this post was submitted on 19 May 2025
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When I was first looking into Linux I asked the only friend I knew who used it and he unironically recommended me Arch...
A year later I actually gave Arch a try, but by then he apparently hated Arch and switched to Gentoo and I stopped asking him for advice at that point.
I have been using Arch for a half a decade at this point and its worked out well for me. I like how its very stable despite being bleeding edge (relatively speaking). It's made gaming a lot easier, and I was pleasantly surprised when Valve announced SteamOS was switching to it as a base.
A lot of people have varying levels of purism when it comes to linux, and it sounds like your friend dipped his toes in with Arch and realized "not pure enough" and then jumped in on the deep end with Gentoo. At the end of the day, Linux is Linux no matter which distro you pick, but each distro highlights different strengths and weaknesses of it. Its all about the package managers, the repository contents, and the maintainers. Occasionally, technical support might matter.
So, pick whichever distro you like, move around a bit to see what has the least papercuts for you, and then stick with that until you can't anymore.
Try testing. And be just as amazed as me on how stable even that is. It literally runs on my main server. The one that, if it goes down, everything of me is down. Yet, I never had problems, for years.
Yeah, I used to run Arch myself, and I never had any issues with anything. Now, I'm no saying there aren't people who have had issues, but it seems to me the reputation it has is undeserved.
I run NixOS now, and lemme tell you it deserves its reputation, no matter how much I love it.
I switched from Arch to Gentoo, for me it's just the next step of taking advantage of every last bit of my hardware. But unless you are seriously invested, I would never recommend Gentoo to someone. If you just want something that's up to date, go with Fedora. If you have some spare time, go with Arch. If you have no hobbies at all, go with Gentoo.