May be a mean sounding question, but I’m genuinely wondering why people would choose Arch/Endevour/whatever (NOT on steam hardware) over another all-in-one distro related to Fedora or Ubuntu. Is it shown that there are significant performance benefits to installing daemons and utilities à la carte? Is there something else I’m missing? Is it because arch users are enthusiasts that enjoy trying to optimize their system?

  • paequ2@lemmy.today
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    22 hours ago

    you understand it more when you build something by yourself, so it’s easier for you to fix it when it’s broken.

    For me, this is a big selling point. Instead of trying to figure out why someone did something or wrestling with their decisions, I know what I did, why I did it, and if necessary, and I can change it.

    • JustTesting@lemmy.hogru.ch
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      19 hours ago

      In a perfect world, yes.

      In reality, i knew what i did and why i did it, two years ago, after which i never had to touch it again until now, and it takes me 2 hours of searching/fiddling until i remember that weird thing i did 2 years ago…

      and it’s still totally worth it

      Oh or e.g. random env vars in .profile that I’m sure where needed for nvidia on wayland at some point, no clue if they’re still necessary but i won’t touch them unless something breaks. and half of them were probably not neccessary to begin with, but trying all differen’t combinations is tedious…

      • paequ2@lemmy.today
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        19 hours ago

        i knew what i did and why i did it, two years ago, after which i never had to touch it again until now

        Hahaha, true. This is why I try to keep as many notes as possible, leave lots of comments, add READMEs, links, and otherwise document what I did and why.

        It’s not perfect, it’s often tedious, and I don’t always do it, but when I come back 2 years later wondering why I set some random option, it’s pretty nice having at least some hint.