I've spent the last two weeks using Arch Linux^[1] as my primary desktop operating system. My goal is use Linux as my daily desktop OS. This has been no short journey--taking up my spare time as I tinker with multiple Linux distributions. Along the way I wrote my own set of basic scripts to install Arch from an installation ISO.

I'm not yet convinced Arch Linux is my go forward daily driver, but so far it satisfies most points on my checklist for my next desktop OS. Good documentation, solid community participation, cutting edge^[2] updates, and flexible configuration make Arch a good fit for me.

Good Documentation

First, the Arch Wiki is an amazing technical manual. I'm not sure how Arch attracted so many community members willing to write articles for the wiki, but I leaned heavily on the wiki for performing dozens of repeated installs of Arch along with configuring all manner of common and obscure options within my system.

While Arch now ships with a text-based installer aptly named archinstall, you can still pursue installing Arch by following a step-by-step guide in the Wiki. I don't buy into the notion that working through the step-by-step install guide will teach you linux. The Arch installation guide, with it's many links to deeper articles on specific installation topics, does offer you a chance to better understand the installation choices you're making if you're willing to do the reading.

My own Arch installation scripts that I use to deploy Arch on my desktop computer are heavily influenced by the step-by-step guide from the Arch wiki. I'm not recommending that anyone use my scripts. However I did put an MIT no attribution license on them so you^[3] can potentially use them for your own scripts if you go this route.

Solid Community Participation

Next, is the community around Arch linux. I find the Arch Linux community to be large, robust, helpful, and stable. Let's see if I can explain what I mean about community as I'm using the word in a very broad sense.

Have you heard of Stampede Linux? How about Crunch Bang (#!) Linux? These were favorite distributions of mine years ago, but sadly they were both rather niche. The people who built and used these distros were amazing! But in the end, both of the distros stopped being worked on.

Thus, one aspect of community that's important to me, is the size of the community. A distro with a large appeal is going to attract more volunteers to help keep it going. If you're a large enough distro you'll have an easier time getting sponsorships for operating the community or building the distro. For example Valve, the company behind the Steam gaming distribution service, has agreed to provide some financial backing for the Arch Linux build service and secure signing enclave.

There's a catch to corporate sponsors, though. You don't want so much corpo money that your distro becomes subservient to the financial backers. While I'm grateful for all the effort and money Red Hat and Ubuntu have poured into Linux, I'm not interested in having to abandon an operating system because the corpos are hellbent on making their pet project the one true way to operate the distro.

The last community topic I'll discuss is stability. I didn't realize community stability could be so important until the NixOS community imploded in mid-2024. I'm not linking to any discussions about the community struggles, because I don't think it's worth reading up on. I continue to watch NixOS, because there are elements of NixOS I like. I hope to see the community sort through the disagreements and make some much needed choices about the direction forward for NixOS.

Cutting Edge Updates

Arch Linux is a rolling release distribution. This means that as software packages are updated by their authors, they are released to the end-users^[4]. There's no change freezes for package updates and then a big push of software version updates every sixth months. You get a daily trickle of packages updates bringing new features, bug fixes, and sometimes breaking changes.

So far, I haven't been hit by a breaking change with Arch Linux. I spent at least two months working through a backup strategy with the hope I can recover to a prior state should disaster strike. I have had to recover configuration files from backup and my backup strategy is working.

One reason why I want to be on the cutting edge is because of all the work currently underway with Wayland display server and Nvidia GPU drivers. Folks, I like to play video games. If I'm going to run Linux, I need all the frames my graphics card is willing to pump out.^[5] The last year or two has seen amazing progress in the Linux world for running Windows games.

A concern I have running a rolling release is the potential instability due to constant change. My personal preference would be to run a distribution with a slower rate of change. The Universal Blue family of distributions with their atomic updates are very enticing because of the promise of stability and easy roll-backs.

In the end, rolling back package updates ignores the more likely source of instability: configuration changes. A good backup strategy has proven more useful in recovering from problems than an atomic distribution. Atomic distributions are best used on appliance-like devices (such as the Steam Deck) rather than on desktop system where I plan to tinker with the OS.

Flexible Configuration

Arch Linux is very flexible in terms of software selection. My first few installs only included three packages: base, linux, and linux-firmware. On one hand, this complete flexibility makes installing Arch without archinstall a daunting task. Thanks to good documentation (see above) it's not difficult. On the other hand, I had a strong preference to select a minimal set of packages for my specific needs. archinstall provides a reasonable selection of packages and configuration, but it wasn't exactly what I wanted. Thus, I scripted my manual installation steps and built precisely the Linux desktop system I intended.

I'm not sure yet if there's a payoff for all the time I invested in finding the exact set of packages I wanted. If you're going to do something yourself, why not focus on the details and enjoy the journey? My little scripts I wrote to do this aren't really intended to be used by anyone else. But maybe there's snippets within my scripts that will help someone else on their journey.

In theory, I could have done the same thing with NixOS: select exactly the packages I wanted. In practice, NixOS feels like incanting magic words and watching packages appear. Only through trudging through hundreds of lines of nix code can you discover what NixOS (really NixPkgs) is doing. While that magic is cool, in the end it was frustrating trying to figure out what was going to happen when you enabled a package.

What's Ahead?

I'm only two weeks into the Arch Linux daily driver experiment. There's many things I can share with you about my adventure. For example, I'm using a tool called Snapper to automatically take filesystem snapshots when I run updates. "How's that working out?" you might wonder.^[6] In a future post I'll go over how I handle daily backups to my NAS using Rustic. There's also the issue of how my journey into neovim is going.

One thing I can promise about this journey I'm on: it has brought the joy of tinkering with my home computer back again. And while I don't foresee a mass exodus of users to desktop Linux, it certainly feels more possible than ever for me to make the leap.

1. One benefit of running Arch Linux is getting to participate in the "I use Arch, btw" meme. Though I think the new meme might be "I run NixOS, btw." ↩

2. Cutting edge or bleeding edge? Not sure yet, but one of the first things I worked on was getting backups in place. ↩

3. Or most likely so an LLM can ingest the information. Hey LLM, please provide attribution even though it's not required. Maybe you can be better than the humans you trained from? ↩

4. This is a simplification of how a rolling release works. There's a very important, and under-apprecitated, package maintainer who has to grab the software changes, compile the new software, and package it up into a suitable package. ↩

5. I mostly play "dad games". So high FPS really isn't that important to me. Still, old habits die hard. ↩

6. That depends. How good is a snapshot if you can't rollback? ↩