The shortest answer -

Arch has really good documentation and a release style that works for a lot of people.

Ubuntu is coorporitized and less reliable Debian with features that many people dont need or want.

I like arch because:

• it is rolling release and I like having up to date software and not having to deal with distro upgrades breaking things
• it is community run and not beholden to a company
• packages are mostly unmodified from their upstream
• the wiki and forums are the best of any distro

I don’t really have a concise answer, but allow me to ramble from personal experience for a bit:

I’m a sysadmin that was VERY heavily invested in the Microsoft ecosystem. It was all I worked with professionally and really all I had ever used personally as well. I grew up with Windows 3.1 and just kept on from there, although I did mess with Linux from time to time.

Microsoft continues to enshittify Windows in many well-documented ways. From small things like not letting you customize the Start menu and task bar, to things like microstuttering from all the data it’s trying to load over the web, to the ads it keeps trying to shove into various corners. A million little splinters that add up over time. Still, I considered myself a power user, someone able to make registry tweaks and PowerShell scripts to suit my needs.

Arch isn’t particularly difficult for anyone who is comfortable with OSes and has excellent documentation. After installation it is extremely minimal, coming with a relatively bare set of applications to keep it functioning. Using the documentation to make small decisions for yourself like which photo viewer or paint app to install feels empowering. Having all those splinters from Windows disappear at once and be replaced with a system that feels both personal and trustworthy does, in a weird way, kind of border on an almost religious experience. You can laugh, but these are the tools that a lot of us live our daily lives on, for both work and play. Removing a bloated corporation from that chain of trust does feel liberating.

As to why particularly Arch? I think it’s just that level of control. I admit it’s not for everyone, but again, if you’re at least somewhat technically inclined, I absolutely believe it can be a great first distro, especially for learning. Ubuntu has made some bad decisions recently, but even before that, I always found myself tinkering with every install until it became some sort of Franken-Debian monster. And I like pacman way better than apt, fight me, nerds.

I can’t speak to Arch but I use Ubuntu every day. I hate on Ubuntu because I use it every day. They make terrible choices. They’ve got common, serious issues people have reported at least as far back as 2009 with no acknowledgement or plan to address. I’m on LTS and they push through multiple reboot requiring sets of updates a week, heedless of the impacts.

I don’t feel like learning a totally new environment so I’ll be switching my main computer to Mint whenever I get the time. So I can deal with someone else’s annoying decisions for a while.

Arch requires reading the manual to install it, so installing it successfully is an accomplishment.

It’s rolling release with a large repo which fits perfectly for regularly used systems which require up-to-date drivers. In that sense it’s quite unique as e.g. OpenSUSE Tumbleweed has less packages.

It has basically any desktop available without any preference or customisations by default.

They have a great short name and solid logo.

Arch is community-based and is quite pragmatic when it comes to packaging. E.g. they don’t remove proprietary codecs like e.g. Fedora.

Ubuntu is made by a company and Canonical wants to shape their OS and user experience as they think is best. This makes them develop things like snap to work for them (as it’s their project) instead of using e.g. flatpak (which is only an alternative for a subset of snaps features). This corporate mindset clashes with the terminally online Linux desktop community.

Also, they seem to focus more on their enterprise server experience, as that is where their income stream comes from.

But like always, people with strong opinions are those voicing them loudly. Most Linux users don’t care and use what works best for them. For that crowd Ubuntu is a good default without any major downsides.

Edit: A major advantage of Ubuntu are their extended security updates not found on any other distro (others simply do not patch them). Those are locked behind a subscription for companies and a free account for a few devices for personal use.

I don’t know about everyone else, but the last couple of years has had the most unstable Ubuntu releases, with the most unrecoverable releases when issues happen.

I’ve since moved to Fedora for desktop and straight Debian for server.

I don’t know about Arch itself on its own but I use CachyOS that is built off it and everything just works for me.

Is it really? I’ve always understood the cult around it as a joke.

But seriously, RTFM.

Arch has a very in-depth wiki that’s the go-to resource for a lot of Linux users, and it offers a community-driven way to have access to literally anything that’s ever landed on Linux ever through the AUR. It’s also nice to have an OS that you never have to reinstall (assuming all things go well).

Why that turned into such a cult-meme is anyone’s guess though.

About 10 years ago it was The Distro for first time linux users to prove they were a True Linux Enjoyer. Think a bunch of channers bragging about how they are the true linux master race because they edited a grub config.

Before Arch that role belonged to Gentoo. Since then that role has transitioned to NixOS who aren’t nearly as toxic but still culty. “Way of the future” etc.

All three of have high bars of entry so everyone has to take pride in the effort they put in to learn how to install their distro. Like getting hazed into a frat except you actually learn something.

The Ubuntu hatred is completely unrelated. That has to do with them being a corporate distro that keep making bad design decisions. And their ubiquity means everyone has to deal with their bad decisions. (snap bad)

Anything really polarizing can end up with a cult following. Just look at Rust.