Is ARCH worth it for someone who has had endless headaches with other distros & just wants to be able to download steam & download wine to use her drawing tablet? Asking for a friend

No.

Even Arch itself is a terribly designed distribution.

  • There are no full time Arch developers, so development can stagnate any any time. For example, the GNU toolchain was unmaintained for an entire year until the community complained about it, which is a huge security risk.
  • The AUR is devoid of packaging standards and any random person can upload malware onto the repository. This is awful from a security standpoint, as packages aren't vetted unlike other major distributions.
  • Pacman didn't have signed signatured for years and still doesn't have proper dependency transactions. The reason that pacman is so fast is because it doesn't do these validatiom checks like apt, dnf and zypper. Furthermore, pacman is run as root...
  • Arch has no official secure boot support, and the methods to implemenr it are cumbersome and not upto stsndard. The wiki even warns you that secure boot can brick your system. Good lord. *Arch is non minimal despite people claiming otherwise. By default packages aren't segmented, so you either install all the packages or none. For instance, libreoffice bundles everything under the same package. In Fedora and OpenSUSE, those are split so the user is able to choose which parts of the software is to be installed. E.g. Only installing LibreOffice Writer and LibreOffics Calc. This is not possible on Arch due to the KISS principle... which moves onto:
  • The KISS principle is a stupid practice. By making packaging and maintenance as simple as possible, that means Arch is bloated by design, since nothing is segmented. *The devs think that its the users responsibility to fix packages that the maintainers pushed out broken, and there's no real standards for testing packages in the core repos. At best all they do is hold them back for testing for a week or two and hope for the best that nothing is broken. It's a joke.

All in all Arch is a poorly engineered system with some serious flaws. The only reason Arch is held together is because there's enough users to report issues. In any other instances, Arch will never be a production ready machine and will always solely remain a home desktop distro. For everything else it's simply too unreliable to be used for serious work.

/r/archlinux Thread