Why I Fell in Love with Arch Linux (2015)
I fell in love with Arch, after having used Gentoo for years, and Debian before that.<p>The straightforwardness appealed to me, it&#x27;s a binary distribution with a rolling release cycle and no custom-finagled packages.<p>But after a while, I got tired of manually configuring <i>everything</i>, doing all kinds of weird house-keeping and having to randomly boot from a USB stick to rescue my system from some update with untested consequences. And this was while running the supposedly &quot;stable&quot; update branch. I also got tired of the countless updates that required manual convoluted update procedures and Pacman tricks to function correctly.<p>Maybe this was because my install was relatively old, and thus had stuff like Pulseaudio and Systemd grafted on top of it, but I never had any issues immediately after those updates.<p>So around a year ago when Linux Mint 18 was released, I made the switch and I haven&#x27;t looked back. I know it&#x27;s a hackneyed phrase, but Everything. Just. Works. I have not had to do anything at all on my refurbed T420, I just installed it, and it just works, it&#x27;s wonderful.<p>I cannot be arsed to mess around with configuration files and whatnot on my computers anymore, I have much more interesting things to do than mess around trying to keep my personal computer running correctly.<p>I was also a hardcore KDE-head for years, but Cinnamon has really grown on me. It does what I need, the way I want it (I grew up on Win9x, so that&#x27;s the interface style I prefer), without getting bogged down in obscure configurations or arcane frameworks.<p>Maybe this all marks me as fallen from the ranks of the Linux cognoscenti, but I don&#x27;t care. I just want to get on with my life. In the same way that I see a lot of people gush about Mac OS, Mint simply gets out of my way and lets me get on with stuff I actually want&#x2F;need to do.