I stopped using Arch Linux

I used Arch for over a year but I recently switched back to Ubuntu.

Arch is great! It has an amazing wiki page, an active forum and an impressive amount of packages. I found a lot of developer tools will readily give you the pacman commands to install on Arch which is very convenient. There’s a community around Arch and people enjoy using it.

Even though I enjoyed using Arch, my experience with it was not all positive. As a rolling distro I found Arch to break every so often. I cannot list everything that broke over a year’s time but I can talk about the main ones I remember.

Bluetooth headphones were one issue that I couldn’t resolve. I have the Samsung Buds2 Pro and very often before I could connect, I first had to forget the device and then pair it as a new one. I tried bluez, bluetoothctl and a few other approaches and couldn’t get it to work consistently.

Another problem I had was copying and pasting to Electron apps. There are quite a few apps built on Electron such as VSCode and Signal. This was not directly an issue with Arch, it was a bug in the electron framework. But it was still related to Arch because of its nature being a rolling distro and always using the latest versions of everything. In this case, I installed a different version of electron to resolve this.

I had an issue with full screen when playing videos which I blogged about.

I also experienced problems with the wifi after one upgrade. The issue was that after I closed my lid on the laptop and then reopened it after a while my wifi was disconnected. I had troubles finding available wifis via the KDE tool and the system froze for a good few seconds. Eventually, I discovered this was a bug with the 6.14.2 version of the Linux kernel.

Because of issues like these that can happen randomly after an upgrade, I decided to switch to a more stable distro. Now I’m running Ubuntu 24.04 LTS.