It does have its merits, but the hype is pretty much "cool kids go hard"

But do you even

my jokey response was already said by Allero, so I'll tell you what I think draws people to it.

1. Early packages. As soon as the packages are shipped, arch tries to get them in the repo, stability and interoperability be damned
2. Related to the above, AUR. You can't be bothered to build something? Get it from the AUR from someone who an be bothered to build it, but can't be bothered to be the maintainer of that package. This then leads to the issue recently with malware.
3. Minimalism. Arch only gives you what you need and you need to set up everything else.
4. No automated help, thus, total control and responsibility over your system. Installed a flatpak? Set up the executable in the application launcher yourself. (NB : your mileage may vary, I'm comparing LXQT arch with LXQT debian)

I'm using it in VMs only, and because setting it up is faster for me than setting up debian, which is my daily driver. Like I said many times in this thread, I slop it on using archinstall since it just needs the initial config, and I just walk away. The deb installer uses a wizard that "does stuff" while I go through it, so I have to stop and start. I'm only doing defaults anyway , so I don't have to change much in the installer.

Well if you're moving from Windows, you can just nuke the entire thing with automatic partitioning and it feels so damn good

But since that was a long time ago, these days I keep my / and /home on not just separate partitions but separate drives since all my SSDs are only 1 TB. The installer can do whatever the hell it wants to / but /home has to stay untouched.

I (struggle to) use arch (in disposable VMs, not my actual machine) btw

Me. Not worth my effort. I've reached a point where I just can't be bothered to be 1337 anymore.

Everything that matters is backed up to 3 different places, my pathetic little repurposed laptop home server and 2 cloud services. And one of those is literally on the other side of the planet from me.

I sleep well. As much as the doctor prescribed medications and cpap machine allow for anyway.

Radius Windows

it's the one you use to access wikifeet

"Hey, I tried the recommended GUI package manager and everything got messed up. Is anyone looking into this?"
"lol just use pacman -Syu in terminal"
"...k, guess I will, but I'm not about to recommend this to anyone else"

you can use arch with the cachyos kernel and repositories to (afaik) get most of that performance boost while keeping the arch experience, that's what i'm doing on my main computer at the moment

https://wiki.cachyos.org/features/optimized_repos/#adding-our-repositories-to-an-existing-arch-linux-install

I'm not great at Linux, did programming for most of my life in Windows, but so far I've gotten by for about a year in CachyOS (uses Arch). Having it work so well in gaming has been a strong motivator.

You don’t actually have to be 1337 to use arch

Omarchy users in shambles right now. oh who am I kidding, they can't read.

That’s like using unreal engine and only relying on blueprints without understanding C++.

I like your comparison in this situation. It's so layman-unfriendly that one can doubt its usefulness. And I'm happy to see that I'm not the only one struggling to find suitable comparisons.

Tbh gatekeeping Arch by keeping an area of pestilent neckbeards around it is good actually. I mean there's nothing hard or elite about Arch really but newbies should never be exposed to the AUR (see recent events) when they have no clue what they're doing and the risks associated with AUR use.