/g/ - Technology

>>592 (OP) 
Pacman isn't more complicated than apt its syntax is just weird.

>pacman -Syu
>apt update; apt upgrade

Both of these update your repos and then the system, pacman does it in one step

>pacman -S = apt install, pacman -R = apt remove

'S' doesn't really make sense for the flag install (sync I guess) but this isn't really more complicated.
Its not often you need to do more than this anyway. 
Also pacman is faster than apt.

The appeal is rolling release, packages are constantly updated and there is no version jumps on the Distro. Arch packages are also kept as close to upstream as they can while being relatively stable, so you have more up-to-date software. Debian even on testing is going to lag behind Arch a good bit.

The other big thing is the Arch User Repository, probably the largest community managed repo of software. Between the Arch repos and the AUR I find Arch has the best package availability of all distros, you'll find just about any software missing from the Arch repos packaged there. Need to be careful since these are community managed packages, can be malicious and packages packaged by your distro are always preferred of course.

There's also the Arch Wiki, making Arch probably the best documented Linux distribution. Second would be Gentoo.

As for minimalism, Arch is minimal sure but like you could install Alpine which takes it to the next level. But you could also do Debian sure, It's just as minimal. You would be choosing Arch over Debain for the above reasons.

I don't use Arch anymore, mainly Gentoo with some Debian servers. Did use Arch for a few years. Good distro.

niggerbuntu holds an advantage over Debian in that it has a lot of package maintainers, so you will rarely find packages that you can't install on Ubuntu as opposed to Debian
Mint offers the upsides of ubuntu without the cancer, but they both are more bloated than Debian

>>593 explained it well
i would add that the AUR is actually a way to compile source code more easily

so let's imagine you're on Mint (which is a good distro) and you want to install something that just got out recently (<1y ago) you could still grab the source code from goyhub and compile it on your system, but it involves using the terminal and editing some text files which is honestly too much of a hassle for me
in comes the AUR and especially AUR helpers ! compiling many of these new projects from source becomes really easy

i finally gave it (arch) a go, boots under the minute mark on a 2005 laptop, i wonder how fast would things go on my main rig

can any archfags tell me interesting stuff to try? already installed libreoffice, vlc, GIMP etc. but i would like to have the CPU, RAM, GPU values widget, i chose the LXQt desktop environment if that matters

>>618
did you install on a BTRFS filesystem with subvolumes ? if so you could install timeshift and timeshift-autosnap, run an update and watch it automatically create snapshots of your system that you can boot into i find it pretty cool
you could also look into the AUR, try to understand how it works and how to edit PKGBUILD files because you may not need it most of the time but when something goes wrong you'll be able to fix it
sorry i know nothing of ricing

>>619
i have only 120GB to work with, wouldn't the snapshots eat half my disk?
also:
>ricing
i am ashamed to admit i don't know what that means

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>>592 (OP) 
Yeah the package manager and user repository are a big factor like >>593 and >>616 said, but I personally really hopped on the arch (btw :3) train for the wiki. It was like my second distro ever and I was 14, so reading up a bunch of the articles on there helped me get a better understanding of Linux in general. There is a reason so many people use it, even if it's mostly a meme. But now that I'm older and more knowledgeable I see that most distributions can be configured and manipulated to the point that the starting point of any one distro really only changes your first few weeks using the system for 90% of users. I am still interested in things like different package managers and init systems though, like I tried NixOS for a time and I'm thinking of trying Void Linux for runit and XBPS, but that's just tinkering with things that already work for me. Just have fun :)

Gentoo and WM are like a poor man's arch just use those