Yes, I am now one of THEM. As stated in my last post, I got a new laptop last year. I wanted to go with Debian, but because the hardware is very new, I had to go with something more … current. My old laptop ran Manjaro, and I was quite happy with it. However, I wanted to go with a base distribution. Nothing that uses another distribution as it’s base. There are of course a few options. Debian, would have been one of them. I could have done Fedora or OpenSUSE. Both also have a rolling version. Main reason why I went with Arch was the Wiki. Especially for new stuff, there is so much documentation there. It also forced me to get again a bit into the weeds of Linux.

Now, let me be completely honest. Is it a perfect experience. No. Some things are a lot more difficult. I used archinstall (yes, I was a bit lazy) and at one point it asked what I want as my boot manager. I mean, grub is an obvious choice, but they also had systemd-boot. I know that there is a lot of eye rolling around systemd and it is far from perfect, but I quite like it. I decided to go with systemd-boot. The downside was that I didn’t really know what features would be there or not there. At first, everything was great until I learned that there is no support to boot from a timeshift snapshot. That’s something I always liked. Arch also updates the kernel and doesn’t leave one or two previous kernels in place. That can be areal bummer.

Eventually I decided to switch back to grub and in addition to the regular kernel install the LTS kernel as well.

I also created myself a few aliases around managing packages.

My verdict so far is great. Most issues I have are more related to new hardware and it not being 100% supported just yet.