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Do you know why Arch Linux is bad?
It certainly isn’t popular like Mint because it isn’t as customizable in terms of the
user interface.
It doesn’t have the ads for Amazon all over the place like Ubuntu. I’ve heard Arch is
sometimes considered a bleeding edge version of Linux.
Conversely, Linux Arch packages break tools that work fine in other Linux versions because
the changes they make are so far out there.
Arch does a lot of updates.
They do rolling updates, kind of like Windows’ endless updates. Arch lets you set up a pacman
–syu to run updates regularly, even every few days.
If the rolling update causes a problem, you have to go to the Arch forums to find support
and hope someone has a fix. It isn’t tested out as much as a commercial product, just
beta tester volunteers.
Arch is one of the more advanced Linux versions, and you’ll get very little support if you
sound like you aren’t a guru. Beginners may get help if they rah-ray Arch while bashing
the competition.
That’s pretty different from other Linux groups.
And Arch uses the init system like BSD that uses scripts and separate directories for
each run level; that different architecture makes shifting to Arch hard for a Mint or
Ubuntu user.
Why else would someone say Arch is bad?
Arch gives you a lot of control over what you install.
Linux is popular as a whole because it gives you a lot of flexibility.
But a lot of the third party applications are written for Mint and Ubuntu or just Unix,
not Arch Linux with its odd directories and structures.
So you need the flexibility in installation potentially to install anything you need.
There’s the general free and open source office stuff, but given Arch’s smaller share
of the Linux market, you don’t have the scientific or engineering distribution options
that you get with some of the other flavors.
Mint is starting to sound pretty sweet right now.