this post was submitted on 16 Apr 2026
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The problem is that you didn't state your premises very well, making your argument harder to follow. (You also argue very broadly.)
You first argued that Arch is not a usable operating system, which is a bold claim given that it's one of the most popular Linux distros. While you did mention a workstation before, the claim regarding Arch wasn't obviously connected to that, implying that Arch is not useful for any purpose.
When asked to back up that claim you talked about workstations for nontechnical users (which hadn't been mentioned before). That didn't match your earlier claims; you made a broad statement and then defended a narrower one. That's indeed a motte and bailey argument even if you simply forgot to mention some details.
Also, if the users are nontechnical they're probably not the ones who administer the workstations so they don't need to care about technical details as long as you can provide a desktop and the applications they need.
After that you declared that any OS that needs more than 15 minutes to set up is useless, which amounts to pretty much all of them unless you don't engage in any configuration at all. And, well, it's another bold claim. It's basically on par with "Mint is completely pointless because unlike Alpine I can't use it to ship 5 MB Docker images"; you're basically declaring that your specific use case is equivalent to any use case any Linux user will ever have.
A coherent version of your argument would be "I don't like Arch because when I set up workstations for Linux-averse users it was much more work than Mint and I prefer something that's quick and easy to set up". And fair enough, that's a perfectly valid reason for you to prefer Mint over Arch. But it's not an indication that Arch is worse in general or even unusable. It's just a bad fit for this specific use case.
The statement was made in a comment that was in its entirety:
"I made the mistake of going with Pop_OS for one of my stores workstations. Its been an almost endless amount of frustration with all the stupid shit Pop has done. Is it better then windows? sure, but its down there with arch as a usable OS in anything outside of an LTT video."
There are 3 or 4 total sentences in the whole thing and the very first one is laying out that this whole thing is about workstations. I don't know how much more I could do other then literally plan for this argument that you started.
As far as not mentioning nontechnical users, fuck right off with that, all users are nontechnical unless otherwise stated. Anyone who has had to set a computer up for anyone other then themselves knows this. I did not make the comment assuming that someone would get bent out of shape and look for any "win".
They have a stick with mint on it and I can and have walked them though reinstalling mint from a stick and then have them connect to the back up system to retrieve the files used for work. The stores are 250 kms apart, you can not in good faith tell me arch is appropriate unless you have an administrator on site (and if I was that administrator I would likely strike you). I used to make rollup disks to do this, but hey guess what has more or less gone away? I can have the workstations up and running in 15 min with a mint stick, with default install options. That is important to me and frankly a lot of places. There are quite a few distros that can do this as well, this is not a feather in mints cap. Configuration is not a thing that needs to be done unless it needs to be done, to think otherwise is just admitting the unconfigured distro is not any good.
There is no situation where you are setting up workstations for users that are not Linux-averse outside of a Linux development environment, in which case those users will not like that you set up arch for them, as if they are arch fans they will also want to do their own configurations.
That all being said, if I had the time and desire I could see making a arch rollup sort of thing custom made for an organization. I just don't need to as a distro like mint has everything the store needs already there by default.
The problem lies with the closing sentence: "sure, but its down there with arch as a usable OS in anything outside of an LTT video." That implies that both Pop and Arch are not very useful for anything. That is the broad statement that people are arguing against. You may not wanted to have made a strong statement there but you did.
Nobody knows how many people work in your shop and what kind of shop it is. That's the part where you come in with a premise that is unknown to everyone else. There's a huge difference between a chain of three computer stores in a 10 km radius, a chain of three hobby stores scattered across a country, and a chain of 100 anything stores operating as part of a major LLC.
Nobody knows if setting up workstations involves you walking over and configuring everything by hand, you pushing preconfigured images over PXE, or (as seems to be the case) you shipping unmodified live USBs to people along with a set of instructions. I assumed the first one, for instance.
We didn't even know what your workstations are and do. When I hear "workstation" I think of a beefy PC doing things that require a lot of processing power and are typically given to power users. But they could also be thin kiosk systems that only ever need to display a single website. Or they could manage the POS system. Or a million other things. Depending on what those workstations are, the requirements could be anything from a hyper-specialized setup to "here's a desktop with Chrome; you know the rest".
So while it was obvious to you that "one of my stores workstations" implies "a general-purpose computer maintained and operated by a nontechnical user in a remote location", it wasn't obvious to anyone else.
Given your use case, Arch is indeed a bad fit. I wouldn't even argue for an Arch derivative (where usually the setup is done through a bog-standard Calamares installer). But that's like complaining that nobody ever needs a semi truck because it doesn't meet your needs of being compact and fuel-efficient. Like Arch it's simply a tool for a different job.
Those users also don't want to deal with any other Linux distro or Windows or macOS. They want their computer to work and someone else to make that happen. And if someone else does make it happen they generally couldn't care less about what's under the hood as long as their workflow isn't impeded.
(Also, there definitely are people who prefer Linux outside of Linux development. Just because my company issued me a Windows desktop doesn't mean I have to like it.)