[pqb]

> I have found that a lot of people _think_ Ubuntu is safe/stable.

As a 10+ years long user of Ubuntu and its derivatives (currently Pop_OS!) I would say I know it is stable. Ubuntu still feels like a polished Debian for a typical computer user, which has many of pre-configuration made that non-techies and not-that-much-knowledgable persons will love. I don't like many decision they have made, e.g. favouring snap over apt, complete lack of a proper GUI for managing installed software/packages, sometimes missing packages that are on Debian but not on Ubuntu (though, the deb file can be downloaded and installed with a single command). After tremendous work done by GNOME users to tweak gnome-shell I have never had a freeze / hang up since three years on Ubuntu. I am also happy having recent drivers from Nvidia that works good enough to also never see any problem in 5+ year history related to GPU card. I also didn't have a problem to install drivers for my printer and scanner, which have a dedicated installer (deb file). I am just a happy user.

Calling kernel for a reason Ubuntu feels stable is wrong I think. I have tried many times Arch and I had many occasions to be not very convinced to its "stability". The most annoying issue I had on Arch was related to sound - when I was changing volume in Spotify client it was changing the system volume. Imagine the situation when you had a headphones with a volume level set at 3-4% and you have increased it by 20-50%, a nightmare for ears and hearth. After that "feature" I have completely removed Arch from my disk and I am not looking back to it nor other rolling distro.

These days I also don't see any unique selling point that Arch had in the past. It is still known for a best documentation and the most recent software. During last 2-3 years I don't remember if I had been complaining on outdated software in Ubuntu. If I would do then there are awesome projects like flatpak, xbps[0] or nix[1] that can be installed without changing my OS and they provide everything what I probably can win using Arch.

[0]: https://voidlinux.org/

[1]: https://nixos.org/

[pimeys]

For me, why I like Arch is its package system and how easy it is to have the most recent libraries and tools for gaming.

I also like Ubuntu and I've used NixOS in the past. What I don't miss from Ubuntu are the PPA's, AUR is much much much nicer. If you plan to do any gaming in Linux, Arch is in the end much more convenient due to AUR.

And, I'm biased a bit because my installation is always quite minimal. I only have i3 and my tools for programming, and whatever is needed to run proton games.

[pqb]

> What I don't miss from Ubuntu are the PPA's,

I have just looked into the extra sources to see if I have any PPA there but I was surprised to see the only one, which come with a Pop_OS! to bring some custom tiling manager and other tweaks.

Frankly, era of PPAs has ended. I don't find many software packages shared on Launchpad nor I won't trust PPA owners to install anything from most of PPAs. There are better ways to share software and easier to set own APT server. Today, almost all software distributors I know (Microsoft, Slack, Sublime, Spotify, Hashicorp...) have their APT repository on also their server or on a packagecloud[0] / JFrog Artifcatory[1]

> If you plan to do any gaming in Linux.

To be honest, I find KVM with GPU pass-though a better idea overall (I can use software like Affinity Designer thanks to that). KVM is a really top-notch software if you know to configure it properly :) However, proton and wine can be installed without any problem on Ubuntu.

> And, I'm biased a bit because my installation is always quite minimal. I only have i3 and my tools for programming, and whatever is needed to run proton games.

I have a complete range of various programming tools and SDKs that hardly can be packed in 240GB disk. My current setup is rather small: Jetbrains IDEs, Unity3D, Qt Creator/Designer, emacs with orgmode, vim, various chat apps, Spotify, Syncthing, Sublime Text & Merge, rofi, pass, fossil, nginx, flutter, nimrod, nodejs, deno, zsh, golang, chicken-scheme, milena+ivona, orca, backup tools, terraform with terragrunt, multipass and some dotfiles and private scripts. It takes about 3h to complete format disk and install OS and provision all software I need (thanks to terraform). My DE is GNOME with a taskbar (Dash To Panel extension) instead of a dock. Is it minimal? Likely no, but it does its job.

[0]: https://packagecloud.io/

[1]: https://jfrog.com/artifactory/

[pimeys]

It's all good! Happy that we have many open source distros to choose from. I've used Linux since 1995, and have always a soft spot for Debian based distros. For some weird reason though, Arch has been my main driver for some years and right now, I see the distribution to be not an issue anymore. I see no reason to change, and what I have just works fine for my main tasks.