> Why not just run Slack or Debian if you want a barebones full distro? Slack and BSD's are closer to old school UNIX. Arch is after my time, am I missing something?

I can't speak for other Arch users but to me, selecting it as my primary OS has been a natural evolution. I first cut my teeth on OpenBSD. Probably not the best choice, but it was the late 90s when I was first exposed to Unix-like OSes, and a friend of mine was something of an OpenBSD evangelist at the time. I then migrated to FreeBSD, and later (around 2005?) to Gentoo. I tried numerous other distros around that period and never really found one I liked (one that felt, well, BSD-ish) more than Gentoo. I admit I only dabbled in Slackware, but Gentoo made more sense to my BSD-addled mind--perhaps because portage was at least passingly analogous to the ports collection, which I still very much admire.

Of course, having to rebuild literally everything on the system or use unofficial binary overlays just for binary packages grew increasingly more frustrating, particularly for desktop use, and I lamented about this on Slashdot many years ago. A kind soul suggested Arch and persuaded me to try it, suggesting that it was close enough to Gentoo that I may enjoy it. I did, and I've been using it ever since--probably for about 5-6 years. I suspect its relative similarity to Gentoo has probably changed with systemd--for better and worse--but one of the things that's simultaneously both very exciting and frustrating is Arch's constant evolution. I can honestly say that's definitely for the better.

It is still possible to build a minimal system in Arch fairly easily, so I'm not quite sure I follow why this may not qualify as "barebones." I'll grant that the absolute minimal base image "out of the box" will still weigh in around 330-360 megs, but I have had limited success reducing that footprint for abusing containers via custom builds (I seem to recall it was necessary to remove the Perl dependency in OpenSSL to shave off a fairly sizable chunk--that may not be true anymore).

The other side of the coin is that it's similar enough to Gentoo (with PKGBUILDs) that you can very quickly build your own custom packages, but it's also a binary rolling release system which gives you access to fairly new things relatively quickly. I'm aware there's also Aptosid, but I'm not a huge fan of Debian-based distros for my own personal use (preference, mostly).

If I had to wager a bet, I think a good chunk of Arch users post 2012 are in the same boat as me. They're recovering Gentoo users. Therein may perhaps be a better answer.

> As an outside observer it seems needlessly complicated and most of the complexity being specific to Arch.

Ostensibly, that may seem true until you scratch the surface. One of the things that's important to understand about Arch is that its maintainers ship upstream packages with minimal changes. Everything you receive is more or less packaged as the developer intended. This can lead to some inconveniences if you want things mostly preconfigured (or configured through an ncurses GUI), but I'd submit that the Arch wiki is absolutely fantastic answer to this. It is this design choice that follows, at least spiritually, with the BSDs and Gentoo, and is also one of the reasons why Debian/Ubuntu's default decision to start services immediately after installation (MySQL, etc) without providing the option to configure first befuddles me.

The other side of the coin is that at least some of that complexity isn't strictly due to Arch-specific choices as much as it is these defaults I mentioned. The init system is entirely systemd with no overlays and no compatibility layers outside what systemd itself provides. Once you learn pacman and how to use PKGBUILDs there really isn't anything that deviates substantially from any other systemd-based distro. I'll agree there are some sharp corners here and there, sometimes due to choices made during upgrades/migrations (OpenSSL's recent update comes to mind), but I suspect at least some of your observations may simply be due to what you're familiar with versus what Arch provides.

Out of curiosity, what is it that you feel is "needlessly complicated?"