Arch Linux

Long-term owners

I use Arch on 100% of my personal servers, have done so for something approaching 20 years, and don't see myself changing.

Jun 2026 · comment

I have an arch installation that is maybe 4 years old, I might update every few weeks, and have only had one issue.

Jan 2026 · comment

What hackers pick instead

• UbuntuA mainstream Linux distro that mostly just works on lots of hardware, suits beginners and offers long LTS support, though critics dislike Snaps and Canonical's direction.560recommend
• DebianA community-run, free Linux distribution recommended for rock-solid stability, curated trustworthy package repositories and painless in-place upgrades; critics say stable packages are old and bug fixes rarely get backported.552recommend
• Fedora LinuxA mainstream, beginner-friendly Linux distro that mostly works out of the box and balances stability with current packages, though frequent release upgrades occasionally break things.437recommend
• Linux MintA beginner-friendly Linux distro that feels familiar to Windows users, works out of the box with no ads or nagware, though major version upgrades and display quirks can be troublesome.277recommend
• Asahi LinuxRecommended for running Linux on M1 and M2 Macs with great hardware, though newer chips lag behind and battery life, sleep and external displays remain weak.260recommend

Every quote

The 40 most detailed of 672 comments. Each links to the original.

1. Arch Linux is awesome, don't get me wrong. I just believe it's borderline unethical to recommend someone installing anything related to Arch on their workstation.

   Mixed · Jan 2026 · in “I dumped Windows 11 for Linux, and you should too”

2. One advantage that Arch has over many distros: as a rolling distributions it's usually easier to get up-to-date packages, you mostly get them by default.

   Recommends · Jan 2026 · in “Linux is good now; to feel like you actually own your PC, put Linux on it”

3. Almost always you can get the PKGBUILD file from either Arch Linux Gitlab or the AUR gitlab and just add the aarch64 version of the package to it

   Mixed · Aug 2026 · in “Omacom Foundation Launches with $8M”

4. Arch Linux just sits somewhere in the middle, where you don't build anything, but you get a guided tour of partitioning and formatting a disk

   Recommends · Jan 2026 · in “Microsoft forced me to switch to Linux”

5. Arch has always had a reputation (since before the 2010s) for keeping incredibly close to upstream in it's package distributions

   Recommends · Feb 2026 · in “I Fixed Windows Native Development”

6. I personally think everyone should install arch once the manual way. It will give you a good idea how everything fits together.

   Recommends · Nov 2025 · in “Bazzite: Operating System for Linux gaming”

7. if someone with the latest generation hardware wants a distro that mostly works out of the box, Arch will be the safest choice

   Recommends · Nov 2025 · in “Linux gamers on Steam cross over the 3% mark”

8. I use Arch on 100% of my personal servers, have done so for something approaching 20 years, and don't see myself changing.

   Recommends · Jun 2026 · in “AURpocalypse now: a look at the recent AUR attacks”

9. Arch and its makepkg and the stuff in the AUR has simply no provisions(that I'm aware of) for that. It's all manual, IMO.

   Mixed · Dec 2025 · in “Wayland Nvidia”

10. This is when I gave up on it and never looked back, but I did, indeed, learn all about Linux internals from dailying Arch

    Mixed · Feb 2026 · in “I love the work of the ArchWiki maintainers”

11. Arch maintainers are a bunch of elitist gatekeepers that don't accept any level of knowledge that is lower than theirs

    Mixed · Jan 2026 · in “Microsoft forced me to switch to Linux”

12. I found myself being more on the Arch wiki than the Debian's one so I did the switch and never used any other distro.

    Recommends · Feb 2026 · in “I love the work of the ArchWiki maintainers”

13. I have an arch installation that is maybe 4 years old, I might update every few weeks, and have only had one issue.

    Recommends · Jan 2026 · in “Microsoft forced me to switch to Linux”

14. I used the same Arch install from 2014 to 2024, with it spending time in three desktops and a VM across that time.

    Recommends · Mar 2026 · in “Our Commitment to Windows Quality”

15. The docs from both Gentoo and Arch, on the other hand, are much more complete and practical in explaining things

    Recommends · Jan 2026 · in “Linux from Scratch”

16. I have used roughly the same ArchLinux setup for years now, probably over a decade, and it is remarkably stable.

    Recommends · Sep 2026 · in “Leaving Linux”

17. Only Arch and RedHat (if you can get passed the paywall) have anything that comes close to the FreeBSD Handbook.

    Recommends · Nov 2025 · in “A Love Letter to FreeBSD”

18. they have a stronger culture of leaving packages as unmodified as possible relative to their upstream sources

    Recommends · Dec 2025 · in “Framework Sponsors CachyOS”

19. Most of these tweaky things will generally work better since you will be on the latest versions of software.

    Recommends · Nov 2025 · in “YouTube Removes Windows 11 Bypass Tutorials, Claims 'Risk of Physical Harm'”

20. Multi-monitor setups, where you can unplug the monitor and have your windows gather back onto your laptop screen requires WAY too much configuration.

    Criticizes · Mar 2026 · in “Microsoft's "Fix" for Windows 11: Flowers After the Beating”

21. An arch upgrade may, without warning, replace your config files and update software to versions incompatible with the previous.

    Criticizes · Jan 2026 · in “Microsoft forced me to switch to Linux”

22. folks following hype like CachyOS, Ubuntu (dead dsitro harvesting users data), Arch, then have bad experience and blame Linux.

    Criticizes · May 2026 · in “Microsoft degrades functionality of perpetually-licensed offline products”

23. rolling back isn't as straight-forward because you're potentially losing any modification to your files made in the past week

    Criticizes · Mar 2026 · in “I stopped using NixOS and went back to Arch Linux”

24. I left an Arch install sitting for a few months and came back and had trouble getting the updates to properly install.

    Criticizes · Mar 2026 · in “OpenSUSE Kalpa”

25. Because Arch itself is run by a cesspool of leftist idealogs that will ban anyone that disagree with them politically.

    Criticizes · Sep 2026 · in “Ask HN: Advice on Migrating from 1Password?”

26. they will just use it to spout their politics and ban individuals for their political views from the repos and wikis

    Criticizes · Sep 2026 · in “Omarchy: 1Password and 37signals become Distinguished Corporate Patrons”

27. I _probably_ shouldn't have chosen Arch Linux (and a custom/bastardised Pacman repo) for a hardware startup in 2013

    Criticizes · Feb 2026 · in “Almost Every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret after 4 years”

28. Arch, btw, is notoriously unstable. Back in 2012 I caught them enabling experimental kernel memory paging modules.

    Criticizes · Jan 2026 · in “Windows 11 Outperforming Linux on an Intel Arrow Lake H Laptop”

29. broken the whole system due to there not being a mechanism that makes sure all QT libraries upate at the same time

    Criticizes · Aug 2026 · in “Linux 7.3 improves performance when running out of vRAM”

30. the completely arbitrarily selected set of hardware and software components that I threw together for my desktop seem to never have any problem like this nowadays

    Recommends · Oct 2026 · in “macOS 15.8.2 Breaks OpenGL”

31. the whole package distribution system in Linux is designed to among other things, handle dependencies and avoid manual compiling

    Mixed · Dec 2025 · in “Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?”

32. Contemporary Linux is still miles ahead of Windows in encouraging the child's hands-on experience and exploration of the system.

    Recommends · Nov 2025 · in “Ask HN: How would you set up a child’s first Linux computer?”

33. I would go as far as to say you'll have an overall better Linux experience on Arch than Ubuntu and friends, even as a beginner.

    Recommends · Jan 2026 · in “Microsoft forced me to switch to Linux”

34. Arch has pretty much lived off the experience of its users, which is the entire purpose and value-proposition of the OS.

    Recommends · Jun 2026 · in “Arch Linux Now Believes Malware Incident Under Control: More Than 1,500 Packages”

35. Arch was the solution. It worked well for some time, but with more time, more experience was gained about pros and cons.

    Mixed · Sep 2026 · in “DHH's Omarchy Considering Replacing Arch/AUR with Nix”

36. Otherwise you'll get the default config synced with the version of the software you've installed, which is desirable.

    Recommends · Jan 2026 · in “Microsoft forced me to switch to Linux”

37. I like how efficient Arch is, in the sense that you have nothing and now you get to pick and choose what you want.

    Recommends · Jul 2026 · in “Reviving a 15-year-old netbook with Arch Linux”

38. I've been able to play 100% of the games that I used to play on Windows with no noticeable performance decrease.

    Recommends · Dec 2025 · in “I can't upgrade to Windows 11, now leave me alone”

39. It is nice to have a distribution that offers the flexibility and space for experimentation that Archlinux does.

    Mixed · Jun 2026 · in “Arch Linux Now Believes Malware Incident Under Control: More Than 1,500 Packages”

40. You should invest into a community run or community oriented distros like Arch, Gentoo, Alpine, Linux Mint etc.

    Recommends · Dec 2025 · in “Slax: Live Pocket Linux”