🏆 The entire story
Cliff Brake May 06, 2025 #arch #BCRIn debates about technology, people bring up points, such as an Arch Linux update occasionally breaking and not booting; thus, Arch Linux is bad.
While the above point is true, it is also irrelevant because it is not the entire story. What about:
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The hours upon hours I've saved updating and installing stuff because pacman is so fast.
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The 100's of packaged tools and applications that save me from installing them manually.
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The AUR, which has everything that is not already packaged, making it easy to install even the most obscure piece of software.
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The benefits of using the latest and best versions of everything. After all, if something is getting better, may as well benefit from it now vs later.
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The simplicity of PKGBUILD, which allows me to create and modify my own packages easily.
I could go on, but you get the point. After running Arch for over 10 years, let's conservatively say I've saved an hour a week by using Arch -- that is 520 hours. I've spent maybe 5 hours working through broken stuff in Arch in 10 years. That is a benefit-cost ratio (BCR) of 104. So yes, the 5 hours are real, but they are irrelevant.