Arch Linux

Reader supplied reviews for Arch Linux Average rating 9.2 from 260 review(s) Please select a rating in the range of 1-10. Please write at least a few sentences about the distribution while limiting your review to 4080 characters. What are your thoughts on Arch Linux? Please include a few pros and a few cons, along with your overall impression of the operating system. Our FAQ page has tips on writing a good mini-review. Version: -- current2011.08.192010.052009.082009.022008.062007.080.80.70.60.50.40.30.20.1 Rating:    -- 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 out of 10 Your review (minimum 250 words): Past reviews - sort by: DateVotes Version: current Rating: 10 Date: 2025-06-17 Votes: 6 It's time for a review after using it for a while. Clean Arch. It's a very interesting and positive experience using the distribution for “pros.” In fact, Arch isn't difficult, it just takes a little time to set up the system. And using the archinstall utility does everything for you, you just need to select the necessary items. Nowadays, we live in an era of full access to information, AI, and documentation, so setting up a clean system is not a difficult challenge. As a result, what you put in is what you get. If a program requires additional packages, it will tell you the name of the package you need. Yes, you have to work with the terminal, but I think that's really cool! There is a chance of breaking something, as always, but no one is immune to that. Updates work well, I don't have any problems getting the latest versions of packages. A good recommendation is to read a little about how pacman works. My personal experience is this: games work great, no driver issues, positive interaction with KDE, etc. Games, browsing, working with text documents, coding, multimedia... Everything works well. It's also important to install AUR. And you'll be happy. That's it. Bye. Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: current Rating: 9 Date: 2025-06-03 Votes: 10 Arch is great if you are relatively proficient in Linux and know exactly what you do. If you know every package you use, if you like to configure and control every bit of your system, down to configuring custom boot loader manually, then Arch is for you. Use it if you customise Linux to the point, when pre-configured installation would just get in your way. Arch Wiki is a great resource as well, and not only for arch users, but for learning desktop Linux in general. Also AUR is neat, it has practically everything. I have been using it for one year, daily driving it for every possible desktop and home server task, it never failed me. Over years, Arch got more reliable, and critical packages nowadays are tested before reaching stable repositories, so your system won't break after update. If you don't know perfectly what you need, and don't want to spend some time learning on Arch Wiki, if you want things just to work out of the box, then don't install Arch, because you won't like it. After minimal installation, Arch is super bare bone, you don't even have networking automatically configured, you don't have sudo, man, and some other utilities you'd expect to universally be installed in every other distribution. This is something you should keep in mind. There are few downsides for me. The first one, logging on disk is enabled by default. Arch doesn't do much on its own by default, but why it decides to write a lot of logs on my disk, I have no idea, especially in the age of SSD, when finite number of writing cycles matters. I would like to see them disabled, and coredumps disabled as well. I also wish watchdog was disabled. The second one, enabling AUR access requires some manual work, that might be avoided if yay was in main repos. I understand that it might be done intentionally to filter out people that have no idea what they are doing, but it requires no effort, except reading an article on Arch Wiki, that you will do anyway over and over if you use Arch. Regarding newcomers trying Arch, I have experience in using it as an inexperienced user. The first time I tried it, I had very little Linux desktop experience, I didn't like it, because of how much stuff I should do myself, and how much learning I should do as well. But after two years of using other distribution (and learning a lot of stuff), I got bored, tried Arch again, and it came together well. Before installing Arch, I read installation guide, made decisions about partitioning, bootloader, and some other crucial packages to ensure its basic functionality, and suddenly, it wasn't as hard as the first try. I was just fine. Now I think if I reinstall Arch manually from scratch, it won't take much more time, than other distro. And it will just work for me, as expected. Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: current Rating: 6 Date: 2025-05-31 Votes: 0 It is a nice and simple distro. It is also lightweight and responsive unless you choose otherwise. The problem is that you must keep upgrading packages. And bleeding edge means bugs. Even if everything run smoothly it is very annoying and time consuming. I use my operating system to serve me and not to feel like a beta tester. With Arch you can learn a thing or two about Linux but if you want more knowledge it is better to choose a non rolling release operating system and spend your time writing code instead of using Pacman or compiling packages. It is way more productive. If you also want to learn how to run a server Arch is probably the worst choice. If Arch had an LTS, non rolling release edition i would probably use it. Was this review helpful? Yes No See all 260 reader reviews of Arch Linux...