5 Reasons why Arch Linux is the Best Linux Distribution

What is Arch Linux?

If you've been using Linux for any amount of time, you've likely heard of Arch Linux as the “elitist’s” Linux distro. This is due mainly to the fact that Arch used to be so goddamn hard to install. You had to go through all the trouble of installing drivers, a graphical environment and dependencies for said programs all through the TTY, without any graphical installation process to speak of. Nowadays, it’s gotten a lot easier to install Arch. Many Arch-based distros, including my preferred distro Asahi, have implemented graphical Calamares installation helpers. This means it’s gotten easier than ever to install Arch and take it for a spin. Here are five reasons why Arch Linux is the best Linux distribution.

1. Rolling Release Updates

Rolling release updates are a method of updating your system without any downtime by rolling out software updates as soon as they come out instead of in batches like most popular operating systems. The most popular example of this is, of course, Arch, but Gentoo is the oldest example of a rolling release software still in existence. The benefit of rolling release updates is the ability for you to get updates to software immediately without having to wait for the next big update. Having no downtime on updates helps tremendously too.

2. Package Availibility

Pacman is widely regarded as the fastest package manager among the popular package managers such as Debian’s apt and Fedora’s dnf. However, it’s real strength lies in its package availability. Pacman has access to the largest selection of repositories and software among all popular package managers. While it is not impossible for other distributions to get packages not available in their package repositories, nothing comes close to Arch’s ease of use when it comes to installing packages.

3. The Arch User Repository

As if the sheer amount of packages available in Arch Linux's official repositories wasn’t enough, Arch also comes with easy access to something known as the Arch User Repository, which is a community driven repository for Arch users. With an AUR helper such as yay or paru, Arch users are able to download package descriptions (PKGBUILDS), that allow you to compile a package from source and then install it with Pacman. Since it is community driven, you can find almost everything on the AUR. Just paru your heart out.

4. All Desktop Environments are at your Disposal

I've never really been a desktop environment user (Qtile for the win!), but Arch Linux has superb compatability for all desktop environments. Most major Linux distributions are desktop environment specific. For example, Ubuntu comes preinstalled with the Gnome DE, but if you try installing another desktop environment such as KDE alongside Gnome, Ubuntu gets offended and you end up with a broken system. Though I don’t use them very often, I have DDE, KDE, GNOME, XFCE, and all my standalone window managers installed on my system and they coexist in perfect unity. I really should start uninstalling some of those DE’s.

5. By the Community, for the Community

Arch Linux is entirely maintained by the community. In fact, there is no real organizational nature to Arch. Distros like Ubuntu have Canonical as an overlord presiding over your user experience, and people have complained about their decisions for their operating system in the past. No such problem exists with Arch Linux. The community is in total control of what happens in Arch, the only official maintainers being release managers and maintainers for things such as pacman and main repos. Other than that, there is no company to completely mess up Arch Linux.