Arch Linux survey results are interesting

Setting aside the systemd catastrophe, Arch Linux has been very good to me and the recent results of a survey only reinforces why i prefer Arch, though i actually use Manjaro (an Arch fork) as my desktop system or, as i like to call it, 'Arch for dummies'.

One of the arguments against Arch is a lack of stability and it seems this claim is way over-blown. I've had an Arch server for nearly a year and have had no problems at all that i didn't create myself. The only scare i had was with an openssh update which required a reboot and since i never read the release notes for my Arch server i didn't know about it. After not being able to log on after the update for reasons unknown, i exercised the last-ditch option and rebooted using my host's control panel and all was hunky-dory.

I've also read about people using Arch for a web server without issue and, given my experience, this doesn't seem like a bad idea at all.

On the desktop side i've been fairly happy with Manjaro which i've been running for around 5 years. Any issues i've had were due to the KDE desktop environment. The people behind that colossal project need to QUIT. ADDING. NEW. STUFF. and go on a massive bug hunting quest for the next several months, at least. It seems every single KDE/Plasma update kills one bug and adds another, though there haven't been any that rendered the system unusable. Often the fix was just a matter of deleting old config files, caches, etc., but i have had to reinstall the OS at least once which is kind of a big deal given all my customization's.

Getting back to the survey, i found several responses quite interesting:

• KDE is the preferred desktop, by far. I really didn't expect this.
• Firefox is, by a mile and a half, the preferred browser, while Gaggle Kram is the choice of a nary 5% of respondents (who don't give a shit about privacy).
• People who don't use Arch were asked, why not? The author adds their own opinion here regarding stability, which i agree with:

  Unsurprisingly, most responses focus on its challenging installation process, followed by concerns about system stability. If I may share my humble opinion here, however, while the first concern is valid, when it comes to stability, I want to assure everyone that Arch is an incredibly reliable system.

One of the potential 'gotchya's' with... well, i suppose any OS... is the updating of configuration files, and so one needs to pay attention to the update logs and check for .pacnew files in /etc and edit their config's accordingly (see the formidable Arch Wiki). I use a Bash startup script to help with this in case i miss/ignore the notice in the log.

The author closes with the following:

As a rolling release distribution, it's no surprise that nearly 80% of users prefer Arch for their desktop or laptop machines. However, about 22% choose it to power their servers. Regarding the preferred session type, the classic Xorg holds a modest 20% of the vote. Wayland takes the lead by a wide margin, with nearly 80% of Arch users choosing it as their go-to option.

The roller model is absolutely superior in my opinion. It's nice to keep up with the latest security updates and features without having to reinstall the entire OS! On the flip side, you're also gifted with the newest bugs and security holes, though i suspect this might be better than running potentially exploitable code for many months without ever knowing. It's also interesting that a whopping 20% of respondents use Arch as a server, though i wonder how many of those actually use it as a public web server.