Arch Linux

Reader supplied reviews for Arch Linux Average rating 9.1 from 296 review(s) Please select a rating in the range of 1-10. Please write at least a few sentences about the distribution while limiting your review to 4080 characters. What are your thoughts on Arch Linux? Please include a few pros and a few cons, along with your overall impression of the operating system. Our FAQ page has tips on writing a good mini-review. Version: -- current2011.08.192010.052009.082009.022008.062007.080.80.70.60.50.40.30.20.1 Rating:    -- 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 out of 10 Your review (minimum 250 words): Past reviews - sort by: DateVotes Version: current Rating: 8 Date: 2026-04-19 Country: Sweden Votes: 1 Arch isn't as hard as many make it out to be. Installing it is similar to building your computer. You pick the individual components to make your PC. Arch does most of the work for you by finding dependencies. I feel that Arch may not be the best distro for beginners. Cachy and Endeavour may be better. Arch is a very good distribution, as everything is up to date. The latest packages are there. The AUR is vast, so if you can't find a package you're looking for in the repos, the AUR is always there. Just be cautious when using the AUR as some packages may be malicious or broken. Arch rarely breaks the bootloader, the past 4 years using Arch, I never had an unbootable system. Arch may be customizable and up to date, but in some cases this is it's downside. Some desktop environments are stable like XFCE and some like KDE break with updates. KDE freezes randomly, the glitch has been tamed, but it still happens from time to time. Some apps may break after an update which forces me to use timeshift to revert the update and hope a patch is sent down. Arch is a very nice distribution, for gaming it's excellent, for general work, it's alright. I wouldn't put Arch on a mission critical computer where up time is a priority as Arch may break from an update, if you prioritize stability and want to use Arch, go with XFCE. I used the XFCE Arch Linux and had no problems with random freezes. Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: current Rating: 7 Date: 2026-04-14 Country: Sweden Votes: 9 Solid distribution. One of the best, if not the best, for those that want a clean minimal base they can set up for their exact specific needs. Despite being a rolling release distro, I found it to be extremely reliable, very rarely having issues (only new big version releases of KDE caused some bugs, other than that I had zero problems after daily driving it for one whole year). However, as time went by and my life got busier I started to notice Arch's shortcomings: -Extremely time consuming installation process (archinstall helps to speed up things, but in some ways I found Endeavouros with it's calamares installer to be the better alternative if you just want an easy install of Arch) -Security is a pain in the ass to properly set up, as you have to manually define your policies for AppArmor or SELinux (altough a positive aspect of Arch in regards to security is that it's a minimal distro -> which means smaller attack surface) -The community, or at least the part of the community that I've interacted with, was kinda toxic - never truly found people willing to actually help you with an issue (most of them were like "if you can't figure it on your own just switch to another distro", which is a shame) Overall it's a very good distro, and has the best documentation you can find on a linux distro, but it's only suitable for thinkerers and hobbyists that got plenty of time on their hands. Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: current Rating: 10 Date: 2026-03-19 Country: Algeria Votes: 34 I have been using Arch for a year, and it has been quite an experience. I have learned a great deal and explored many distributions before ultimately settling on Arch. After all of that, I can confidently say that Arch is the best: it is faster, reliable, and provides the latest updates, allowing me to enjoy my favorite software with their newest features and bug fixes, unlike Ubuntu or Debian-based distributions, which are outdated for a very specific type of stability which is: "however it was it should remain". Imagine moving from Windows and leaving behind all the new features your software once offered, only to settle for versions that are a decade old. Fedora is better in these terms but not so much. I appreciate Arch’s minimal approach, as it allows you to decide exactly what to install. This way if something fails, you can often identify the issue with just a little knowledge, since there are relatively few potential points of failure. because it is minimal, whatever you install tends to work seamlessly, whether it is: a desktop environment, window manager, or other software. Of course, occasional bugs or issues may occur, but with the Arch Wiki and researching, you can not only resolve the problem but also understand how it occurred and how to prevent or fix it in the future. Was this review helpful? Yes No See all 296 reader reviews of Arch Linux...