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Comment by usr1106 | Hacker News Reader

I'd say Arch is for hackers by hackers. You should be interested to find out how things work. You should prefer the command line for a lot of your daily work. As such person when switching from Ubuntu you might be positively surprised how lightweight but still functional some things can be done.

Ubuntu has the goal to be usable by users who don't know what a command line is. Many more bells and whistles are installed in Ubuntu by default. If you need to use non-free software like Skype or Zoom you are more likely to find Ubuntu packages than Arch packages for it.

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Very elitist take.

I'm a hacker but I prefer that my computer just works without fuss so that I can do actual work. Why is fighting with an OS seen as some huge universe-brain achievement?

Hey, I do the same. I sometimes play with Arch, but I mostly run Ubuntu, because sometimes I am in a hurry to get things done and don't want to fiddle with the system.

> but I prefer that my computer just works without fuss so that I can do actual work

This is exactly the reason I run arch. I have repaired loads of colleagues fedora installs that broke during dist-upgrade. And I the two times I tried to dist-upgrade old ubuntu installs went catastrophically wrong.

With arch I update every day or once a week and don't have to worry.

I have never once had a Fedora upgrade or Windows update break my machine.

I think the trick with Fedora is to know the release-schedule, give them about two weeks after the release to find and fix the worst bugs and then not wait too long to update. On my own workstation I also didn't have issues.

> If you need to use non-free software like Skype or Zoom you are more likely to find Ubuntu packages than Arch packages for it.

My experience has been exactly the opposite. Nowhere is it easier and as hassle free as on arch to run non-free and proprietary software without(!) depending in the vendor for distro specific packages that happen to work in your distro version.

Skype, zoom, msteams all install and work out of the box.

using pacman? Or just installing from a tar or extracting a deb/rpm?

Installed from AUR with yay, but there is no difference in convenience, yay teams, select package, enter. I don't remember for Skype and zoom, but iirc teams uses the deb package from MS under the hood. The point is that the necessary work to get it running has already been done by the community, so you can just install and use it.

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