I don’t really understand the question. All you have to do is run archinstall and then add a desktop environment like KDE and that’s like 80% what other distros do.
I think arch used to be hard to get started but not anymore. That’s reserved for gentoo now
It’s really simple: the apps preloaded are the apps DHH uses. It’s his distro people have been duped into using.
There’s also archinstall which comes with the latest os image which is just like any other installer and holds your hand through the process.
It’s really very simple to get arch installed
While not the same I use an rss-to-email service that hits the minimal sweet spot for me
It seems like there might be exceptions to the “no partial upgrades” which has not been discussed: you can pin your version of the kernel primarily to give time for packages like zfs to catch up to the latest kernel
I’ve never used bcachefs and only recently read about some of the drama. I wish the project the best but at this point it is hard to beat zfs
If you want low effort high value then get a synology 2 bay. If you want full control over the host OS then run Debian/arch with zfs
I didn’t use any of the terms you used in your post. I’m not using those products in part for the reasons I discussed but also I don’t see it particularly useful beyond a cult of personality building it.
I used shotcut for light video editing and it worked great, no complaints
Here’s my homelab journey: https://bower.sh/homelab
Basically, containers and GPU is annoying to deal with, GPU pass through to a VM is even more annoying. Most modern hobbyist GPUs also do not support splitting your GPU. At the end of the day, it’s a bunch of tinkering which is valuable if that’s your goal. I learned what I wanted, now I’m back to arch running everything with systemd and quadlet
I’m of mixed views about this. Omarchy is popular purely because of DHH. I don’t see anything of benefit beyond the notoriety of a famous dev.
There’s also some dissenting opinion about DHH in general that taints the project: https://drewdevault.com/2025/09/24/2025-09-24-Cloudflare-and-fascists.html
Being based on hyprland also has some potential social issues.
I don’t get why cloudflare didn’t donate to arch instead.
For something super lightweight you can try https://pr.pico.sh/
I agree. For everyone’s sake they should rip Rust out and put all that effort into RedoxOS. There is way too much misalignment for this to be constructive.
Quadlet