76 engineers on Hacker News describe using Arch Linux first-hand: 34 endorse it, 4 regret it, 5 are mixed.
“It's actually surprising just how reliable Arch is”
endorse · personal · ndsipa_pomu · 2025-12-23 · source ↗ · wrong label?“It's been great, yeah, but it's still a massive, long drawn exercise of friction”
mixed · personal · 0.2 yr · Levitz · 2025-12-21 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've had to arch-chroot from a live usb several times over the last five years to fix broken upgrades”
mixed · personal · 5 yr · throwup238 · 2024-12-31 · source ↗ · wrong label?“now I have settled on arch/manjaro/lxde, I can get away with a cheap machine”
endorse · personal · shams93 · 2024-12-30 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Arch rules. The AUR is great, but honestly for me it's more about how deeply I know the system”
endorse · personal · arittr · 2024-06-12 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've had friction in the past with Fedora and Arch on Dell because it takes 6 to 9 months for all the drivers to make it upstream”
regret · personal · freedomben · 2024-05-21 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've been using Arch on my personal and work laptops for probably 7 years now and the only time it had been a problem has been due to layer 8 issues”
endorse · production · 7 yr · glitchcrab · 2023-12-31 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Arch came with some additional challenges that I don't experience from other distros, mostly revolving around how software packages are found and installed.”
regret · personal · starttoaster · 2023-12-30 · source ↗ · wrong label?“My main driver is a HP Elitebook 845 G9 (so the 14" version) running Arch. I have been using it for the past six months”
endorse · personal · 0.5 yr · nicolaslem · 2022-12-30 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've been using arch for years both at home and for work, I love rolling release!”
endorse · production · tsukurimashou · 2022-12-19 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I agree, Arch is amazing. I haven't been using it for a few years, I've been on Ubuntu”
endorse · personal · mort96 · 2022-12-18 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Been using arch as my first and only *nix for about 4 years now, most of the pain points have been smoothed out”
endorse · personal · 4 yr · Sugimot0 · 2022-12-16 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I love Arch for its simplicity and performance. But it just wasn't productive for me to get everyday tasks done.”
mixed · personal · rmbyrro · 2022-11-24 · source ↗ · wrong label?“over seven years of running Arch on a personal server I've had a total of three instances of breakage”
mixed · personal · 7 yr · mananaysiempre · 2022-11-02 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I have been using Arch primarily which has a great wiki for installing”
endorse · personal · sakebomb · 2021-12-09 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I'm running Arch Linux with GNOME on Wayland. It's mostly perfect for me out-of-the-box”
endorse · personal · _qbjt · 2021-12-07 · source ↗ · wrong label?“After that certain things broke with updates. Several other things never worked or had its quirks.”
regret · personal · josephferano · 2021-09-02 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I installed Arch plus i3 and it worked like a charm.”
endorse · personal · abetlen · 2020-12-16 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I really like Arch, but I wouldn't use it in production.”
mixed · personal · bierjunge · 2020-12-10 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I always loved arch for its minimalistic approach... it is still my favourite distro, even after those sleepless nights.”
endorse · personal · ramtatatam · 2020-11-13 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've had the same Arch install since they have launched on x86_64 (so quite a while ago)”
endorse · personal · 11 yr · qalmakka · 2018-12-13 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Never had to mess with anything I didn't want to mess with (I use i3 and write most of my own utilities)!”
endorse · personal · pard68 · 2018-12-09 · source ↗ · wrong label?“In 4 years of running it (and updating weekly) I have not had any major problems with updates breaking things”
endorse · personal · 4 yr · simon_acca · 2018-02-06 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Arch is the only distro I will recommend... it's the only Linux install I've had that "just works" and works.”
endorse · personal · erikbye · 2017-09-14 · source ↗ · wrong label?“this is why I'm using arch. It's the first (binary) distribution I tried that eight years down the line still works”
endorse · personal · 8 yr · fmap · 2017-09-14 · source ↗ · wrong label?“ibus (w/ mozc/kkc/libthai) has been working very reliably so far on Arch (been using since February)”
endorse · personal · sirn · 2016-12-28 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Arch Linux: my significant other. a year since she adopted it, and she can find her way around just fine.”
endorse · personal · 1 yr · imode · 2016-12-07 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Now I use Arch Linux ... Arch Linux has the best documentation I've seen”
endorse · personal · reedlaw · 2015-07-31 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've been using Arch Linux for over two years now (not in production; I'm not brave enough), I've hardly had any issues at all with its rolling updates.”
endorse · personal · 2 yr · logicchains · 2015-07-27 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I LOVE LOVE ARCH. I use OpenSUSE at work. It is 100% my choice and I always feel that Arch is great”
endorse · personal · baldfat · 2015-06-08 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I previously ran Arch Linux on the W530 with the Intel card and also had no issues.”
endorse · personal · jlgaddis · 2015-05-30 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I haven't been using Arch for very long (not more than a year), but I never had any issues that would break the system.”
endorse · personal · 1 yr · osense · 2014-12-31 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I'm running Arch Linux on the same machine (quad-core, 32 GB RAM, 480 GB SSD + 500 GB SATA) and it flies.”
endorse · personal · jlgaddis · 2014-11-27 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've got it running Arch Linux with no features unusable.”
endorse · personal · grannyg00se · 2013-12-28 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I have run Arch in production for the past 3 years on about 10 servers without any problems”
endorse · production · 3 yr · yogo · 2013-12-10 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I'm extremely happy with my Arch+i3 system.”
endorse · personal · rob05c · 2013-10-14 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've used archlinux for a few years before I got tired of it breaking my apps with the updates”
regret · personal · mvanotti · 2013-09-20 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've been using Arch for about 1 year now and I'm so much happier than I have been with anything else.”
endorse · personal · 1 yr · bhrgunatha · 2011-12-16 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've been using it for the last five or six years now and have had no desire to switch to a new main distro”
endorse · personal · 5 yr · cookiecaper · 2011-11-13 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I have been using it for almost a year and the most atractive thing is the rolling release update.”
endorse · personal · 1 yr · CrystalBlood · 2011-11-08 · source ↗ · wrong label?“So I liked building stuff from source on Arch better.”
endorse · personal · hollerith · 2011-11-02 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've been using Arch for a few months... the extensive wiki and large community make it relatively quick and painless to figure out what's going on”
endorse · personal · 0.25 yr · gdl · 2010-11-14 · source ↗ · wrong label?“That I'm using Arch and using mostly the TTY isn't an issue.”
neutral · personal · ho_schi · 2024-05-15 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I too have been using Firefox on Wayland for some time now (on Arch Linux).”
neutral · personal · aquova · 2023-12-19 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We published our internal doc for how we install our Arch setup with fully encrypted BTRFS”
neutral · production · freeqaz · 2022-12-13 · source ↗ · wrong label?“The worst incident I can remember from several years of running an Arch VPS is when they had relocated some /lib or /usr/lib files”
neutral · personal · vonunov · 2022-08-17 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I run arch linux in a vm with docker installed”
neutral · personal · jillesvangurp · 2021-12-16 · source ↗ · wrong label?“A few Gentoo and Arch boxes at smaller businesses.”
neutral · production · doubled112 · 2021-12-08 · source ↗ · wrong label?“in half a dozen years of running Arch on several machines, the only way I could get into this particular failure state”
neutral · personal · 6 yr · mananaysiempre · 2021-08-15 · source ↗ · wrong label?“After the next upgrade on arch linux where i had to fix the setup and reinstall some plugins/dependencies”
neutral · personal · Bumkatio · 2021-03-18 · source ↗ · wrong label?“if I want to play in the wild world of new hotness I have Arch for that.”
neutral · personal · syshum · 2020-12-13 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I too was using Arch before and a friend convinced me to do the leap and I don't really regret it.”
neutral · personal · jaemoe · 2020-11-08 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Based on experiences with Arch, Debian 10, Fedora 31 beta”
neutral · personal · orhmeh09 · 2019-10-11 · source ↗ · wrong label?“which runs an Arch Linux chroot in order to gain a modern cross-compiler. It's a doozy!”
neutral · production · coldpie · 2019-08-07 · source ↗ · wrong label?“The only reason why we run it is because we know it. I wouldn't have used Arch on any production things personally.”
neutral · production · Foxboron · 2018-07-10 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Updating eclipse on arch linux meant that i have to readd the marketplace url for the proper version”
neutral · personal · sigi45 · 2018-02-23 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I started GNU/Linux distribution hopping after archlinux's maintainers decided to migrate to systemd”
neutral · personal · pecg · 2017-12-28 · source ↗ · wrong label?“while I do use Debian, I used to use Arch”
neutral · personal · steveklabnik · 2017-12-21 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've been using a Thinkpad for my Arch build for years”
neutral · personal · ratsimihah · 2017-11-23 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We ran Arch the entire time my team was on these and we kept the wiki up for this product.”
neutral · production · storrgie · 2016-11-27 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We decided to go with Arch Linux to gain access to packages as they release, rather than wait for the next iteration of Ubuntu or Fedora to get updates.”
neutral · personal · kminehart · 2016-10-28 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we had a few of those in Arch Linux when we moved to systemd.”
neutral · production · scrollaway · 2016-10-01 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've been using both OS X and GNU/Linux (Arch) for several years”
neutral · personal · carlosrg · 2015-07-24 · source ↗ · wrong label?“By default, I believe systemd will skip the fsck if running on battery power (this is the case on Arch, at least).”
neutral · personal · chimeracoder · 2014-12-21 · source ↗ · wrong label?“On Arch: Randomly pull it in from the repos or AUR, fiddle with it till I am bored”
neutral · personal · LeoSolaris · 2014-12-15 · source ↗ · wrong label?“used to run Arch till it got infected with this garbage too.”
neutral · personal · ultramancool · 2014-09-23 · source ↗ · wrong label?“The devs these days tend to prefer Arch and Ubuntu”
neutral · production · eitally · 2014-04-13 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I am an Arch user - with our company running their servers on FreeBSD”
neutral · personal · tete · 2013-11-09 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Been using uzbl on Arch for a few months now.”
neutral · personal · 0.25 yr · dkersten · 2012-12-30 · source ↗ · wrong label?“One screen is all Windows, and the other is xmonad and emacs on Arch Linux on VirtualBox.”
neutral · personal · rcb · 2012-11-11 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I'm already on Arch Linux on most of my machines”
neutral · personal · andreadallera · 2011-11-26 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I have Arch Linux in a VM that I use for development.”
neutral · personal · gks · 2011-11-10 · source ↗ · wrong label?“On my Sony laptop, I run Arch Linux with Awesome”
neutral · personal · _b8r0 · 2010-11-08 · source ↗ · wrong label?“It was super easy to create an archlinux base box and i've been using chef”
neutral · personal · gnubardt · 2010-10-08 · source ↗ · wrong label?