Arch Linux - Best distro ever?

The author says he moved from macOS to Linux, tested Fedora 25 and found some defaults better than Ubuntu, but ran into problems with GNOME Online Accounts. On Arch Linux, with GNOME 3.22 and gnome-online-accounts installed, Google account integration worked without expiring tokens.

He presents Arch as a distro that stays close to recent software without breaking as often as other systems, and highlights pacman, AUR, pacaur, and asdf as practical tools for packages and language versions. He also argues that Arch is useful for beginners because it exposes the underlying parts of Linux, and he recommends the Arch Wiki and Arch Linux Anywhere.

Reading notes

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• Arch is presented as offering a better balance between stable and cutting-edge software than many major distros.
• The author prefers Arch because recent packages like PostgreSQL 9.6 are available in the main repositories.
• Arch’s rolling upgrade model is contrasted with big upgrades that can break systems or force reinstallations.
• AUR is described as a user-maintained collection of PKGBUILD recipes that makes third-party software easier to install.
• pacaur is recommended as a wrapper that can manage both official repositories and AUR packages.
• asdf is presented as a version manager for multiple languages such as Clojure, Elixir, Go, Ruby, Rust, and Node.js.
• The author lists several desktop packages and tools he installs for multimedia, fonts, development, and applications.
• For desktop responsiveness, he recommends sysctl tuning and suggests the Zen kernel for desktop use.
• He warns against using those custom kernels on production servers.
• The conclusion is that Arch feels polished, fast, and under control, even for users who want a system they can learn from.