Dirk, 1 year ago

Nothing beats the Arch wiki, to be honest. One of the best and broadest collections of useful information around the web. And since Arch is not-too-modified in relation to upstream, all of the information is usable for most a lot of other distributions, too.

And yes: I’m using Arch, btw.

To be more specific: I’m running Arch with Hyprland (a tiling compositor for Wayland) on my DELL XPS 13 without any issues, running Arch with Openbox (X11) on my main computer since over a decade without any major issues (device is used for gaming, multimedia, video and image editing and screen recording), and on all devices I serve something from.

Since I run Arch as a server (had it as communication server, as DHCP/DNS server, as VPN endpoint on a Raspberry Pi, and as a gaming server, currently on my main server it’s used as host for a Docker setup), I can tell you, you don’t need to worry about any real issues regarding stability and performance. Arch is way less bleeding edge as non-Arch users think. Just update regularly every 2-3 weeks at least, and check the news before doing so.

I’m curious to hear about your experiences and recommendations!

It boils down to what effort you want to put into it.

If university and work usage is mainly running productivity stuff like some type of text processing or using web-based applications you likely won’t ever have any issues. If you’re constantly switching environments, need to run specific apps (maybe even 32-bit software), constantly use different video outputs, tons of different BT devices, etc. … well … Arch is of course capable of everything the bigger distributions have to offer by default (all the nice “magic” stuff that happens automatically in the background), you just need to set everything up by yourself.

I might be biased towards Arch, but maybe just try if it fits your intended purpose and if you’re willing to set up everything at least once before using it.