Different strokes for different folks mostly.

Arch is a rolling release, meaning everytime something changes in a package or dependency, there’s an update.

Mint is a stable release, and gets major updates every few months, with much more frequent security updates, but yeah, it’s not an everyday thing like with Arch

While I don’t like saying “this is better than that”, since Arch is a rolling release, it’s always up to date, and so you’re not going to end up in a situation like “my built-in laptop sound card isn’t getting picked up” (i mean, you might, but it’s rare. After all, Arch can break sometimes times, just like everything, really) like you sometimes can with Mint and other stable distros. Also, Arch–well, vanilla Arch and something like Endeavour–comes with just the basics and everything else, you gotta add. I personally like this because I like knowing exactly what I’m installing and having only what I’m going to use…and also not deal with messing with PPA’s. This isn’t a point against non-Arch distros or anything, it’s all just personal preference–but really, everything from “Should I do Arch with Cinnamon or something like Mint or Fedora’s Cinnamon Spin?” is all up to personal preference

Moved over from Mint to Arch for gaming, which has some additional benefits:

• more up-to-date kernel and more up-to-date Mesa, which brings very noticeable improvements in frame rates - in Elden Ring for example, 45 fps outside in Mint to 60 fps outside on Arch

• my desktop soundcard isn’t recognised properly by PulseAudio but is by PipeWire. It’s hard to be sure that PulseAudio is completely gone when you uninstall it then reinstall something else. Arch, I just installed what I wanted in the first place

• some utility programmes, like CoreCtrl for graphics card fan and power tweaking, and emulators like RPCS3, are the Arch repositories but not the Mint ones. Much easier to keep them up-to-date

• for a gaming machine, no more ‘mystery services’ that I don’t know what they are. I quite like having everything quite stripped back for a gaming machine. On Arch, I know what everything does because I installed it. That’s not the case on Mint.

Obviously, I installed the Cinnamon desktop as my GUI choice - there’s certain things about Mint that are tremendous and worth sticking to.

There’s nothing inherently superior, just what people like more. If you want to use Mint that’s totally fine and valid.

Package base is always up to date since it’s rolling. The AUR is absolutely fantastic and gives me any obscure application I could ever need. You ever tried installing the marathon trilogy with alephone on fedora? The AUR makes it a single button install. I’m currently running endeavour OS plasma, such a smooth experience.

The AUR

That’s essentially an extremely subjective question. Arch is well-liked but not for everyone.

When you boot up the ArchLinux ISO to install it, what you get on the screen is:

root@archiso ~ #

That’s it. It doesn’t ask you what language you want to speak or which keyboard layout you want to use. You get a zsh shell, and that’s it. Go figure out what you want to install, how you want to install it, where you want to install it to. That’s how basically all of Arch works: if you install something, it comes barebones with sometimes the default starting configuration shipped by whoever made the software and nothing else.

To me, that’s what makes Arch so good compared to something like Linux Mint: I’m an advanced user, I don’t want training wheels, and I want to build my system entirely from scratch, with only what I want on it installed and running. And it comes with excellent documentation, is a rolling release (meaning, you get the latest version of everything fairly quickly). Since Arch pretty much only ships packages for you to install, it’s not nearly as important to make sure that they work and there isn’t any incompatibility with other packages. Oh the newer version of X doesn’t work with Y anymore? Too bad, go figure out how to downgrade it or figure out a workaround.

Is this useful to you, a beginner? It depends. If you want to go into the deep ends and learn everything about how a Linux system is built and works, sure, it’s going to be great for that. Lots of people do that and love it! If you’re coming from Windows, all you’re used to is clicking next next finish, and you like things to just work out of the box, eehh, probably not great for you.

Distributions like Linux Mint does a lot of the work for you: first of all, it has a graphical installer. It boots up and asks you about your language, your keyboard, where you want to install it. And it installs a system that’s ready to be used out of the box. When you install Linux Mint, you get a desktop, a web browser, you get drivers configured for you. It detects what’s the best graphics drivers and prompts you to install them automatically.

Most distributions, especially Debian/Ubuntu derived ones, are all about providing a curated experience. It comes with a whole bunch of stuff installed and configured to reasonable defaults. Need to print something? Yeah it comes with printer support by default, just plug in your printer and it’ll configure it for you. Some distributions even comes with Steam and Discord and everything needed to game ready to go right out of the box. Log in and play.

To provide such a reliable and out of the box experience, these distributions typically work with a release cycle, or delay updates to have time to properly test them out and make sure they work correctly before they ship it out to users. This means you may be a few versions behind on your desktop environment, but you also get the assurance you won’t update and your desktop doesn’t work anymore.

I personally picked Arch a long time ago because I’m fundamentally a tinkerer, I want the newest version of everything even if it means breaking things temporarily, and I do kind of whacky things overall. One day my laptop is there for working and browsing the web, another day it’s an iPXE server to install 20 other computers, another day it’s a temporary router/WiFi access point, another day it’s a media center/TV box, another day it’s an Android tablet. Arch gives me the freedom to make my computer do whatever I need my computer to do at the moment, and because it doesn’t make any assumptions about what I want to do with my computer, I can easily make it do all of those things on a whim. On Linux Mint, I’d be fighting an uphill battle to tear down everything the developers spent so much time building for me and my convenience.

For everyone saying the wiki, you don’t have to be an Arch user to love the wiki. I’m on Solus but use the Arch wiki frequently.

Arch and Mint target a different user base. Mint is more appropriate for the beginning Linux user who wants to wade slowly into using Linux. It’s for somebody that is coming from an entire GUI experience like Windows. This person may have no understanding of partitions, filesystems, bootloaders, etc. Arch is going to be more appropriate for either an intermediate to advanced user of Linux that wants more control over their installation or a Windows user that understands the more complex topics around the way a computer operates.

The above said, it is very possible to do advanced things with Mint as well and I have in the past. I just want to have a leaner system that does not make assumptions about what I want or need. I want fairly strict control of what goes into my installation but not strict enough that I would need to do something like Linux From Scratch. Both Mint and Arch are excellent distributions! In fact, I would go as far to say as I like all open source operating systems and software by the nature that they’re open sourced. They can be customized, expanded, etc. I would also advise people to mix some FreeBSD and OpenBSD in their homelabs if possible because the more you can learn, the better. OpenBSD is my firewall and advanced router. FreeBSD powers my blog. Arch powers my desktop and Mastodon and Lemmy instances.

If you like extra config work you’ll love Arch relative to Mint.