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Connor J Kelly

Arch, Btw

Theres this meme in the programmer community: that anyone who runs Arch will tell you immediately, and will use the phrase: “I use Arch, by the way.”

I use Arch, by the way.

I have to admit, It’s a nerdy, funny thing to run an operating system that starts from as close to zero as you can get.

A funnier thing entirely is that it’s the most reliable, fast, flexible operating system I have ever used. And for reference, here are the OS’s I’ve used:

  • Windows (7, 8, 10, 11)
  • OSX / Mac
  • Linux
    • Ubuntu (desktop and server)
    • PopOS
    • NixOs
    • Mint
    • Fedora

And for some reason, a rolling release, always unstable, community driven operating system is not only the most reliable system I’ve used, it’s also the one that sparks the most joy. Its the system that makes me smile when I see the systemd boot logs.
A large part of that is the amount of time I’ve put into the build on this system. Its like putting together your own plane, and taking it out for a flight. It’s definitely not the most well put together system, it damn sure shouldn’t be the most reliable system, however, I recall hacking together many of the subsystems and setups and configs and miscellaneous scripts. It might fly the best, but it flies like I want it to fly because I made it fly like it does.

Arch is the best for this.

It’s what you get when you want to break things and see how the insides work. It’s what you get when you don’t particularly care what happens to your system. It’s what you get when you want to install whatever there is to install, and generally hope for the best.

The AUR is a sheer marvel of engineering. Here’s it takes one of the most difficult problems in computers today: Dependency Management, and asks the question:

“What if we just had the common expectation that the community will package everything for us if we give them a decent enough format to put it in.”

And, it works. For the most part.

Last time I checked, the only software distribution with more packages is NixOS, and they have their own insane language written for it. Almost every single package you will need has been packaged for Arch, and if it wasn’t it should be relatively trivial to install it from source.

And, to be honest, it’s got the best documentation of any software I’ve ever used. There’s a reason that the Arch Wiki is as legendary as it is. It probably represents the single largest repository of documentation on a technological project that exists. Period.

It’s a sheer wonder that it exists. And it exists for the majority of the ecosystem, of which Arch is an extremely minor player. Though the information exists primarily for the benefit of Arch users.

It turns out that when you make a project of largely insane programmers who build systems from scratch, they tend to write down the things that they actually broke and needed for next time.

I, for the most part, have been a quiet user, and yet, I continue to tell people about it. However, Arch is getting a lot more popular, especially since SteamOS is based on Arch. When the new Steam Machine launches next year, we’re gonna have Arch based consoles, and when Steam Frame launches next year, we’re gonna have Arch based Virtual Reality goggles running on ARM chips. Before too long, we’re gonna have Arch running ARM and RISC-V running on things like the DC Roma RISC-V Framework Mainboard.

Because Arch is kind of cool, by the way.