Arch Linux

★★★★☆

I’ve mostly used Arch Linux on my PineTab 2, and occasionally in virtual machines for tinkering. What I’ve found is that once it’s installed it’s generally fine! The biggest issue I have with it is remembering the options for pacman instead of apk or apt or dnf, and that’s only because I use a lot of different Linux distributions on a regular basis! But I don’t like the throwback to the old days of setting up a system by hand. Even Alpine has a better installation process.

Since it’s a rolling distribution, included software tends to get updated faster than Fedora or Debian. It has a smaller selection, but between Flatpak and AUR that’s less of an issue than it could have been. I haven’t seen updates break the system, so there’s clearly some process to keep things stable-ish upstream. The AUR pseudo-packages are sort of like RPM spec files. You do need enough technical know-how to install the dev tools and run the package builder from the command line.

The main Arch project is only built for x86_64, with no official ARM version, but I’ve been quite happy with with the Danctnix distribution for Pine64 devices. Not only is it quick to update its aarch64 branch from the upstream project, it’s also quick to include things like driver updates for Pine64 hardware (which has been kind of important since the device shipped before all the drivers were finished).

All that said, I wouldn’t recommend it for a novice, unless the novice wanted to use it as a learning experience. I would recommend the Arch wiki, which has helped me many times!