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

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.

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