I’m not sure either. I think arch used to be one of the less popular distros (because of the more involved install process, solved now by the arch-based distros with friendly installers), despite having some of the best features, so it required more “evangelism”, that’s unecessary now. Arch-based distros are now some of the most popular ones, so its not necessary.

Others have commented on why its so great, but the AUR + Rolling releases + stability means that arch is one of the “stable end states”. You might hop around a lot, but its one of the ones you end up landing on, and have no reason to change from.

In my experience the Arch people are the sane ones and the NixOS people are the young cult evangelists nowadays. I use Arch btw

Because it just works. I used to love Debian . It had issues with drivers and stuff. Arch just does it for me.

Because Arch requires human sacrifice.

I had moved from Slackware to Debian but by 2004 the long release cycles of Debian were making it very hard to use any Debian with current hardware or desktop environments. I was using Sid and dealing with the breakages. Ubuntu promised a reskinned Debian with 6 month release cycles synced to Gnome. Then they over delivered with a live cd and easy installation and it was a deserved phenomenon. I very enthusiastically installed Warty Warthog. Even bought some merch.

When Ubuntu launched it was promoted as a community distro, “humanity towards others” etc despite being privately funded. Naked people holding hands. Lots of very good community outreach etc.

The problem for Ubuntu was it wasn’t really a community distro at all. It was Canonical building on the hard work of Debian volunteers. Unlike Redhat, Canonical had a bad case of not invented here projects that never got adopted elsewhere like upstart, unity, mir, snaps and leaving their users with half-arsed experiments that then got dropped. Also Mint exists so you can have the Ubuntu usability enhancements of Debian run by a community like Debian. I guess there is a perception now that Ubuntu is a mid corpo-linux stuck between two great community deb-based systems so from the perspective of others in the Linux community a lot of us don’t get why people would use it.

Arch would be just another community distro but for a lot of people they got the formula right. Great documentation, reasonably painless rolling release, and very little deviation from upstream. Debian maintainers have a very nasty habit of adding lots of patches even to gold standard security projects from openbsd . They broke ssh key generation. Then they linked ssh with systemd libs making vulnerable to a state actor via the xz backdoor. Arch maintainers don’t do this bullshit.

Everything else is stereotypes. Always feeling like you have to justify using arch, which is a very nice stable, pure linux experience, just because it doesn’t have a super friendly installer. Or having to justify Ubuntu which just works for a lot of people despite it not really being all that popular with the rest of the linux community.

Arch Hits the great spot

It has:

• a great wiki
• many packages, enough for anything you want to do
• its the only distros that is beetween everything done for you and gentoo-like fuck you.
• and the Memes.

I feel like it isn’t really specific to arch, every distro has a following, but some are more “passionate” about it than others. I think arch, NixOS, and gentoo are the most notable.

Arch is better because…

• pacman, seriously, I don’t hear enough of how great pacman is.
  Being able to search easily for files within a package is a godsend when some app refuses to work giving you an error message “lib_obscure.so.1 cannot be found”.
  I haven’t had such issues in a long time, but when I do, I don’t have to worry about doing a ten hour search, if I’m lucky, for where this obscure library file is supposed to be located and in what package it should be part of.
• rolling release. Non-rolling Ubuntu half-year releases have broken my OS in the past around 33% of the time. And lots of apps in the past had essential updates I needed, but required me to wait 5 months for the OS to catch up.
• AUR. Some apps can’t be found anywhere but AUR.
• Their wiki is the best of all Linuxes

The “cult” is mostly gushing over AUR.

“I run Arch btw” became a meme because until install scripts became commonplace you had to have a reasonable understanding of the terminal and ability to read and follow instructions to install Arch Linux to a usable state. “Look at my l33t skills.”

Dislike of Ubuntu comes from Canonical…well…petting the cat backwards. They go against the grain a lot. They’re increasingly corporate, they did a sketchy sponsorship thing with Amazon at one point, around ten years ago they were in the midst of this whole “Not Invented Here” thing; all tech had to be invented in-house, instead of systemd they made and abandoned Upstart, instead of working on Wayland they pissed away time on Mir, instead of Gnome or KDE they made Unity, and instead of APT they decided to build Snap. Which is the one they’re still clinging to.

For desktop users there are a lot better distros than Ubuntu these days.

People praising Arch, people hating on Ubuntu, meanwhile me on Debian satisifed with the minimalism.

because they used to be special. “I run linux”, matrix text on boot, typing shit in the terminal, “I’m in”, awe-inspiring shit to an onlooker…

but nowadays, anyone can run ubuntu or mint or whatevs and our hero ain’t special no more. so here comes the ultimate delimiter.

I’ve started with ubuntu/mint and it was always a matter of time before something broke then i tried everything from then all the major distros and found that I loved being on a rolling release with openSUSE Tubleweed (gaming and most new software works better) and BTRFS on Fedora (BTRFS let’s you have boot time snapshots you can go back to if anything breaks).

After some research I found I can get both with arch so installed arch as a learning process via the outstanding wiki and have never looked back. Nowadays I just install endevourOS because it’s just an arch distro with easy BTRFS setup and easy gui installer was almost exactly like my custom arch cofigs and it uses official arch repos so you update just like arch (unlike manjaro). It’s been more stable than windows 10 for me.

Tldr: arch let’s you pick exactly what you want in a distro and is updated with the latest software something important if you game with nvidia GPU for example.

We’re not a cult. Come on out to our compound and we’ll show you!

There are a lot of different reasons that people hate Ubuntu. Most of them Not great reasons.

Ubuntu became popular by making desktop Linux approachable to normal people. Some of the abnormal people already using Linux hated this.

In November 2010, Ubuntu switched from GNOME as their default desktop to Unity. This made many users furious.

Then in 2017, Ubuntu switched from Unity to Gnome. This made many users furious.

There’s also a graveyard of products and services that infuriated users when canonical started them, then infuriated users when they discontinued them.

And the Amazon “scandal”.

And then there’s the telemetry stuff.

Meanwhile. Arch has always been the bad boy that dares you to love him… unapproachable and edgy.

I installed arch before there was the official install script. It’s not that is was THAT difficult, but it does provide a great sense of accomplishment, you learn a lot, customize everything, and you literally only install things you know you want. (Fun story: I had to start over twice: the first time I forgot to install sudo, the second I forgot to install the package needed to have an internet connection)

All of this combined mean that the users have a sense of pride for being an arch user so they talk about it more that the rest. There is no pride in clicking your way though an installer that makes all the choices for you