Exploring Arch Linux

Why I decided to explore Arch?

Recently, a picture of my high school days popped up in Facebook which got me curious to revisit an old friend’s blog. In one of his blog posts in 2015 that covered his setting up of a new laptop with Linux, he wrote this in regards to why he picked Arch Linux:

I decided to go with Arch. If you told me two years ago you were putting Arch on a laptop I’d have said you were crazy but now I think it is just great. It’s so nice to be able to just pacman -S go and know I'm getting a current version of the Go compiler with the links to source in the godoc browser working, not some old supposedly-stable version.

This got me curious about Arch once again. I have heard a lot about Arch in the recent years and how its community is becoming much bigger most primarily because it’s a build-from-scratch distro that has an awesome package manager and a community-driven repository that consists of bleeding edge software and libraries (rolling release) along with loads of documentation. Perhaps it’s also worth mentioning that it’s designed with “simplicity” in mind. Of course, the “simplicity” it refers to is not the simplicity that a new Linux user would consider simple but rather, simplification of the setup and customization of a demanding advanced user’s needs. Also, because you would only install what you need…