I’ll tell one other Arch story – my son is studying computer engineering and taking a digital logic class that uses Altera FPGAs. We tried installing the tools on Ubuntu, but we did not have a machine with the officially support version, so were fighting various issues. Since it was hard to get things working on Ubuntu, we figured it would be impossible on Arch – I was wrong. It turns out the Quartus support on Arch Linux is quite good:
https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/quartus-free/
With the Arch packages, everything came up working!
In the PKGBUILD, there is the following comment:
# NOTE: If you plan on using the usbblaster make sure you are member of the plugdev group.
This is the kind of polish that makes Arch a pleasure to use. One of the reasons I think there are so many high quality packages in Arch is the build/package system is relatively easy to use, so it is not a huge deal to create and maintain a PKGBUILD, so more people end up doing this as it saves them time and effort long term.
I really need to create a siot package for Arch …