I have a roughly 13 year old install that I’ve moved through the transition to /usr/ and from sysv to systemd. Its my oldest install. I run almost everything except suse as a systems admin.
As a way to run Linux, I find arch one of the nicest. Rolling release, unmodified packages direct from the dev, unopinionated systems management, arch build system for any packages you want to compile, arch Linux archive that can be used for snapshotting or locking your rolling release, and AUR.
It’s a completely different way to manage and build an OS that no one else is really doing. I find team ‘I use arch btw’ to be extremely annoying but at the end of the day, the arch tooling for building a Linux ypunlike to use means that people are naturally going to want to tell you they built something they find enjoyable to use. That’s not really something a lot of people say about most OSs.
I have a range of issues and annoyances with most major OS, ranging from i cant use this to i wish this worked. Windows, MacOS, Ubuntu/deb flavors, redhat/fedora flavors, openwrt, alpine and other busybox flavors, iOS, Android, Graphine. All have things that mostly work but I’m always working around something.
And finding accurate documentation for issues on distros that have different configuration release to release is a pain, deb, Ubuntu and redhat flavors are especially egregious. I don’t really care how to do this on RH6 or Ubuntu 11, lol, I want docs for the current version.
Yeah, I that nk a lot of people ‘get it’ but can’t quite explain it. So they tell you they use arch and they they are excited about it.
I’m a pro, I’ve used basically every type of Linuxevwr made. Ive built and run linux from wcratch multiole times, as a lewrning experience, a teaching experience and even protypes for production systrms. I understand the packaging philosophies, I understand the opinionated administration decisions. I’m subscribed to most major distro mailing lists and i understand the political motivations that drive various teams to the different technical decisions.
Arch isn’t for everyone. And I’m totally fine with that. But it is perfect for people who want to build something with well crafted and unopinionated tooling. Of everyone ‘got’ arch they’d be failing at what they ate trying to do.