Arch Linux turns 20: Small, simple, great documentation
> The installation process, and the documentation behind it, lead to the third virtue: a complete installation tends to be very small and simple, because you only install the bits you need. If you don't know what bits you need, the documentation will help you to work it out, and the result is something that is both fairly minimal and that, with luck, you understand. You know what's in there because you installed it.<p>I feel this gets to the core of why I like Arch so much. I’m a Linux novice, so for a long time I ran Ubuntu VMs when I needed to do stuff on Linux (this being before WSL). It worked well enough, but I never really felt that I properly knew what I was doing.<p>Then I tried installing Arch in a VM… and it took me several days and several attempts, but when I finally got it working I felt, for the first time ever, like I actually <i>understood</i> the system I was using. Now I have a webserver running Arch, and only a week or two ago installed Arch on an old PC to see if I could get a desktop working.<p>Of course, Arch is not easy, especially for a non-expert such as myself. Sometimes I have no idea how to solve a problem, or even what kind of software I need in the first place. For this reason, I’m planning to install Debian instead on the new laptop I’ve ordered (to replace my ~10 year old machine running Windows), in the hopes that it might have more stuff working out of the box. Still, I’d say that trying out Arch has immeasurably improved my knowledge, not just of Linux but of the underlying concepts behind modern computing.<p>(Oh, and the documentation’s amazing too!)