Someone in high school debate class is tasked with arguing in favor of Flat Earth theory or moon landings were faked.
Intrigued by the ease with which they manipulate people into believing outlandish concepts, they try talking people into believing more untenable ideas like "grip tape is much better at holding reaper pepper hot sauce on the surface of a dildo than barbed wire."
Person finds that limits exist and tries to come up with something more reasonable – becomes champion for Arch Linux.
People take them seriously and it takes off…
DISCLAIMER: I have tried neither grip tape and hot sauce covered dildos nor Arch Linux but you get the concept I’m trying to convey I hope.
Birds Aren’t Real, Flying Spaghetti Monster, and probably a few other things started out as jokes and people started taking it seriously. But Arch probably didn’t start as joke given how gate-keeperish the linux community was at the time.
They’re kinda the same, in that people joke about them constantly talking about it when they really don’t, and if you try to push back against the stereotype, you only feed into it
I learned Debian-based distros back in high school from a college tech class. After leaving school and getting my first job, I built my first computer (after two DOA boards and much gnashing of teeth). I sat happily in my Windows bubble for a long time.
Years later I had a catastrophic failure when trying to get clever and unlocking my system32 folder to do some tinkering. I’d had enough of Windows. Thought Pop! OS looked really nice.
But we sometimes have that one friend. Arch. Every time I talked about my OS or showed him my clean setup, Arch. If I had a problem with packages. Pacman. AUR. Arch.
I was going nuts. Did he care I was running Pop! OS with KDE Plasma using Kubuntu backports to jury rig a later version? No. Arch.
After a long and grueling battle, after slogging through mountains of unsolicited Arch memes in my DMs, after vehemently defending Debian, I will only say this:
Rolling distros are just great 😍 arch for nerds, endeavourOS for nerds without too much time and Tumbleweed for the latest and greatest but stable and OpenSuse slow roll for even more stability, I guess
I think we’re years past the point where the frequency of memes about people saying “I use arch btw” has exceeded people actually saying “I use arch btw” by a wide margin. At this point I’m just waiting for this one to die.
I use Arch btw was always a meme , literally no one ever said it unironically.
There was definitely a time when many folks regularly mentioned using Arch. It did have some novelty when it was new to newish. I was probably one of them.
maybe do a google search before attacking people on the internet … or don’t, I’m not your manager.
On November 16th, Redditor[4] SusuKacangSoya commented a possible explanation of the meme’s origin, writing, “Someone gave the following narrative: That when Arch was new, it was distrusted by the rest of the community because of some stability, etc. issues. However, as it got more and more usable, Arch users began telling everyone else that they were using Arch, to bring more awareness about Arch and prove that it’s usable (they were using it just fine, after all). With this strategy released onto the wild, rolling across the community, Arch’s usage share quickly went from laughable to that of major distribution. Of course, with the end goal completed, the meme is supposed to be obsolete, but… it stuck, its original purpose lost to time.”
Controversial opinion: you become a senior, when you let arch behind and use distros like debian.
I don’t dislike arch, going step by step through the install process is the best way learning and no matter which distro someone use, the arch wiki should be the first place to visit for instructions or help.
But isn’t that behavior actually documented in the Arch wiki? At least when you manually install it, it lists packagekit-qt6 as being “not recommended”.
I said I lt elsewhere already. The maturing "I use arch btw" crowd is steadily migrating to NixOS. In a few years at most .the meme will be "I use nixOS btw".
Debian is just as prone to breaking due to the lack of fallbacks (e.g. Snapper), it just doesn’t break as often because it doesn’t change as much as Arch.
If you use a minimal/ default install, this won’t happen as easily, but as soon as you customise anything, you get problems.
Arch can be reliable too, there are many people who have had the same install for years without breaking.
I would actually recommend Fedora Atomic or other image based distros, e.g. VanillaOS.
They can be more modern, while being way more reliable thanks to atomic updates/ transactions, complete image rollbacks and the reproducibility.
They are a dream to use imo!
This is the way. Everyone can use what satisfies them. My arch experience was good, too. But after tinkering confs and setups, I lost my spirit to become a Unixporn user.
Nowadays I want easy to use setups. That’s why I use debian for servers and fedora for clients. Last week I saved an old laptop from a friend before being e-waste. Fedora atomic was the chosen one and he is really happy with it so far.
Maybe better to use cross-post next time. Sometimes people do not cross-post and then the same link will appear five times in the time line for the five identical posts they made. With cross-posting it appears only once. I use Arch, btw
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