Arch Linux After a Year of Use: Myths and Reality
Arch Linux users are easy to spot: ask one of them which keyboard to get for a laptop, and five minutes later they're explaining how to install Arch and build the perfect environment. For a long time I didn't understand this fanaticism myself. Why Arch and not Ubuntu or Fedora? What makes it so different?
After a year on Arch Linux I understood where it comes from. This article is about my experience: what I liked, how things stand with games, software and drivers, and which myths about Arch didn't hold up. I'm currently moving my setup to NixOS, but the reasons Arch became my main system haven't gone anywhere.
Packages and rolling release
The first thing that hooked me was the update model. Arch is a rolling release: you get fresh stable versions of programs right after they come out, without waiting for a new distribution release. Debian, by contrast, ships older versions that have been tested longer. In a year, nothing broke for me on Arch.
The second thing is the repositories. Almost everything a developer needs is installed with one command, without hunting for installers on websites:
sudo pacman -S git rofi redshift fastfetch
If you're a developer, you can easily end up with a hundred tools. I keep their list in a script and install them all at once — the packages are checked by maintainers and get updated together with the system.
What isn't in the official repositories is usually in the AUR — the user repository with build scripts. For example, I install Anki from there with the yay helper:
yay -S anki
Be more careful with the AUR: these are user-made scripts, so before installing a little-known package it's worth looking at its PKGBUILD.
Is it true that Arch breaks all the time
This is the most persistent myth. On Manjaro I really did have problems: I updated once every six months, and after a big update the Qt and GNOME themes fell apart, sometimes the graphical session itself too. On Arch in a year — not a single crash, no broken dependencies, no dead X server.
It's important to understand where breakages come from. Arch doesn't support partial upgrades: if you refresh the package database and install one program without updating the system, library versions can drift apart.
sudo pacman -Sy firefox # bad: a partial upgrade
sudo pacman -Syu firefox # right: the whole system first, then the package
The second common source of trouble is removing packages while ignoring dependencies (pacman -Rdd). If you're not sure why you'd need that flag, don't use it. Almost every "Arch broke" story is about skipped steps from the Arch Wiki, not system instability.
Gaming on Arch Linux
Another myth is that you can't game on Linux. The fresh drivers and libraries in Arch actually help here. I installed Steam and PortProton (from the AUR), which gathers launchers and emulators in one place. In Steam I kept the default settings and only enabled a newer Proton version.
I bought several games specifically to test this. Light games launched in one click without stutter or screen tearing. Metro Exodus with maxed-out graphics ran stably, including in dynamic scenes. Stray on ultra settings also ran smoothly. That doesn't mean absolutely everything will run: games with certain anti-cheat systems don't work on Linux, and it's worth checking ProtonDB in advance.
The Arch Wiki is the best documentation in the Linux world
After Manjaro and Debian, the Arch Wiki genuinely surprised me. The installation guide goes step by step with ready commands, and the wiki itself is a huge knowledge base on networking, sound, power management, desktop environments and optimization. Plenty of people who don't use Arch rely on it too.
An example: I needed to manage Bluetooth. The wiki article lists both graphical and console options; I chose console ones because they're easy to embed in the bar — I click the icon and get a menu. Need a video editor — the list of applications page has dozens of options by category: Kdenlive, Shotcut, OpenShot, Blender and DaVinci Resolve. I edit in Kdenlive, and DaVinci Resolve installs from the AUR following the wiki's instructions. Instead of Photoshop there are Krita and GIMP. Even VirtualBox, which gave me trouble on other distributions, installs with a short guide: which packages you need for the standard kernel and what to do with a custom one.
Any desktop environment
Ubuntu or Linux Mint offer you a few environment options. On Arch you can install any: KDE with tons of settings, minimalist GNOME, Xfce, good old Cinnamon or tiling window managers.
I chose BSPWM and am now moving to Hyprland. In these, absolutely everything you see on the screen is configurable: the bar, animations, window layout. Window animations, for example, are set in the compositor config — you can switch between several variants and see the result instantly. Ideas for your own setup are easy to find on Reddit in the r/unixporn community, where people post screenshots together with their configs.
Drivers: AMD vs NVIDIA
Another myth is that drivers are hard on Linux. With AMD graphics cards the drivers work out of the box: they're built into the kernel and Mesa, and everything works after installing the system. If needed, you can add the packages listed in the wiki — the Vulkan driver and libraries for 32-bit games.
NVIDIA is harder. I worked on Linux with an NVIDIA card for three or four years: it's usable, but there are more problems. There are several driver options and it's easy to get confused, a bad update can take down the graphical session, and on laptops with hybrid graphics setup is even harder. On X11 with BSPWM you can live with it, but if you're building a computer for Linux, my advice is AMD for both the CPU and the GPU. When I switched to AMD, everything started working on the first try — faster and easier than on a test Windows installation.
Peripherals work without a fight
I expected to struggle with devices, but on Arch everything worked right away: a second monitor, a USB microphone, an external sound card, wired and Bluetooth headphones, several keyboards, a trackball, mice, external drives and SD cards. Printers and scanners need CUPS — one package and one service. On Debian I once couldn't even get Wi-Fi working without installing a driver manually, while here I didn't have to install anything except the AMD drivers when moving the system over.
Who Arch is for
Arch suits you if you want fresh software, full control over the system and are ready to read documentation. In return you get a system with nothing extra in it and an understanding of how it works.
It won't suit you if you need a system that just works right after installation and you don't want to read the wiki and keep an eye on updates. Then it's better to start with a friendlier distribution. Why I left Windows in the first place is in why I switched from Windows to Linux, and what moving from Arch to a declarative system gave me is in NixOS after Arch Linux. If you want to squeeze more FPS out of an old laptop, see the article on CachyOS — an Arch-based distribution.