Linux distros are a dime a dozen. A lot of them are great. I myself started with Debian back in the 90’s, then moved onto the now-defunct Mandrake before the advent of the new millennium. After that I meandered my way through Slack, Gentoo, and a host of others before settling on Arch in the mid-00’s.

Settling on Arch wasn’t easy, and I did try a lot of different things. I approached it scientifically, analyzing different aspects that made distros, and deciding where my priorities where. In the end, I found I wanted a rolling-release model that installed only a fairly minimal set of packages for me to build on, with a robust package manager that could handle customizations and a focus on binary packages.

I wanted a rolling-release model because I found I preferred having access to the latest kernel, software and libraries. I also didn’t like doing major upgrades because when things went wrong it was a lot more work to fix than merely dealing with a problem that arose from updating one or two packages.

I wanted something with a fairly minimal set of packages because I was studying computer science and we were spending 99% of our time on the command line already. Installing a wealth of tools I would never used just rubbed me the wrong way - that’s what I was trying to get away from by moving from Windows.

I wanted a robust package manager because while I wanted something minimal and was comfortable on the command line, I hated manually resolve circular dependencies or long dependency chains. I could do it if I had to, but I didn’t want to so I wanted to minimize it as much as possible. I also wanted it to handle customized packages because sometimes I wanted to compile from source and use specific flags to enable specific options in the end package.

And I wanted binary-based because while I loved Gentoo and the absolute power and perfection that is Portage, some newer packages were coming out that I really wanted but that took ages to build from source (I’m looking at you Firefox Santa Cruz and StarOffice 6). If I could leave a computer for 2 days, that might work for me, but as a student in technology that just wasn’t feasible.

So in the end, the distro that was the sum of my requirements was Arch, and I’ve never looked back. I’ve even been quite happy with systemd, though that’s a whole other discussion for an entirely different day.

The reasons why you may or may not want to use Arch Linux I will cover in a separate post.