The tiered storage stuff is pretty cool. You can say “I want this data on this disk, so if I get a cache miss from a faster disk/RAM it’ll come from this other disk first.”
I believe it also has some interesting ways of handling redundancy like erasure coding, and I thiiiink it does some kind of byte-level deduplication? I don’t know if that’s implemented or is even still planned, but I remember being quite excited for it. It was supposed to be dedupe without all of the hideous drawbacks that things like ZFS dedupe have.
EDIT: deduplication is absolutely not a thing yet. I don’t know if it’s still on the roadmap.
For me, it’s Arch for desktop usage. When I first started using Arch it would not have been Arch, but now it’s Arch. The package manager has great ergonomics (not great discoverability, but great ergonomics), it’s always up to date, I can get a system from USB to sway in ~20 minutes (probably be faster if I used the installer), it’s fast because it doesn’t enable many things by default, and it’s honestly been the most reliable distro I’ve ever used. I used to use OpenSUSE ~10 years ago, and that broke more in one year than Arch has in ten.
I personally feel like Arch’s unreliable nature has been overstated. Arch will give you the rope to hang yourself if you ask for it, but if you just read the emails (or use a helper that displays breaking changes when updating like
paru
) and merge yourpacnew
s then you’ll likely have a rock solid system.Again, this is all just my opinion. It’s easy for me to overlook or forget all of the pain and suffering I likely went through when learning how to Arch. I won’t recommend it to you, but I’ll happily say how much I’ve come to enjoy using it.