My main reason is, it’s not a dependengy hell. If I want to build software, I don’t have to go through 5 iterations of being told something is missing, figuring out what that is (most annoying part), installing that and retrying. On Arch-based distros, it’s 2 or less, if it even happens.
Also, AUR.
Other points include
- Small install (I use archinstall though, because more convenient.)
- rolling release.
- Arch wiki
My installs never broke either, so it doesn’t feel unstable to me.
I like it more than ther distros because
- Debian is a dependency hell, otherwise fine. Older packages. I still use raspian though.
- Fedora has too much defaults that differ from my preferences. I don’t want btrfs, I don’t want a seperate home partition, dnf is the only package manager that selects No by default. dnf is also the slowest package manager I’ve seen. Always needs several seconds between steps for seemingly no reason at all. Feels like you can watch it thinking “Okay, so I’ve downloaded all these packages, so they are on the disk. That means - let’s slow down here and get this right - that means, I should install what I downloaded, right. Okay that makes sense, so let’s do that. Here we go installing after downloading”. I also got into dependency hell when trying something once, which having to use dnf makes it even worse. - I guess you can tell I don’t like Fedora.
- Love the concept of NixOS, don’t like the lack of documentation
TL/DR it’s about boulding software yourself. I’m describing the process and my thoughts.
Alright, everything downloaded, let’s build this software. Oh, it fails because… wait a second, what does this mean? Okay, so I’m missing a component. This component is in - well, I don’t know. This post here - no, that’s about coding. The second thread is coding too. Oh, the third one helps. Okay, so I need to install this package.
Nice, the error message changed. Now I go through the whole loop again and - no, the post didn’t help at all, I still have the same problem.
[some hack later that I never remember]
So, the next thing - great, I cannot install it because of some incompatibility with another thing I’d like to keep on my system.
[solution differs here]
Oh, of course I don’t have everything yet, why would I? So I’m missing - nothing, the library is literally right there in this package that’s already installed, but the compiler is too stupid to find it. What’s wrong with you!?
I give up.
That’s the procedure most times when I have to compile something on Debian and there’s no prerequisites list. Dependency problems can obviously happen on Arch, but it’s not 7 iterations, it’s more like 2. Or I use an AUR Script and don’t care.
EDIT: I now see that I am repeating myself a little.