3 reasons I'm quitting Arch Linux—after using it for 5 years

Published Aug 2, 2026, 4:45 PM EDT Dibakar Ghosh is a tech journalist at How-To Geek, where he focuses on Linux, Windows, and productivity tools. His goal is simple—help readers at every skill level get more done with the tech they use every day. He began his writing career in 2016 with WordPress tutorials, later moving into digital marketing, where he spent years reviewing complex tools for marketers. His work has also appeared on Authority Hacker, where he’s shared in-depth guides on digital workflows and online productivity. That experience now shapes his journalism, blending analytical depth with practical, real-world advice. When he’s not writing or testing software, Dibakar is usually watching movies or playing video games. He’s a huge Christopher Nolan fan and a strong proponent of the theater experience. In gaming, he has sunk hundreds of hours into Insomniac’s Spider-Man series, Returnal, Prototype, Darksiders, and Final Fantasy titles. I've been using Linux for a decade now, and around the five-year mark, I went all-in on Arch. I daily drove Garuda Linux for four of those years, dabbled with CachyOS and a few other Arch-based distros, wrote a small mountain of articles about Arch-based distros, and told anyone who would listen to give them a shot. And while it's been a good run, I think it's finally time to call it quits. I figure I owe you all an explanation, and it really boils down to three reasons. I don’t care about bleeding-edge anymore Stability and predictability have become more important Credit: Lucas Gouveia/How-To Geek | Artimari/Shutterstock Access to bleeding-edge software was one of the main reasons I switched to Arch in the first place. I had a major case of FOMO (fear of missing out)—and, to some extent, I still do. Knowing there was a newer version of a piece of software out there with features I wasn't using would drive me crazy. The biggest example was back in March 2021, when GNOME 40 launched. I was using Pop!_OS at the time, and I desperately wanted the new Activities Overview and the horizontal workflow that came with it. But neither Ubuntu nor Pop!_OS had GNOME 40. Even Fedora—the distro everyone calls cutting-edge—wouldn't ship it until Fedora 34 arrived in late April. Meanwhile, my friends in the Linux community were already running GNOME 40 on Arch the week it was released. That was the week I installed Manjaro, and I've been using Arch-based distros ever since—until now. Don't get me wrong—I still enjoy getting new packages and the latest features as quickly as possible. But my tolerance for the way those updates sometimes break my workflow has gotten a lot thinner. Back then, if a package update broke something, I'd treat it like a puzzle. I'd research the issue, dig into the technical weeds, and fix it—and honestly, I enjoyed the process. These days, though, I don't have that kind of free time. If I manage to carve out two or three spare hours at the end of the day, I'd rather spend them with friends and family than troubleshooting my PC. The breakages that sting the most are the ones tied to major system updates. It's one of the reasons I left GNOME in the first place. The desktop is too minimal to be usable without extensions, and every major GNOME release just broke most of the extensions I relied on on a regular basis. KDE has treated me better because many of the features I rely on are built in, but it isn't immune either. When Plasma 6 replaced Plasma 5, plenty of the widgets and themes I depended on stopped working. To be fair, I haven't experienced any system-breaking issues recently. But there's still the constant maintenance: reviewing pacdiffs, merging configuration files, or hunting through a redesigned interface because an update moved the setting I use every day. At this point, I want an operating system that stays consistent so I can build my workflow on top of it—not one where the foundation keeps shifting beneath me. I'm tired of the AUR security concerns Using an OS shouldn’t feel like a part-time job Credit: Jordan Gloor / How-To GeekCredit: A typical Arch Linux AUR entry The second big reason I switched to Arch was the AUR (Arch User Repository). It's arguably the largest software repository in the Linux world, with close to 100,000 packages. It's a treasure trove if you enjoy discovering new apps and expanding your workflow, and for years it was my favorite thing about running Arch. But the AUR is community-maintained. The Arch developers don't oversee it and anyone can upload a package. That means a malicious actor could publish a compromised package, and if an unsuspecting user installs it, their system is toast. As a result, using the AUR requires a lot of vigilance. Before building a package, you should inspect the PKGBUILD and ensure there isn't anything suspicious in the code. That's a layer of friction that would put off most users, but I was willing to accept it. What eventually wore me down is that the vigilance doesn't end after installation. Imagine you install a package after deciding it's safe. Now, the maintainer at the time could eventually stop maintaining it, leaving the package orphaned. Someone else can then adopt it, and that new maintainer might have malicious intentions and slip harmful code into a future update. In other words, it's not enough to vet a package only when you first install it. You should also make a habit of checking it again before installing updates. And because Arch is a rolling-release distro that you're updating every week—or at least every couple of weeks—that verification becomes a recurring chore. Sure, you could argue that you should simply avoid the AUR. But for me, the AUR is Arch's biggest selling point. If I'm avoiding it, why am I using Arch at all? Stable release distros are good enough for Linux gaming Other distros have caught up Credit: Lucas Gouveia / How-To Geek The final thing that attracted me to Arch was gaming. I was a PC gamer through and through, and when I switched from Windows, I needed a distro where most of my games would actually run. The combination of bleeding-edge packages and the AUR meant Arch always had the latest Proton builds, graphics drivers, and gaming tools before anyone else. If a game could run on Linux, the packages that made it possible usually landed on Arch-based distros first. Today, though, the rest of the Linux ecosystem has largely caught up. There are now several gaming-focused distros that aren't based on Arch. Take Nobara, for example. It's a Fedora-based distro created by GloriousEggroll—the developer behind Proton-GE and a Red Hat engineer. By combining his work on Proton with his professional expertise using Red Hat tools, he's built one of the best Linux gaming distros available today. Then there's Bazzite, which is built on Fedora Atomic. Its immutable design makes accidental system breakage much less likely, and it even includes a HTPC (Home Theater PC) version that boots directly into SteamOS’s big picture mode—giving users a home console-like experience. I should also mention that the options aren’t limited to Fedora either. PikaOS is a newer gaming distro based on Debian. While I haven't used it personally, it has earned a strong reputation within the Linux gaming community. That said, you can also just install the necessary packages on Ubuntu or another distro you’re using, and it should be able to run all your Steam games. The point is that you no longer need CachyOS—or any other Arch-based distro—to enjoy Linux gaming. The performance, compatibility, and overall experience are now excellent on several non-Arch alternatives. So, which distro am I switching to? It starts with a K and ends with Ubuntu For context, I wasn't running vanilla Arch—I was using Garuda Linux. After deciding to move on, the first distro I tried was Fedora because it strikes an appealing balance between stability and access to cutting-edge software. The problem was Fedora's commitment to shipping only open-source software by default. I use an NVIDIA GPU, which works best with NVIDIA's proprietary drivers, and those aren't available in Fedora's official repositories. You can install them through third-party repositories like RPM Fusion, and I tried, but I ran into one problem after another getting everything working. Maybe it was just my lack of experience with Fedora, but the experience left me frustrated. The next obvious choice was Nobara, which includes NVIDIA drivers out of the box. But as I mentioned earlier, it's maintained primarily by one person. GloriousEggroll has openly said that Nobara is a hobby project and I just wasn't comfortable trusting it with my primary workstation. And so, in the end, I finally settled on Kubuntu. It's an official Ubuntu flavor that pairs Ubuntu's long-term stability with KDE Plasma instead of GNOME. Kubuntu 26.04 LTS ships with Linux 7.0 and a recent enough version of Plasma that I don't feel like I'm missing anything. It's a setup I can comfortably lock myself into for the next two years without any grievances. Arch is still a solid distro To be clear, I'm not leaving because Arch changed or somehow got worse. It's still the same distribution it was when I switched in 2021, with the same philosophy and core strengths. Back then, those strengths were exactly what I wanted. Today, they aren't. I no longer want a cutting-edge system where every major update has the potential to disrupt my workflow—whether that's by breaking something I rely on or changing the interface in ways I have to relearn. I want a stable foundation I can build on without constantly worrying that the ground beneath me is shifting. Likewise, I don't think Arch has become any less secure either. The AUR isn't more dangerous than it used to be—the underlying trust model has always been the same. Nothing about Arch has fundamentally changed. What has changed is me and what I expect from my workstation.