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 the community-provided AUR (Arch User Repository), 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.

AUR pseudo-packages are easiest to manage using a helper app like Yay. If you have enough technical know-how to install dev tools and run a build script from the command line, they’re sort of like RPM spec files.

The main Arch project is only built for x86_64, but there’s an Arch Linux ARM port that’s quick to update its aarch64 branch from the upstream project. I’ve been quite happy with that and the Danctnix distribution for Pine64 devices, which adds drivers 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!