Without getting too far into the weeds, but we probably will, lol.
Lunduke posted a story yesterday aboutr DHH making a point of PewDiePie, Typecraft and ThePrimeagen and them urging their huge followings to switch to Linux, Arch and Hyprland in particular.
I can clearly see why Hyprland. It’s got an immense amount of eye candy and a very easy config file(s) to work with.You can literally change the work flow to work for you in a single line. Plus there are now gui tools to configure it with. Personally I love and would love to use Hyprland daily. Burt I cant because of Wayland and it’s software comparability issues.
But why Arch?
DHH points out in his post that Arch is a notoriously know as a difficult distro and I’ll add that it is one of the hard nosed RTFM crowd. But not so much any more.
Arch is a great distro for those that have the time, knowledge and (most importantly) discipline to use it. Unlike OpenMandriva. I’ve been running it daily on the on 2 desktops at home, 1 in the office and on the work laptop since January and not once has any of those installs been borked during an update. I did a couple of reinstalls but those were caused by my own boneheaded screw ups.
Arch, in my experience, has caused me to reinstall by doing a normal upgrade or even installing a new app.
So, was Arch able to re brand themselves as an easy to use, new user friendly distro and I didnt see it somewhere?
Is it because of Valve and Steam’s use of it?
Is it the sheer size and age of the Arch community?
Did all these things come together at just the right time and Arch was in the right place at the right time?
Or is Arch going to be the next big distro on the list to get the EEE (embrace, extend, extinguish) treatment?
Keep an eye on the board members cause only time will tell.
I want to think that Arch was just in the right place at the right time. And I want to think that Arch has re-branded themselves. I also want to think that Steam really is using it because it’s a superior OS compared to Windows and not just because they can get a free OS with free/cheap labor prices out of devs. But after watching Red Hat/IBM, Microsoft, Google, Apple and countless other smaller tech companies grift into the open source space over the years I’m going to be cautiously optimistic. I’m not saying Steam is a bad company I’m saying I dont trust them. I also dont trust systemd even though I do use it in a distro.
Being in the opensource community since 2010 I’ve seen many projects get the EEE treatment. Many of you have been here a lot longer than I have and seen more than your fair share this.
What are your thoughts?
And more importantly what effect could this have on the smaller projects like our own OpenMandriva?
Lunduke link:
https://x.com/LundukeJournal/status/1940993335155732818
More links in DHH’s post: