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?


This! I after two years of Debian out of habit from the past, I switched to cachyOS last year and am pretty happy with it. Completely agree that updates feel easier to manage (so far).
However, I guess hygiene also plays a role here: dont “try” multiple audio drivers and this sort of things
Yeah. I would massively emphasize this too.
Don’t mess around.
Especially don’t mess around with AUR. Discrete packages are fine, but AUR tweaks that mess with the system are asking for trouble, as they have no guarantee of staying in sync with base Arch packages.