The Arch Linux Results Are In, It's Really The Best

[@Destide]

We have investigated ourselves and found to be correct.

[@freedomgoddess]

myeah🗿

[@tranthien3932]

Arch users think that Arch is the best Distro: 🗿🤝🗿

[@kraio-sfu]

👨🏾‍🦲🏅👨🏾‍🦲

[@Emancipatriot]

Best is always subjective when speaking about others. For me,, arch is the best.

[@stanzacosmi]

I mean it's used as a base for SteamOS so...

[@linuxstreamer8910]

whoohoo the dutch are also here all 71 of us

[@dolgorukysvyatoslav]

I love democracy. - A certain ex-republican

[@TaiGroot]

"What psychopath is running arch on a server?" ....ummmmm

[@guiorgy]

$ hostname defo_debian_server

[@zzco]

All of the linodes I work on, save for specifically appliances (e.g., Asterisk) run Arch. What are you talking about, Brodie? 😂

[@ishino_ki]

Ummmm... Home Depot, okay?

[@papakamirneron2514]

I mean I assume it’s good but why would you need it?

[@unitazer]

Ironically, arch is the only distro i know how to install, and i also had an iso on a usb ready

[@ilia21-live]

>cheks survey results >what library supplier do you use? >"snap: not at all" bar is so tall, it went offscreen yeah

[@ytbone9430]

Why is using an AppImage not more popular though? Is it because it's too difficult to set the x-flag? I think AppImages provide the most flexibility if you look at the various ways to make use of applications on Linux. The native package management and Flatpak don't allow me to have full control over where the application is going and where it will put its files and settings. You also cannot have the same application installed twice with different settings or in a different version. Running an application from USB or network share is also not possible, I actually see no reason to NOT make use of AppImages for all these advantages. Using the AppImages also keeps you from re-installing and configuring your applications on each and every machine from scratch, just copy over the folder structure with all the AppImages / portable programs in there and the next machine is ready to go. You can even do this with no internet and escape the requirement to be online to do installation jobs when using Linux. You also also have full control over which application you want to update, to not end up with something new, but not working as expected anymore. There also is no command line access to any application installed with Flatpak, but there is with AppImages and it works! So, AppImages for the win next time please! o)

[@BuriedUnkind]

I y'all will still be whining about Snaps 20 years from now. It's been a decade give it a rest already.

[@АлексейГриднев-и7р]

​@BuriedUnkind maybe Canonical will eventually give up and kill it, just like they killed Unity Desktop and Ubuntu Touch.

[@BuriedUnkind]

@ Maybe they will. Maybe they won't. But anytime a video mentions either Snaps or Ubuntu it's the same thing in the comment section. Give it a rest already.

[@kuhluhOG]

@@АлексейГриднев-и7р unlikely considering they use Snap for their embedded products (and quite frankly, it's the only packaging system which can recover from problems during an update and is capable of doing that job in specific)

[@andreaspatsalides1914]

I struggle to believe only 64% of Arch Linux users have EVER tried Windows. That number has to be 85%+ for sure!

[@BrodieRobertson]

Yeah I'm doubting that number

[@peyton_uwu]

Maybe kids who grew up using an Apple ecosystem? I know of quite a few of my family's households that exclusively run Apple devices, and one of the school districts that I went to also only used Apple devices (I remember when our school got a sponsorship and replaced our old cart of sloooow white MacBooks with a new cart of shiny new Aluminum MacBook Airs!!!) Even still, in both cases that I mentioned, there was always some dingus computer floating around that ran Windows, so.. yeah I dunno either xD

[@yahira.7031]

I'm with the guy above. Maybe MacOS users. In my case I do come from a life of windows. But the former is a possibility.

[@JeffreyJibson]

My kids used Linux long before Windows. That was Fedora (KDE). On hindsight, I should have used Gentoo on their systems, because it's easier to update.

[@JosephSaintClair]

I grew up during the original releases of Unix and VMS and PrimeOS, so seeing windows felt like a toy in comparison. First and last version I ever touched was windows 2000. It felt so… guard railed?? Oh.. I use arch, btw… too!!

[@GuyFromJupiter]

You skipped tye additional comments section at the end. "I use Arch btw" "Arch... btw" "I use Arch" "Arch linux btw" "I'm eating cheese right now" "I use Arch btw"

[@cameronbosch1213]

Who ✂️ the 🧀?

[@hfc2x]

What I gather out of this survey, is that Arch is a great distro for gooning.

[@nottucks]

Lots of foot fans.

[@realskyquest]

My beloved nyarchlinux moe

[@agustinsida8877]

The main reason for tiling WMs

[@spl420]

​@@agustinsida8877Yep, let's scale gooning to infinity and beyond.

[@slorent]

I'm writing this comment from my laptop running Arch Linux with the standard kernel, with KDE Plasma on Wayland as my desktop environment, Firefox as my browser of choice and Konsole as my terminal emulator. If only that was the end of it, though; the top answers to most questions fit me like a glove. This tells me two things: one, the hive mind is real; two, that Arch-based distribution that KDE is planning - KDE Linux, I believe? - might be a real success.

[@cameronbosch1213]

I have all of those defaults except I'm running EndeavourOS with Vivaldi (not FOSS but I prefer it to Brave and Firefox). I do use the stock arch kernel with KDE Plasma and Konsole though.

[@streettrialsandstuff]

Standard Kernel, KDE Plasma on Xorg (because Wayland had way too many bugs), Terminator as a terminal emulator, because I want multiple terminal windows tiled 😅 And (a highly controversial) Google Chrome for convenience so I can sync my password manager, bookmarks and history with an Android phone. User for 15 years or so.

[@MrBluePoochyena]

Zen Kernel, KDE Plasma Wayland, Alacritty and as for Browser Vivaldi, as i sync my stuff between devices with it and around 1-2 year of actual use of Arch/Linux in the last 4 years. All of my games finally fully work on Linux, so decided to swap fully to it with Arch which i find the "easiest" to use basic commands wise + my system being obsolete enough to not support W11 and me fully disliking the direction that Windows is going towards.

[@avalagum7957]

"Arch Linux with the standard kernel, KDE Plasma on Wayland, Firefox": it's me too and I use packages from CachyOS

[@OhhCrapGuy]

​@@streettrialsandstuff How long ago did you try Wayland last? Since around KDE Plasma 6.1, Wayland seems to be the better option for me, across the board for KDE, though on wlroots based compositors it's been the better option for longer. My primary is Sway (or i3 on X), and I've far preferred Sway to i3 for about 2 years now.

[@Ryhon]

The AMD card usage on Arch is sooo much higher than what the Steam survey reports, I thought it would be closer

[@Sunlight91]

The Linux only Steam survey is full of AMD video cards.

[@MegaManNeo]

Steam Survey is full of OEM users, switching operating systems even between Windows versions is rare.

[@XDRosenheim]

@@Sunlight91 Steam (linux) survey is full of Nvidia cards, but AMD is the dominant one. This is most likely due to the Steam Deck, which is also the primarily used Linux version. (Arch second, wooo!)

[@MH-GoL]

The Arch Wiki is the best! If there is a life after death then you find the answer in the Arch Wiki!

[@andreaspatsalides1914]

@@MH-GoL Will I go to Arch heaven or Arch hell? Is there a difference between them?

[@kayakMike1000]

​​@@andreaspatsalides1914 sigh.... Eyes, roll, engage maximum condescending tone... Where is the log file? What does dmesg say? I can't really help you if you can't help yourself... Just read the wiki and stop asking dumb questions on the forum. Sheesh. RTFM, man, RTFM. Oh and go touch some grass... End condescending tone.

[@koolkrafter5]

@@andreaspatsalides1914 Arch heaven is where you don't know how to exit vim. Arch hell is where you use vim of your own volition.

[@MH-GoL]

@andreaspatsalides1914 Oh yes a big difference! Arch hell is hosted on Azure for maximum punishment!

[@AM-yk5yd]

Even when I was using ubuntu I've searched it before looking on forums.

[@Mosquitobomber1]

I have never used arch, but I can totally confirm that the arch Wiki is awesome. I recently rebuilt our Yocto distro at work, and kept landing on the arch wiki for anything grub, kernel or secure boot related. Thank you very much to all who contributed to that!

[@thomashanson3476]

I think overall arch is the best distro, but gentoo would be the best if we all had dual threadrippers that could compile firefox in 2 seconds

[@raughboy188]

I switched over to arch linux 4 days ago and it works better than debian. I picked up handling packages really fast and some things i knew how to do from before. I like arch linux so far. There are a lot of things about arch i don't know but i am looking forward to learning it.

[@GSBarlev]

For sure. Once you go pac[man] it's really hard to go back[, man]

[@insu_na]

Have fun

[@yahira.7031]

​@@GSBarlev😂

[@JonathosDX]

Apparently I've been gaming in linux since 2006. I just found an old forum post I made about how to get Thief running in Wine back then. But I've only been on arch for the past couple years. Back then it was gentoo (to really learn how linux worked) and then ubuntu for a while when that got big.

[@GSBarlev]

Gaming on Linux in 2006-2013 was in some ways better than it is now-WINE was really good, and you could pay for CodeWeavers, which did Bottles before Bottles. Most games were at least Bronze, even in multiplayer, and a lot of older titles were actually easier to get running in Linux than they were through Vista or Win7's "compatibility layer." Heck, I could even run iTunes, Photoshop and my Windows-only scientific software through WINE for the longest time!

[@JonathosDX]

@@GSBarlev I can run every bit of Windows software that I want basically effortlessly now, so I can't really say anything about the old experience was better. The post I mentioned goes through all sorts of config tweaks like enabling a wine desktop and tweaking indeo codecs in the case of Thief. These days it's basically just double click the installer executable or run it through Steam and that's about it. Maybe adding some gamescope launch parameters if you're trying to do something like HDR in DXVK titles. Admittedly I don't play anything that requires kernel anti-cheat (and I wouldn't anyway). Mostly stick to Barotrauma and classics like Quake for my multiplayer gaming. That said, yeah, if you knew what you were doing back then a surprising amount of stuff worked.

[@kuhluhOG]

"What psychopath is running arch on a server?" Apparently way more than one would think.

[@dashcharger24]

I did lol

[@electric26]

I like not having to do massive updates every 4 years. Plus a (home) server has far fewer things that can break. For example if the GPU driver breaks all I lose is Jellyfin transcoding plus Steam on the upstairs TV, which I hardly ever use.

[@imzesok]

I ran arch for about a month before christmas. ended up needing to swap to the zen kernel because there was a bug in the main kernel that would just cause my system to crash. fixed in about a week and they pushed the new main kernel and everything was fine. . That's pretty much the arch experience. if something breaks.. it gets fixed relatively quickly. That's what I like about Arch, as a person whom is primarily a Windows user.

[@Opharg]

It's a bit funny, sometimes my Hyprland crashes on start, something with an xdg-portal idk, so I swap to KDE for about a week and when I try again, it just magically works again. The only time I wanted to really curse Arch, was when it deleted my Kernel on an update and the new kernel didn't fit into the Windows EFI partition anymore, which I didn't notice until the next reboot... Needless to say, I now have a 4GB EFI partition, because that was not fun and I really want that to never happen again.

[@imzesok]

@@Opharg I was kinda always afraid of this scenario coming up, so I always made linux and windows their own separate EFI partitions on their own drives. I let Windows' drive be first in the boot order, so it doesn't side-eye the linux install's EFI partition or overwrite it when it updates. I kind of also need linux to work and be separate for when windows eats itself. This practice saved me last week when windows decided it needed to set all of it's drive partitions to read only and refused to boot. I have no idea why it happened. There was no crash while it was running or anything, no fast boot enabled. I Fixed it by booting into linux and running ntfsfix on them and it came back up after a couple of reboots and a system restore later. I had to reinstall a few apps, but no data loss, and I didn't have to reinstall windows and reconfigure everything.

[@cameronbosch1213]

23:22 "...But I do want to highlight this person right here. At least they're being honest!" ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

[@autumnjeserich2689]

Holy shit vaxrys splash screen of Hyprland overtaking gnome in popularity has happened but many many years earlier

[@GSBarlev]

Highly correlating this response with Wayland *dominating* X11 as "preferred session type."

[@autumnjeserich2689]

But doesn't gnome also have a wayland session as an option? correct me if I'm wrong I haven't used gnome in ages

[@GSBarlev]

@@autumnjeserich2689 Yeah, it might even be the default. But Hyprland is Wayland-only, so people enthusiastic about Hyprland will also be enthusiastic about Wayland.

[@TatharNuar]

4:20 "Windows for school" is unfortunately mandatory no matter how much I try (curse you, Solidworks) but I'm still not going to put down Windows as my primary OS on a survey like this, even if it's the one I spend the most time on.

[@No-mq5lw]

WSL is also in the running for reasons someone would use Linux but Windows is the primary OS. Though a Linux focused survey should include a follow up question asking if they dual boot or have another computer with Linux on it.

[@phantomwise67]

Oh god Solidworks... I had almost managed to forget that cursed abominaton. If I never see a 3d schematic of a screw again in my life it will still be too soon 😭

[@erroroliver]

wine doesnt work?

[@TatharNuar]

@erroroliver for Solidworks, absolutely not. Even a Windows VM won't work.

[@JoshuaT902]

18:00 wayland just works for me. With two monitors with different framerates. When playing games it feels like I only get 30 fps when the game says 100fps only on x11.

[@cameronbosch1213]

Exactly why I cannot use XOrg. X11 literally cannot support my desktop setup with one 1440p ultrawide and two 4k 144 hz screens.

[@CatFace8885]

Wayland's multihead is really really good. And I say this as an X11 user; I have to do some funny scaling tricks to get consistent scaling between my monitors on X, since I have mixed DPIs with them. It's not great.

[@TheShitpostExperience]

This is the same reason when I migrated from win10, I went with fedora KDE even though I had been using ubuntu at work forever.

[@TooLateNate]

I'm glad that the archinstall script is being shown. It's a fantastic script for getting a basic system up and running. It's a great springboard to jump from, or a complete install, your choice.

[@alpacamale2909]

I am surprised about ext4 having more users than btrfs. the advantage I get when creating snapshots outweighs whatever it is ext4 is better at, and since I use Arch (btw) it is very important to have something like timeshift autosnap for when something bad happens.

[@yozul1]

Ext4 is mostly just faster and more reliable. The reliability thing is getting better on btrfs, but ext4 will always have better performance because of how it works. Sometimes doing less is just better. Plus you don't actually need btrfs for Timeshift. It just uses a little less drive space on btrfs, but storage is the cheapest part of a computer right now.

[@alpacamale2909]

@@yozul1 The snapshots are faster and I haven't had any problem with btrfs

[@yozul1]

@@alpacamale2909 Look, I'm not asking you to switch, and yes, the snapshots would also be faster. Btrfs is also faster if you're "copying" something into the same partition. Ext4 is faster at actually duplicating data, and it's faster at quickly accessing lots of little files, which is something a lot of games are weird about doing, so it can be better if you play games on Linux. You didn't ask for a full breakdown of every single possible pro and con of ext4 vs. btrfs though. You expressed surprise that people are still using ext4, and I tried to point out a couple reason why. If you're happy with btrfs then by all means keep using it. It does a lot of cool things, but it's not just a straight upgrade. There are reasons to stick with ext4, even if they aren't relevant to you.

[@infine-8222]

I'm just afraid of btrfs and I don't think the devs know what theey are doing with it. What with Edward Shishkin old rant about btrfs not actually being btr so the actual btr math can't be applied. And all the data loss horror stories. If I really wanted snapshots and timeshift and whatnot, I'd probably rathrer use an lts kernel with zfs.

[@zerrubabbel]

I originally installed Arch on a Sata SSD, but once I gained confidence in using it, I decided that if I was able to install it on an M.2, then leaving it "relegated" to a Sata SSD was kinda treating it like a 2nd class OS... So I eventually did install it on an M.2 drive, and corrected a few things I ended up not liking about my first config... The practical difference is only situationally noticeable, but since moving, it feels a lot more like 'home'.

[@IXPStaticI]

I like arch because its just solid with no bullshit attached, which ironically leads to a whole different kind of bullshit in the opposite direction.

[@VoyivodaFTW1]

that's why I ultimately dropped arch. For every problem it solved for me, arch gave me 2 more.

[@DeusinMachina]

I feel like Arch users using KDE more than Gnome just make more sense given the philosophy of KDE. If you are on Arch you like being on the bleeding edge, you like tweaking with settings, personalizing things etc. All things that KDE does way better than Gnome. It's the same reason why I'm not surprised you see some many Arch users trying COSMIC (alpha).

[@GSBarlev]

The default GNOME desktop group on Arch is also GNOME at its worst. I hadn't really realized how much effort Fedora and Ubuntu put into their theming until I booted into a pure GNOME session on Arch for the first time. 🤢

[@PerilousBooklet]

Arch is not bleeding edge, it's rolling release. Bleeding edge means using testing packages.

[@ForeverZer0]

​@@PerilousBooklet Non-Arch users think that using software within a month of its stable release by the upstream developer as "bleeding edge". I can't count how many times that I have encountered someone who is literally under the impression that Arch is running something akin to "nightly" builds for every package.

[@infine-8222]

I think another contributing factor is arch is kind of a KDE user sink. KDE tends to be a second class citizen in other popular distros except maybe OpenSuse. So if you want KDE, there is no benefit iin going elsewhere for improved experience. Doesn't help that plasma, especially in plasma4 and plasma5 days, used to be like mesa in GCN days, and you'd always want to run the newest release with the most bugfixes, so you'd want rolling release.

[@thingsiplay]

7:35 Cosmic shill is happy about that COSMIC (alpha) is in this list too.

[@piman13_71]

Didn’t even know about it let alone frequent Reddit anymore after they went ipo. I think the problem is you’re gonna get the most dedicated or very much in the community. Perhaps a pop up on the aur or arch wiki asking for them to get involved in the survey would have helped (although may have skued it more to people trying to fix problems or setting up still lol)

[@MZZenyl]

Used ElementaryOS a little on my old laptop a decade ago, played with VMs and WSL for a while, then dualbooted with Arch last year (KDE on Wayland (NVIDIA proprietary), Konsole works flawlessly). I still mostly use Windows, but I try to boot into Arch whenever I don't need Windows-specific applications, as well as migrate my workflow over to Linux.

[@GSBarlev]

Pantheon is still my favorite desktop environment. I use COSMIC on Arch for the full tiling (and because the Pantheon Arch packages are usually borked), but I still use most of Elementary's application suite (terminal, file manager, calculator) as my defaults.

[@kuhluhOG]

3:32 I am not sure putting "I speak little to no English" as an option in a survey which is entirely in English makes a whole lot of sense.

[@GSBarlev]

Does Google Forms auto-translate?

[@kuhluhOG]

@@GSBarlev no idea, but considering Google's quality of auto-translating stuff I hope not

[@bartolomeothesatyr]

Speaking and reading are two different skillsets.

[@kuhluhOG]

@@bartolomeothesatyr technically yes practically by far most people learn both simultaneously when learing foreign languages

[@Lampe2020]

23:22 "At least they're honest" XD Well, I think most of us have at some point watched some of that. But I doubt many people use Arch specifically for that…

[@Soccera0]

I'm one of the eight Gentoo users that responded 😊 I may have skewed the kernel data a bit by inputting gentoo-kernel in instead of the other gentoo-kernel user's response of sys-kernel/gentoo-kernel.

[@Jaymal10]

What surprised me is the favorite distribution. I thought gnome would be higher because the fan based is pretty vocal. But it proves the point that people want a grown-up distribution.

[@emptor543]

Arch with KDE has ushered in the year of Linux on the desktop (for me).

[@maicon9]

gaming on arch was the nail in the coffin i needed to ditch windows for good.

[@maximelenfer6280]

I think kitty is the favorite of a lot of arch new user (like me) because it's the default terminal for hyprland

[@electric26]

It's probably default since Vaxry hates Rust 😂 I'd put some money on it (Alacritty is written in Rust)

[@ForeverZer0]

They are typically going to be one of: kitty, Alacritty, WezTerm, and now Ghostty. I like Alacritty, but the lack of literature support is a deal breaker, as I use a terminal-based editor for writing code, otherwise any one of those are great terminals.

[@szaszm_]

As a "wizard" myself, I'm surprised by Hyprland, it wasn't even around for the majority of time I spent using Linux. As much as I dislike vaxry, the FDO should really unban him, or at least have a vote about the ban. As long as he doesn't throw around insults all the time, tolerating him for the benefit of the community is something that should take precedence over individual beef IMO. I'm also surprised by Firefox being 50%+. As their Windows and Mac userbase disappears, Mozilla should finally embrace Linux users as their main demographic. Also, take that xorg shills, 80% wayland. haha

[@ForeverZer0]

I embrace vaxry in both his project and how he treats others. Whatever he is, his way seems to be working better than what HR-inspired institutions like the FDO, OpenSUSE, etc. are currently doing.

[@spatiumowl]

​@@ForeverZer0His way is literally just developing the project on his own. The fact that he bullies and insults people has nothing to do with his productivity (unless he's insulting himself and it boosts it somehow)

[@ForeverZer0]

@ Perhaps it does, neither of us can argue with the results. I don't need to be his friend, that is not what open source code is about. "Does he write code" is literally the only important factor. I have better things to do than police the words that people say online, least of all the ones they write on their personal blogs. EDIT: Also just wanted to say that the project has over 400 contributors and nearly 2000 PRs merged. There is no reality where "just developing the project on his own" is even remotely accurate.

[@AlejodelosReyes]

​@@ForeverZer0"on his own" means he does not need to negotiate or deal with anybody because it's his project. Writing good code doesn't make you a good person or somebody everybody has to tolerate. I use hyprland, but I don't need to be a vaxry simp because of it.

[@Karn0010]

When it comes to ease of use, I used Arch to learn a lot about how Linux works as an OS. A lot of that was because of the wiki. It really expedited the learning process for me. I understand why people this it is difficult to use, but for me it was intuitive. I use Fedora KDE now, but the call of Arch is always in the back of my head, for I know it is the best. Even if I like how Fedora works.

[@hopelessdecoy]

Arch is inherently very custom.... Like KDE, so makes sense

[@ishino_ki]

17:09 golden quote

[@cameronbosch1213]

Viacom's Dan Schenider? 😬

[@arandomfox999]

Arch was my previous distro of choice, currently though I use NixOS. If NixOS ever dies for whatever reason, like the recent drama or something, you can can bet I'm straight back to Arch.

[@guytech7310]

I tried NixOS, but the non-standard file structure is a real turn off. I understand the version control, but they could have just used symbol links & keep all the standard paths.

[@ThatTrueCJ201]

At least anecdotally, Linux just works way better on laptops. Sleep actually works, battery lasts longer. That's what I care about on a laptop and that's what I'm getting

[@DBBravo]

Just today I was surprised with my laptop. I resucitated it and in windows it wouldnt lasr longer than 2 hours awake. Hybernation also did not last much longer. Today I woke up, decided to use the laptop (which was unplugged) and found it it 90% battery left, It was unpluged for longer than 24h

[@davidfrischknecht8261]

I have Snap installed on my Arch VM for one specific package: VSCode. I use the Insiders edition of the IDE and the snap makes it easier to keep it updated.

[@ThatTrueCJ201]

I guess I'm the only Arch user who enjoys Budgie then...

[@wumwum42]

The biggest surprises for me: - The anmount of hyprland users. I did not expect it to be that big especially compared to sway. - The huge difference between I have used gnome and my preference is gnome (very satisfing though!)

[@faaastcalllllll]

sway has been way smaller for a long time now

[@g.farias5138]

Have the results changed so much since you uploaded it? Now I see Gnome as the second favorite with around 21%

[@g.farias5138]

Oh, there are two. One says "(select one)" and the other one doesn't.

[@magovermelhoffv4729]

One of the two Xanmod Kernel users on Arch here. The other one, please raise your hand o/

[@ChloeCake]

I wasn't surprised the display server results were so skewed towards Wayland, but I did expect it to be somewhat more balanced

[@LukasTheWizard]

Arch is the best for nvidia because it actually works

[@TatharNuar]

7:00 I'm surprised that there are 35.7% of Arch users who have so thoroughly dodged Microsoft's monopoly that they've never even tried a Windows system.

[@bartolomeothesatyr]

A lot of school systems in the US are embedded in the Apple ecosystem.

[@matthewmoore757]

I use Arch with KDE. I think it's really interesting, that the survey shows that more people have AMD CPUs, but Nvidia GPUs. That one is interesting to me. 🤔

[@ForeverZer0]

NVIDIA is the bigger GPU manufacturer that is sold in more machines, so it kinda makes sense. I personally have never even owned an AMD GPU. I have nothing against them (I have an AMD CPU), I just have always used NVIDIA, have been happy with the results, and never was unable to overcome any of the NVIDIA issues that everyone blows way out of proportion.

[@guytech7310]

Cuda API (Machine Learning, & other productivity tools that use the Nvidia API). a lot of GPU tools don't support AMD.

[@fortifyve]

I have an AMD CPU + NVIDIA GPU. My reason is this machine was built with gaming on Windows in mind, only later on did I dig into the world of Linux and fall in love with Arch. I would imagine many others share the same story. Nobody buys an NVIDIA card with Linux in mind.

[@AM-yk5yd]

@@fortifyve "Nobody buys an NVIDIA card with Linux in mind". Lol, what? If you ever use computer for rendering with blender, writing GPGPU code, using ML models for text or image generation, you would know that it's not even a contest. In the best case AMD is worse. Sometimes it is not working because drivers are not there yet. I once waited for months for to get OpenCL on GPU. "Flagship" 7900xt lacked ROCm support for about a year. Last time that I had fond memory of the red team was when I had ATI5970. Not even AMD yet. I have higher hopes for Intel to become useful than AMD at this point. Until then unfortunately nvidia is the best.

[@exnihilonihilfit6316]

gamers, man ... 😆

[@Lampe2020]

3:47 By the way, why do you pronounce it "Catchy" and not "Cachy" (as in "cache")? Is that the correct way to pronounce it and I'm just dumb?

[@BrodieRobertson]

No im just dumb

[@Reonmitchelli]

Arch Linux on a laptop because Arch has the newest kernel and firmware for my newest laptop. Literally the only Linux distro that works "out of the box" on my laptop.

[@kxuydhj]

KDE bodying Gnome in the faves section was about to be expected but Hyprland doing the same just made my day.

[@JoshuaT902]

X11 was not designed to run multiple monitors and 2k monitor with 144 hz wasn't a thing when the spaghetti code was created

[@cameronbosch1213]

Same with ultrawide monitors with HDR. OLED wasn't even a thing, and different scaling factors on monitors were not even an afterthought. Honestly, I think the three reasons XOrg survived for so long even after Wayland were GNOME devs screwing over protocol discussions, accessibility on Wayland wasn't making progress, and Nvidia on Wayland was basically Nvidia dragging their feet with EGLStreams when Mesa was using GBM and it took several years for Nvidia to give in.

[@rav6324]

Yeah it is time tested but doesnt run your toy setups

[@tngaskell]

X11 was designed to run on potatoes from the 1980s. I would argue that "toy setups" like potatoes SBCs are actually a place where it shines. Big fancy desktops, apparently less so.

[@rav6324]

big fancy desktops are toys for man children

[@darukutsu]

true, xorg was beast designed to run rotated 12 degrees to left, use 10monitors as 1 big monitor and display whatever way you want...

[@OkerlundTV]

Only reason I still use X11 is because there is an issue I have with Wayland when it comes to maximizing windows. I tend to move windows fairly quickly, and when I quickly drag a window over to my 2nd monitor and drag it to the top to maximize it, the window breaks. It thinks that it is full screen, but it's not. There is a gap at the top, so you have to click slightly above where you actually want to click. And sometimes when trying to fix it the window breaks even more to the point where the title bar just gives up and leaves. I am on KDE with Nvidia. Only seen a few others with this issue. X11 just works, so I am fine. I will switch to Wayland and give it a proper try when that is fixed.

[@felipec]

Arch Linux is never going to drop the Xorg packages. If other distros want to make stupid decisions, that's up to them.

[@YourWishes]

That snap graph made me laugh

[@Bob-of-Zoid]

I plead guilty: I'm a freakin' Arch geek!🤓 But with KDE on top!🥳🐧🐧🐧🥳 I just cannot wrap my head around wanting anything less!😮 I have been computing since 79, and know what all computers can do, and therefore want to take advantage of everything they can do for me! Linux has come a really long way and is getting better so much faster than in the past, and an old freak like me is already struggling to keep up with all the new and good stuff every update brings. I never had anywhere near as great of an experience in any MS OS, and I've used most of them before 2009, not even on my Macintosh Lisa, although for the time it was the bomb indeed.

[@ThatLinuxDude]

Dang, that's a lot of DWM users around 7:00 - 3rd highest even 😳

[@somenameidk5278]

clever

[@rexthewild]

Oh, I did that survey as well I really was curios what was the outcome

[@chriswinters-ca]

12:55 I feel personally attacked...

[@Xizax41325]

Just swapped from win10 to garuda. Once cosmic comes out in a beta, i am giving that a go. I did run into an issue right out the gate. My nic wasnt supported so i had to blacklist a thing and run an update again to roll back a driver.

[@Void_Dragon]

So as someone who used a AI assistant to help with installing KDE with gnome pre-existing, I ended up with a unbootable system. Luckly I ran that on a VM and not on actual hardware.

[@angeldude101]

You can't just install KDE and then uninstall Gnome? I can understand uninstalling Gnome while still in Gnome causing weird things, but the idea that it would make your system unbootable is surprising.

[@Void_Dragon]

@@angeldude101 the AI suggested to purge gnome packages so its configs didnt stay behind. I didnt get a prompt to switch to SDDM. Thats what broke it. In hindsight, I could of just opened a TTY terminal and switched it then, but I didnt know any better back then.

[@altermetax]

I like that Arch doesn't make any choices for you

[@rjawiygvozd]

Fedora sway edition is using foot by default, that's actually how I started using it because I wanted to use immutable sway image without installing literally anything on it except for my dotfiles (it worked great btw). And then I still kept using it when I went back to arch.

[@cinfinity]

I must confess that I'm a proud Artix user - that's Arch without Systemd.

[@cookies1702]

Hmm, how did you do that click and pull down to scroll down ?

[@TheDireLynx]

the desktop and laptop bits switching places for number of installs and main usage makes a lot of sense to me. generally if someone has both a laptop and a desktop, the desktop is the more important one. it's the more powerful one, it's the more situated one, it's the one you want to be most comfortable with, and it's where all your stuff is. i know for me, i've never installed an OS on my desktop that i haven't first tested a lot after installing it on my laptop because it's less important. i use my laptop to chat on discord and run firefox. that's really it, honestly. because of that, i can say i've tried like 2-3 dozen different distros and OSes, but i've only ever installed 2 of them on my desktop. Windows 10, and Arch Linux.

[@JohnSmith-gd2ws]

23:25 Oh boy... I did NOT expect my honesty to be GLOWING BEACON in the survey.. Some other "interesting" answers are also from me.

[@Sunsper]

Ha-ha, nice.

[@exnihilonihilfit6316]

infantile

[@gblenemy]

Yay made me fall in love with arch. I always found linux to be very difficult. Arch with Yay made things a lot easier for me, personally. And then there's the Arch wiki. I would be nothing without that wiki.

[@alarii2582]

The AUR is the main reason I use Arch. I've used other distros but eventually I always run into some piece of software that's a pain to install on that distro but has a working AUR package available

[@peyton_uwu]

12:50 Yeah, I do the same thing. I've always had an old laptop laying around, and my use-case has always been pretty simple; web browsing, office work, and some light gaming, so I would just distro-hop on my laptop every few months. This gave a good feel of what Distros have to offer, how easy they are to work with, how good and sensible their defaults are, etc. Currently I have a Dell Precision M2800 with Bazzite on it, which is the only distro I've installed on it where all the drivers are configured properly, including the muxleas iGPU/dGPU setup. Literally all I had to do is set "DRI_PRIME=1" in my launch options to get anything to render using the dGPU, instead of faffing about and reading wikis & threads for an hour.

[@BarryBazzawillWilliams]

I have been using Linux for close to 20 years. I can't remember when I settled on arch I did go through Ubuntu, Fedora (briefly), Gentoo and some others mostly distro hopping when I broke something or needed something specific (such as compiling the latest kernel with specific flags for certain DVB-T drivers). I was totally going to do this survey when you did the first video on it but...

[@BarryBazzawillWilliams]

I remember the super fun game called let's try and get this game to work 😜😂. I owe much of my Linux knowledge to this and using mythtv for DVR/HTPC

[@Sunsper]

Kinda surprising and actually not at all that Konsole is in top 3 terminal emulators. That pie chart gave me thoughts that maybe I should try out Kitty or Alacritty more, I tried Alacritty once but didn't have time or motivation to fiddle around with it's configuration so naturally I became stuck to Konsole. To be honest I love Konsole, but I'm also open to try out something different. Also on the note of kernels, now I think it would be interesting to ask in the next survey like this not only what kernels do Arch users use (or have installed I suppose), but also which kernel they prefer to use/boot into. Because for me personally, for example, I have both vanilla and LTS kernels installed, just in case I need them for anything, but I have Zen kernel installed as well and I actually prefer and daily drive this kernel. That may as well just be placebo, but I feel like I'm getting somewhat better performance with that kernel compared to vanilla/LTS.

[@GentExec]

Saying KDE is like Windows is as silly as saying Gnome is like Mac. Stop it please. I use XFCE btw.

[@kuhluhOG]

21:12 Linus Torvalds would not have a dGPU on his main system if (back when he built it) AMDs most powerful CPUs would have had an integrated option.

[@AM-yk5yd]

Also not every game need GPU. I play lots of modded minecraft, and I'm too lazy to use prime-run. Integrated graphics is very good compared to something like i815 from 2000. I use GPU only for fooling around with local LLM.

[@Finkelfunk]

This could have been done way easier: Just add an opt-out user data collection to Arch and you can get so much more useful data out of this at absolutely no cost! /s

[@cameronbosch1213]

N🧊 b8 m8! 😂

[@alarii2582]

11:20 I use the LTS kernel in addition to the standard kernel because I use ZFS for my /home directory and there have been instances of the ZFS module not working with the newest kernel version.

[@darukutsu]

try using new zfs releases from archzfs repo, works well for me... new zfs 2.3 release is crazy

[@Tracenji]

honestly, Konsole is pretty great, it does what most people want and is reasonably fast i mostly use Yakuake which is basically Konsole in dropdown form, which is great as i no longer end up with 20 Konsole windows open that i forget to close

[@guytech7310]

KDE win for all of the app integration. Only apps that are really missing are cloud\DB\vm tools (which aren't apart of the KDE system).

[@forzatoro89]

Hey, I run Arch on a server, but I'm not a psychopath, it has the LTS kernel

[@someguy9175]

There's a typo in the title. You meant fedora. (;

[@Ejioplex]

So i am not the only crazy one using arch on a tablet?

[@Ozzymand]

Genuine question because you mentioned it in the video when talking about installed packages. You talk about doing a refresh, so I'm assuming a full system reinstall, but I don't want to loose all my images/videos/downloaded games/some software. Is there any real way of going around this?

[@RandomGeometryDashStuff]

16:11 I don't like alacritty and many other terminal emulators because no context menu on right click.

[@Shgktk]

0:09

[@JamesMcCloskey]

What percentage of Desktop Linux Users even use Arch?

[@syrefaen]

nice, been thinking about trying hyperland again :D

[@RandomGeometryDashStuff]

22:43 "Floppy Disk" how?

[@pi_ist_toll]

17:30 I use foot! btw

[@moussaadem7933]

the best

[@electric26]

I use 2, personally

[@okashiromi5541]

I really don't like to admit it bc it goes to arches users heads, but I do gotta give the distro massive props for how tailor made you can make that thing. It's like, if you're tech savvy and willing to put in the time, you'd probably get your personal perfect system out of the deal.

[@santiagohal6747]

The kitty domination is because of Hyprland

[@TheObsesedAnimeFreaks]

garuda ships alacrity, and i'm very happy with it, but i want to do a full custom arch install at some points... just haven't spent the time to do it.

[@electric26]

Do people really just use the defaults??

[@TheObsesedAnimeFreaks]

@@electric26... I have a git repo of my modified version of Hyprland that shipped with Garuda. I've not spent a lot of time messing with animations and things like that, however I did more or less rewrite the entire thing moving things out of the standard config to other files. Plus I swapped the lock screen that shipped with hyprilde/hyprlock among other things.

[@electric26]

@@TheObsesedAnimeFreaks that's pretty much exactly what I did. I think the only thing I didn't really change were the animations (until I disabled them) and keybinds.

[@ThisIsSparta-k2m]

It's because kitty supports images. Ghostty uses the kitty implementation as well, but dear God it's Mac os centric, with missing options on linux. Kitty it is.

[@Your_Degenerate]

I know I like M.2 storage for minimalism and ease of installation. The speed is nice too.

[@LaSpookyEXE]

That’s so strange I use zen kernel on arch and lts for backup

[@thebill2001]

22:40 Both my laptop and PC use M.2 SATA SSD + SATA HDD combo. I don't know where people are seeing that SSDs are getting cheaper. Every time I check, shit is still expensive AF.

[@jamesyoung151]

To be a bit fair. If you combine the dedicated and integrated AMD GPU only results , the number winds up higher than nVIDIA.

[@ManaMouseYT]

I think I would classify as one of the people who uses Arch but has Windows as their primary operating system. I spend a lot of time on my Laptops which are both running Arch Linux, but my main gaming PC is still on windows because I don't have the guts to try changing it, nor the storage space to back up my entire filebase. Plus, I do a lot of work on that computer that I don't want to risk compromising. That said, if the time comes where I'm forced to go to Windows 11 I will more than likely attempt to install Arch or Ubuntu on that computer then.

[@averageamerican6727]

Where's Hyprland? ML4W and tgpt convinced me that I can dive into Arch. And I'm loving it!

[@kayakMike1000]

We're awesome. We have always been awesome, even before we started using Arch, by the way.

[@tato-chip7612]

26:00 I would not use an AI to help me set up archlinux. Idk i think it might halucinate or something and cause more issues than it's worth.

[@realPlerby]

5:02 wizards is crazy tho