My one year review of using Arch Linux!

I have been using Arch Linux for around one year, and I’ve finally made the decision to switch to Artix Linux.
My journey with Arch Linux has made me orders of magnitudes more educated in systems administration, and the overall architecture of a linux system. I have definitely had my fair share of reinstalls over the past year, probably somewhere between 3-8 reinstalls, between my desktop and laptop computer. I think that’s pretty good considering the fact that I learn through trial and error the best and the fact that I am somewhat quickly decisive. ADHD also plays into this as I have felt an urge to just rip everything from the roots and start over, no clue why this occurs in those with ADHD but hey, its pretty fun to reinstall Arch Linux if I’m being honest. Most of my problems that I encountered on Arch Linux were user error, if not all of them 🤡. But in all seriousness this approach to learning has been one of my most successful in many facets of education, and life in general. Obviously this theory/mentality isn’t bulletproof, far from it, but it has been very successful in my personal education.
My experience of using Arch Linux across my two systems was very fun throughout, and the knowledge it gave me about linux systems and computing in general are absolutely incredible, and personally I don’t think I could’ve learned it any other way than hands on usage of a personal system.
I would recommend Arch Linux to anyone who wants to learn more about linux systems and is ready to mess their system up a couple times if you’re like me.(!) But in all seriousness I would recommend this distro to anyone who has a passion for learning, software and computing and the like, as it helps you really understand it better.
Arch Linux also just flat out worked better than most other distros, as it seemed to just work once I installed and knew what I was doing. If you aren’t afraid of the command line and ttys and the like, then I would totally recommend it to anyone who wants to learn and is definitely ready to reinstall their system a few times (maybe) and backup their important files regularly.

Why did i switch to Artix? I switched because I wanted a new challenge and I was interested in alternatives to the bloated systemd. I switched to Artix base with OpenRC as the init system, because it seemed the most appealing to me in terms of features. Looking back at it, I think I probably should’ve used the Artix base iso with s6-rc as the init system, as it is the most lightweight and has the most advantages, and little did I realize how little of an effect the extra features OpenRC shipped with had for me. I’m not sure if I will switch from OpenRC to s6-rc, as the procedure of switching does seem a little difficult, as the Artix Wiki page for it seems very inconclusive about the errors that you may find. I understand that the errors you may get depend on so many variables that differ from system to system, so this inconclusiveness is understandable, but I personally wouldn’t risk my functioning desktop systems just to switch to a different init system.
If either of my desktop systems fail or just stop working someday and I cannot fix them, I probably will go to install Artix with s6-rc, but other than that I don’t have too much of a reason to switch other than that and just buying a new computer. Even if I bought a new computer I probably would just keep the same hard drive with my current install, so the odds of me switching are more unlikely.
Even so, I am interested in switching to s6-rc in the future, as I am currently having problems with DBus on my desktop computer, mostly concerning the XDG-Document-Portal.
Edit: I solved the problem I was having with the document portal by using ly as my desktop manager. Using its builtin setup scripts. I believe the environment variables it sets for X11 fixed my problem.
All in all, I would totally recommend Arch linux to anyone who fits the criteria I listed above. To those that think they’ve learned all they can from it and want something new to learn, I’d recommend starting with Artix Linux or if you enough time to compile kernels until the heat death of the universe in 10^100 years, then go for Gentoo.
That’s about it, have an amazing day.

(now that I think about it due to thermodynamics and whatnot people that use gentoo and/or compile absolutely everything from source actually make the lifespan of the universe shorter due to all of the cpu usage…)