People switching to Linux: But why?

Coffee break
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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:

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Arch, at least in the past 5 years that I have used it, has never been hard to use. The hardest part was the installation being a CLI rather than the calamares GUI. After install it is no different than learning how to use any other distro. I’m convinced that the people spreading the “arch is hard” narrative are just the Ubuntu fanboys.

I think people making their jump to Linux should use something with plenty of documentation, and that means Arch or Arch-based.

Hyprland is good for me with my laptop. My usage is just a browser and libre office, so I haven’t run into any issues. But if you do anything more involved it might not be ideal.

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I’ve heard the arch is hard story since 2010. It’s nothing new but is based in historic reality.
It used to be a pain in the butt to install. Not ever Gentoo level but still a lot harder than it is now.
Now the hardest part about Arch is the discipline of the user to maintain it. I would argue that the vast majority of people that use a computer do not have that level of discipline.

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I think the biggest issue for most Linux newcomers is using the terminal. In that regard there isn’t a big difference between distros. Desktop environment is probably the second largest roadblock, but plasma is the easiest transition from what I’ve seen with friends. I haven’t tried Discover or dnfdragora, but if we have a good GUI package manager that will certainly help.

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This question, really depends on when you ask it. In the late 90’s, early 00’s it was about giving people options to modify/own the software on their computer. With the advent of high speed internet, it was because the prevalent options were no cost. This seems to be the primary reason now. This brings along exactly the kind of users you would think when you think of products or services that are no cost.

Somewhere along the line, FOSS foundations started taking in numerous amounts of donations from their perceived competition. Their mistake was thinking that their competition’s money could be used to compete, or that the money did not come with conditions once the foundations started getting hooked on it. Most people in the US don’t realize that 501(c)3’s only need to use 3% of their intake on the cause or goal of the foundation. GDC, Goodwill, and many other high visibility entities are highly criticized as much as the Linux Foundation for adhering to these practices.

Will Arch be the new distro base? You could almost argue that it already is. Projects like ArcoLinux, Artix, Manjaro, KaOS, and many others have either attached directly to the Arch repos, or built their own repos to serve their specific purposes. It’s really a system building distro, so it’s footprint in the set-top market is going to be predictable. I don’t think it will be the new mainstream distro that caters to people with little to no experience. That is not to say projects (like Manjaro) will not come about to fulfill that need.

They will still suffer from the same foundation and financing issues that other distros do, because they do not generate their own revenue. The normal use case for a PC was set by the market shift to throwaway devices in the mid 00’s. People are not given the tools and knowledge to own, use, and maintain a computer longer than 6 months if they bought it off the shelf. Most boutique PC’s are priced out of range of the average consumer. Unless they didn’t have some knowledge of computer hardware, then building their own might not be an option. Computers therefore, have become an interactive TV.

I don’t think Linux and the distros that ship it would have been what they are now without being a charity case and catering to people that didn’t want to pay for it, for better or worse. There is no way to inform people of the value of a thing they didn’t earn or labor for. This is regardless of the use being for personal or business.

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I tell alot of people that if they want the “Arch experience” of building a system up from a bare install then just install Debian CLI and add on whatever you want. I don’t have time for bleeding edge FOMO and these days with Distrobox & Flatpack base distro doesn’t even matter as long as you are getting the basic features you want.

Heck, I am even considering giving Bazzite a whirl just for the lols.