ideological reason that you just want as few packages as possible arch Linux works just fine for what it's doing It's not minimalist in that sense, but it is minimalist in the minimalist install thing Now one thing one one other note about the minimalist install some people will say well, okay What's the big deal about arch so arch you have a minimal install? But if you want to use Debian you could install you can have a minimalist install in that and install everything from the bottom Up or you could use one of their desktop environments either one is fine So what's the advantage of arch there now the advantage is it's sort of a practical one Let me put it this way. So the arch community Is built of people who all installed arch from the bottom up They're all sort of working, you know, they all had the same experience And so the problem if you have a problem that you can't figure out by looking at the manual or something If you look a problem up For you know some specific thing on arch Usually you're gonna run into lots and lots of people who have had the exact same problem And that's really nice And that's not necessarily true if you're using a minimal install of Debian or Ubuntu even though those distributions are hugely hugely used Arch Linux like the the community or that the troubleshooting that's online is geared to the kind of Stuff that you'll be interested in if you're you're looking to make a minimalist installation And so that that's really that was really convenient for me and other people as well And I will say comparing arch to other Distributions like again void Linux or Distributions that are less trafficked The nice thing about arches because it's used by a relatively large number of people And this is totally arbitrary mind you this isn't this is only a practical practical benefit, but it actually means a whole lot There is a lot of people who have their eyes on arch Linux and who are running into problems who are reporting the problems who are Fixing the problems well if you use a distro that is relatively rare like you want to be cool and use something that you know is You know number 300 on distro watch or something like that You're gonna have a lot more problems if you actually run into something you can't solve yourself So it's nice having a bunch of people now Mind you if you told me this when I was looking for distros to install I'd be like I don't care if there's a about the community for a distro I'm not a part of that and I'm not really still part of that. I don't really care for that stuff But it does make a difference if there are lots of eyes looking at the problems at a distribution So arch Linux is sort of there's nothing knocked down perfect about it but it's right at that sort of sweet spot of It's a minimal install for people who want to custom custom configuration and it also even though it has that sort of I guess difficulty you have to overcome. It's also a very widely used distribution. So when you run into a genuinely Problematic problem you can get that resolved relatively easily So on my arch Linux system. I nothing really spontaneously breaks I think there are two things that I could remember of one happened like two years ago Where something broke and I couldn't figure it out. It was just a config file that needed fixed or something like that So I'll just say arch Linux is a once you get it set up It's a relatively easy distribution to use and if you're looking for making in your own configuration Arch Linux is a great place to To serve as a platform for that now. I haven't even mentioned stuff like the AUR which has a huge number of Packages that you can access, you know, even very obscure things that other distributions are just not going to carry It's nice having the AUR. It's nice even though a lot of stuff on the AUR can be a little shifty because it just comes from random people more or less It's nice having it just because it allows you to test out so many different programs Really quickly just play around with whatever you want. Um, so anyway, that's about it I just wanted to talk about this stuff generally. So again, I'm gonna be putting up an arch Linux install video relatively soon But yeah, so I'll see you guys next time