I’m curious about trying Arch Linux, but I want to know what’s difficult or impossible with it first, as that’s usually what stops me sticking with a distro.
I’m particularly interested in software/driver support. For example, NVIDIA doesn’t mention Arch in its CUDA download page.
UPDATE: OK it sounds like Arch is for bleeding edge. That sounds fun, but I like things simple and reliable, so I’ll still with Ubuntu. I might run Arch on my secondary drive, or toy with it in Docker.
There are cuda packages for arch. I can confirm they work.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/GPGPU
Edit- to add i haven’t found arch’s limit, it feels like i am bound only by my own limit in my time, ability, and willingness to tinker with my setup. arch itself is widely supported, it has many official packages through pacman, and then additional through the “arch user repository” (AUR) so chances are most of the things you want or need have a package that can be installed with an AUR helper (like yay/paru which install from both pacman and AUR). In other distros you get more of a one-size fits all and you lose some of that ability to change things whereas arch you’re giving a minimal setup and left to build the system to your liking. It does take more time and expertise than other distros but it does give you more control. For me the trade off was an easy decision, but it’s not something i blanket recommend to everyone.
the first time I installed arch on my T420s, I was blown away! a minimalistic install, done in no time. no cruft of any kind, latest software versions, and the speed - the thing booted more than twice as fast as Fedora! I was ecstatic, how come everybody’s not using this!?
but then I needed a piece of software that wasn’t available and flatpak wouldn’t work in that scenario. rpm and deb available but nothing for arch. OK, so there’s this AUR thingy - cool, so like a repo, right? one copy/paste and I’m done…
not fucking so. what this does is fetch the source code and then compiles and builds it on your puny dual-core…I can’t imagine what a full system upgrade looks like, compiling tons of stuff for hours. that’s 1998 linux, I thought we were done with this.
not a week later, a normal system update with no errors made the thing unbootable. yeah, said one laconic reply, you really should keep up with breaking changes by way of the mailing list. do what now? the what now? dude, this just became a job.
so that was it for me. thanks to btrfs subvolumes, all my stuff was already there and ready to go for the new OS.