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Comment by Tehchops | Hacker News Reader

Arch Linux teaches skills like:

- Knowing what happens if I have the audacity to update my computer without reading 3 different forum threads

- Understanding how to fix hilariously bad font rendering issues in a terminal, a software paradigm that's almost as old as computers themselves

- Tempering expectations that incredibly obscure apps like "Spotify" will "just work".

I think to imply Arch teaches much beyond the skills needed to deal with Arch Linux is a tenuous premise at best.

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Contrary to the popular belief that Linux has no games, Arch includes many fun games such as "find out why the audio decided to stop working today for no reason"

I use Spotify for hours every day and I've had absolutely zero issues with it since I moved to Arch 3 or so years ago.

Agreed on the fonts, that has always been a pain. That being said, I recently installed Arch on a new laptop and the fonts weren't too bad out of the box - times change.

I update at least twice a week and I've only had one breakage in 3 years - I didn't update a config file with some new settings.

All in all, your response comes across a little FUDdy IMO.

My experience of Arch is that it's fun as a home computer tinkering exercise but I don't trust it for my work computer since I can't resist a version number bump and the amount of time spent faffing around would be a nightmare.

I think it can definitely differ between individual systems - the fact that Arch is so flexible also means that each system can have individual little foibles. Personally speaking, I've used Arch for work for the 3 years mentioned previously with no problems. At my previous job I used to be oncall for a week at a time and I wouldn't upgrade during those periods just in case, but that was the extent of my caution.

This is all way too close to home, but I legitimately think the time I spent on arch made me more productive on linux machines.

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