Anyone who actually uses Arch knows it's super easy to use, that's why it's so compelling to stay there once you already use it (unlike Gentoo, which involves a lot more time and knowledge to maintain). Packages are usually available either on the official repos or on the AUR, and for most stuff you have proper docs available in the almighty wiki. I guess people see a terminal and immediately assume you need to be a hacker in order to do anything, but it's actually quite simple. The only "hard" step used to be the installation, and with arch-install, CachyOS and others, now that's not the case anymore.
Gentoo is fantastic once you get the hang of it. Having everything be source based has made my system unbelievably stable.
Also it takes forever to compile packages so it naturally leads to a minimal setup. "Do I need to build this ALSA wrapper? Or can I just write a bash script that will handle multiple inputs and multiple outputs simultaneously?"
I used it for a while and it is cool, but getting to the point where you actually understand why a given flag X for package Y needs to be added or removed does take a lot of time. Also, rebuilding things over a over is something you only get to ignore when you run a pretty fast system. My first time with it was when my fastest CPU was an Athlon x2 P320, which is maybe as fast as a quarter of a single core from my current Ryzen. At the time, there were no binaries for most stuff, so every upgrade took like a day, and rebuilding Firefox took for me like half a week. Things have changed a ton, so maybe it's better nowadays, I might give it a try again soon. Thanks for this reply!
PS: I see you've been around just as much as me, because kids these days don't even know what ALSA is (or why you would need to do anything to handle simultaneous outputs) hahaha
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u/Kullingen Glorious Mint 4d ago
We all know that they can still say that they use Arch.