🏆 The entire story

In 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:

• The hours upon hours I’ve saved updating and installing stuff because pacman is so fast.

• The 100’s of packaged tools and applications that save me from installing them manually.

• The AUR, which has everything that is not already packaged, making it easy to install even the most obscure piece of software.

• 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.

• 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.