Linux

You must have missed the small print that says "Personality not included". Linux is simple, individual character is hard.

I think arch peaked in its popularity in 2016 or so. It felt like an elitism thing was going on around that time that has 1. Faded off and 2. Been dispersed into other distros because as it turns out there are other good choices, too.

Besides. How are you going to become a rising influencer rehashing the same old takes as the prior generation of dorks? Can’t keep people coming with Arch is the greatest YouTube videos forever.

I also felt a little underwhelmed, I thought the installation would be more difficult.

If you are not in it for the memeing I find it to be a great distro.

I tried it out because of the memes and stuck with it because there wasn't a bunch of extra stuff I don't need distracting me. I kinda forget I'm using arch btw

now start using it for a while and you will notice the difference!

you will see you have all of the latest versions of programs, that other distros wont have for 6 months!

you will learn that the AUR has every package you could ever want!

you will see that the Wiki has extremely comprehensive answers to every question!

I prefer a minimal install of Debian personally. Someone should make a rolling release apt-based/debian-based distro and I'd hop right on it. Technically Kali is one and I do daily drive that, but it's not something I can really recommend to people as a general use distro.

Anyway if you want something more tangibly different (and difficult to install) try running OpenBSD :)

Those people are mostly just a meme, I rarely see people actually doing that anymore, although I'm sure they exist. If you want my personality out of it, spend more time customizing. You can look into optimizations, theming, or delve into window managers if you really want to make it your own. There's a lot of options.

You forgot one thing: “I use Arch BTW!”

If you want a challenge that may or may not be worth it, try configuring NixOS. And I mean really get into it, try to configure everything using Nix. It's very time consuming but not boring, each configuration varies person to person (i.e the way you organize it) so it can be quite fun if you have the time.

Also nixpkgs (what Nix and NixOS use) has like, all the packages

Now use Gentoo

I can only use Arch, because I know how I set it up.

Preinstalled distros, even arch based seem overwhelming to me nowadays. I just prefer to set up Arch Linux myself so I know what minimal steps I did and what package I have

When I went in I had very specific expectations and Arch lived up to them. Had an idea of what I wanted for a DM, and an idea of what I wanted out of an operating system, and it met my needs. I would still be using it like that except for the fact that I had to change it out to be able to run the proprietary software for my university, and I just never bothered to reinstall/reconfig it. If I were to do it again, I would make some script to set it up with all my necessary programs so that it is robust.

I’ve been using Debian for many years now. The hardest part about switching my desktop to arch (partly to try something different, partly for later kernel / tools) was not that arch is difficult, but that I need to type ‘sudo pacman -S’ instead of ‘sudo apt install’ to install new packages. It is functionally the same in my day to day use which is fantastic.

Just do ./install_arch.sh