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

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 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.

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

 :: Searching AUR for notes...

 -> Missing AUR Packages: SideNote

 there is nothing to read

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.

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.

Because it’s awesome. Join us… join us… join us…

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)

I just think its good.

The way I see it, you can have an OS that breaks less often and is hard to fix, or an OS that breaks a little more often that is easy to fix. I choose the latter. 99/100 times, when something breaks with an update, it’s on the front page of archlinux.org with a fix.

The problems I’ve faced with other distros or windows is the solution is often “reinstall, lol”, which is like a 3 hour session of nails on a chalkboard for me.

Linux is supposed to be hard and for nerds. Arch is the hardest and most for nerds, and ubuntu is the least. At least that’s what I’ve seen.

How user friendly is the installation process? I’ve never tried, so I don’t know. I’m curious now; just based on how people talk about it, I always perceived it as as distro that requires a lot of technical knowledge to use like Gentoo, which I unsuccessfully tried to install way back in 2010. I’m more knowledgeable and patient these days, so I may be able to work with arch.

The same reason people brag about working 80 hour weeks.

Well, Ubuntu uses Snap, which is a rather poor packaging solution that basically no other distro has adopted. By default it’s a little bloated, it’s made some controversial decisions (rust coreutils), and other distros just do what Ubuntu does better (like Mint)

People that got into Linux when most of the main distributions were easier to install than windows in most cases. Some people wanted to show off that they can install a Linux like it was when we did it back in the 90s for some reason I still don’t understand till this day. I do like their wiki though. Works great for debian as well as arch.

I use Ubuntu professionally and Arch at home

Anything that’s not Windows is my preference.

I love arch because I know what’s in it and how to fix it and what to expect, the community is mostly very nice and open to help

AUR is great and using pacman feels lovely

I also care about learning and understanding the system I’m using beyond just using a GUI that does everything for me

Ubuntu is not bad it’s probably one of the most used distros by far

Linux motto is: Use what you like and customize it how you like because there is no company forcing you to do things their way

Because Arch requires human sacrifice.

arch is slop for normies pretending to be chads, real chads use gentoo and openbsd

Because the logo looks cool

Arch Being cult like is stereotypical. Far from reality.

It’s funny because I see the same cult behavior, but for Fedora. I’ve never understood the point of this distribution that has never worked well for me.

I’m on Manjaro by the way, because I love everything about Arch except the release style.

a reputation more than 10 years out of date

vocal peope on social media ≠ everyone

I just think it’s neat. <img alt="comfy" src="https://hexbear.net/api/v3/image_proxy?url=https%3A%2F%2Fchapo.chat%2Fpictrs%2Fimage%2Fddf2c69d-10eb-4f5a-b537-8a4511505610.png">

When I got fed up with windows 8.1 (and windows update bricked it), I first used ubuntu. How well or not it worked depended on the version. In version 19 it got some ugly white message boxes. I searched for how to change their color and found an angry dev saying no you cant change that. This was the final bullshit. Then I switched to arch, which lets me choose how my stuff looks and doesn’t have the whole 3/4 versions are buggy thing. It works and ubuntu does not.

Arch is amazing for what it is, hence the love. It’s what you make of it; by default there’s nothing and you design your own system from scratch. This leads to a very passionate and enthusiastic community who do great work for one another, for everybody’s benefit. Anything under the sun can be found in the AUR, the distro repos are fresh and reliable, and every issue that arises has a hundred people documenting the fix before it’s patched.

Ubuntu has a bad reputation for inconsistency, privacy invasive choices, etc. I don’t think all the hate is deserved, as they corrected course after the Amazon search fiasco, but I still won’t use it because of Snaps. They have a proprietary backend, so even if I wanted to put up with their other strange design decisions I can’t unless I wanted closed source repos. That goes against my whole philosophy and reasoning for being on Linux to begin with, and many feel the same.

Normal people who use Arch don’t bring it up much, because they’re all sick of the memes and are really, REALLY tired of immediately being called rude elitist neckbeard cultists every time they mention it.

The Ubuntu hate is because Canonical has a long history of making weird, controversial decisions that split the Linux community for no good reason.

I’m quite experienced in Linux but I wouldn’t use either. Arch is great if you like to tinker, Ubuntu sucks for the not so libre approach , corporate ties, telemetry etc. I distrohopped before but today I just install my debian based distro and shit works… Ubuntu I’ve installed twice before when I was new to Linux, and have had a major issues every time due to official updates that broke internet drivers and other things, that’s a fun one when you only have one PC . Not to mention its so bloated that shitty computers that I like to thinker with it have a hard time catching up. The arch thing is also mostly a kind of meme, targeting the more unbearable nerds. People I hated when I was a noob (they will let you know you are) But they are found everywhere and in general I don’t think there’s more of those people in arch community than anywhere else. It’s more of a stab at elitism than arch specifically.

I see a point in arch but zero in ubuntu.

I feel like it isn’t really specific to arch, every distro has a following, but some are more “passionate” about it than others. I think arch, NixOS, and gentoo are the most notable.

Arch Hits the great spot

It has:

• a great wiki
• many packages, enough for anything you want to do
• its the only distros that is beetween everything done for you and gentoo-like fuck you.
• and the Memes.

because they used to be special. “I run linux”, matrix text on boot, typing shit in the terminal, “I’m in”, awe-inspiring shit to an onlooker…

but nowadays, anyone can run ubuntu or mint or whatevs and our hero ain’t special no more. so here comes the ultimate delimiter.

Arch is better because…

• pacman, seriously, I don’t hear enough of how great pacman is.
  Being able to search easily for files within a package is a godsend when some app refuses to work giving you an error message “lib_obscure.so.1 cannot be found”.
  I haven’t had such issues in a long time, but when I do, I don’t have to worry about doing a ten hour search, if I’m lucky, for where this obscure library file is supposed to be located and in what package it should be part of.
• rolling release. Non-rolling Ubuntu half-year releases have broken my OS in the past around 33% of the time. And lots of apps in the past had essential updates I needed, but required me to wait 5 months for the OS to catch up.
• AUR. Some apps can’t be found anywhere but AUR.
• Their wiki is the best of all Linuxes

The “cult” is mostly gushing over AUR.

“I run Arch btw” became a meme because until install scripts became commonplace you had to have a reasonable understanding of the terminal and ability to read and follow instructions to install Arch Linux to a usable state. “Look at my l33t skills.”

Dislike of Ubuntu comes from Canonical…well…petting the cat backwards. They go against the grain a lot. They’re increasingly corporate, they did a sketchy sponsorship thing with Amazon at one point, around ten years ago they were in the midst of this whole “Not Invented Here” thing; all tech had to be invented in-house, instead of systemd they made and abandoned Upstart, instead of working on Wayland they pissed away time on Mir, instead of Gnome or KDE they made Unity, and instead of APT they decided to build Snap. Which is the one they’re still clinging to.

For desktop users there are a lot better distros than Ubuntu these days.

I left Ubuntu for Arch because I got sick of Arch having everything I wanted and Ubuntu taking ages to finally get it. I was tired of compiling shit all the time just to keep up to date.

Honestly glad I made the change, too. Arch has been so much better all around. Less bloat and far fewer problems.

I installed arch before there was the official install script. It’s not that is was THAT difficult, but it does provide a great sense of accomplishment, you learn a lot, customize everything, and you literally only install things you know you want. (Fun story: I had to start over twice: the first time I forgot to install sudo, the second I forgot to install the package needed to have an internet connection)

All of this combined mean that the users have a sense of pride for being an arch user so they talk about it more that the rest. There is no pride in clicking your way though an installer that makes all the choices for you

IMO Despite some unjustified rumors Arch is a very stable distro. For me it feels the same as Debian stability wise while still being on the cutting edge side. The Arch wiki is the second most important reason.

I think Arch is so popular because its considered a middle of the road distro. Even if not exactly true, Ubuntu is seen as more of a pre-packaged distro. Arch would be more al a carte with what you are actually running. I started with Slackware back in the day when everything was a lot more complicated to get setup, and there was even then this notation that ease of access and customization were separate and you can't have both. Either the OS controls everything and its easy or you control everything and its hard. To some extent that's always going to be true, but there's no reason you can't or shouldn't try to strike a balance between the two. I think Arch fits nicely into that space.

I also wouldn't use the term "cultists" as much as "aholes". If you've ever been on the Arch forums you know what I'm talking about. There is a certain kind of dickish behavior that occurs there, but it somewhat is understandable. A lot of problems are vaguely posted (several times over) with no backing logs or info to determine anything. Just "Something just happened. Tell me how to fix it?". And on top of that, those asking for help refuse to read the wiki or participate in the problem solving. They just want an online PC repair shop basically.

People making the things they consume their whole personality, not a rare thing tbh.

I’m not sure either. I think arch used to be one of the less popular distros (because of the more involved install process, solved now by the arch-based distros with friendly installers), despite having some of the best features, so it required more “evangelism”, that’s unecessary now. Arch-based distros are now some of the most popular ones, so its not necessary.

Others have commented on why its so great, but the AUR + Rolling releases + stability means that arch is one of the “stable end states”. You might hop around a lot, but its one of the ones you end up landing on, and have no reason to change from.

No idea, but ArchWiki has some of the best linux documentation around.

Because there are still people who have not yet seen the light. Once everyone has joined the fold they will not be able to remember why anyone resisted in the first place.

There are a lot of different reasons that people hate Ubuntu. Most of them Not great reasons.

Ubuntu became popular by making desktop Linux approachable to normal people. Some of the abnormal people already using Linux hated this.

In November 2010, Ubuntu switched from GNOME as their default desktop to Unity. This made many users furious.

Then in 2017, Ubuntu switched from Unity to Gnome. This made many users furious.

There’s also a graveyard of products and services that infuriated users when canonical started them, then infuriated users when they discontinued them.

And the Amazon “scandal”.

And then there’s the telemetry stuff.

Meanwhile. Arch has always been the bad boy that dares you to love him… unapproachable and edgy.

In my experience the Arch people are the sane ones and the NixOS people are the young cult evangelists nowadays. I use Arch btw

I’ve started with ubuntu/mint and it was always a matter of time before something broke then i tried everything from then all the major distros and found that I loved being on a rolling release with openSUSE Tubleweed (gaming and most new software works better) and BTRFS on Fedora (BTRFS let’s you have boot time snapshots you can go back to if anything breaks).

After some research I found I can get both with arch so installed arch as a learning process via the outstanding wiki and have never looked back. Nowadays I just install endevourOS because it’s just an arch distro with easy BTRFS setup and easy gui installer was almost exactly like my custom arch cofigs and it uses official arch repos so you update just like arch (unlike manjaro). It’s been more stable than windows 10 for me.

Tldr: arch let’s you pick exactly what you want in a distro and is updated with the latest software something important if you game with nvidia GPU for example.

it was made by rocky horror picture show

People praising Arch, people hating on Ubuntu, meanwhile me on Debian satisifed with the minimalism.

I had moved from Slackware to Debian but by 2004 the long release cycles of Debian were making it very hard to use any Debian with current hardware or desktop environments. I was using Sid and dealing with the breakages. Ubuntu promised a reskinned Debian with 6 month release cycles synced to Gnome. Then they over delivered with a live cd and easy installation and it was a deserved phenomenon. I very enthusiastically installed Warty Warthog. Even bought some merch.

When Ubuntu launched it was promoted as a community distro, “humanity towards others” etc despite being privately funded. Naked people holding hands. Lots of very good community outreach etc.

The problem for Ubuntu was it wasn’t really a community distro at all. It was Canonical building on the hard work of Debian volunteers. Unlike Redhat, Canonical had a bad case of not invented here projects that never got adopted elsewhere like upstart, unity, mir, snaps and leaving their users with half-arsed experiments that then got dropped. Also Mint exists so you can have the Ubuntu usability enhancements of Debian run by a community like Debian. I guess there is a perception now that Ubuntu is a mid corpo-linux stuck between two great community deb-based systems so from the perspective of others in the Linux community a lot of us don’t get why people would use it.

Arch would be just another community distro but for a lot of people they got the formula right. Great documentation, reasonably painless rolling release, and very little deviation from upstream. Debian maintainers have a very nasty habit of adding lots of patches even to gold standard security projects from openbsd . They broke ssh key generation. Then they linked ssh with systemd libs making vulnerable to a state actor via the xz backdoor. Arch maintainers don’t do this bullshit.

Everything else is stereotypes. Always feeling like you have to justify using arch, which is a very nice stable, pure linux experience, just because it doesn’t have a super friendly installer. Or having to justify Ubuntu which just works for a lot of people despite it not really being all that popular with the rest of the linux community.

We’re not a cult. Come on out to our compound and we’ll show you!

I don’t really understand either. Where are the Gentoo and LFS elitists? It seams like there should be more of those than arch elitests. Maybe it’s just because more people use arch.

Ok, I think I can provide some insight into this that I think it’s missed on other replies.

I switched to Arch back when Arch had an installer, yup, that’s right, Arch used to have an installer, then they removed it and you had to do most of the process manually (yes, I know pacstrap is technically an installer, but I’m talking about the original ncurses installer here).

After Arch removed its installer it began to attract more purists, and with that the meme was born, people online would be discussing stuff and someone would explain something simple and the other would reply with “I use arch BTW”, which meant you didn’t need to explain trivial stuff because the person had a good idea on how their system works.

Then Arch started to suffer from being too good of a distro, see those of us that were using it consistently saw posts with people complaining about issues on their distros that never affected us, so a sort of “it doesn’t happen on my distro” effect started to grow, putting that together with the excellent wiki that people were linking left and right (even for non Arch users) and lots of people became interested.

This new wave of users was relatively new to Linux, they thought that by following a tutorial and running a couple of command lines when installing arch they had become complete experts in Linux, and they saw the “I use Arch btw” replies and thought they meant “I know more than you because I use Arch”, so they started to repeat that. And it became common to see posts with people being L337 H4ck3r5 with no clue whatsoever using “I use Arch btw”.

That’s when the sort of cult mentality formed, you had experienced people who liked Arch because it was a good distro that didn’t break on its own with good documentation to help when you screw up, these people suffered a bit from this and told newbies that they should use Arch. Together with that you had the other group who thought because they installed Arch they were hackers telling people Arch was waaaay too hard, and that only true Linux experts should use it. From the outside this must have felt that we were hiding something, you had several people telling you to come to our side or they couldn’t help you, or pointing at documentation that looked specific for their distro, and others saying you weren’t cool enough for it probably felt like a cult recruiting.

At the end of the day Arch is a very cool distro, I’ve tried lots of them but prefer Arch because it’s a breeze to maintain in the long run. And the installation process is not something you want to throw at a person who just wants to install Linux to check it out, but it’s also not complicated at all. There are experts using Ubuntu or other “noob” distros because at the end of the day it’s all the same under the hood, using Arch will not make you better at Linux, it will just force you to learn basic concepts to finish the installation that if you had been using Linux for a while you probably already know them (e.g. fstab or locale).

As for Ubuntu, part of it stems from the same “I use Arch btw” guys dumping on Ubuntu for being “noob”, other part is because Canonical has a history of not adoption community stuff and instead try to develop their own thing, also they sent your search queries to Amazon at some point which obviously went very badly for their image in the community.

Slackware users, “Those Arch users are crazy.”

I use Arch because I don’t know how to use Debian based distros, I got lost when trying to use Linux Mint or PopOS.

Because it just works. I used to love Debian . It had issues with drivers and stuff. Arch just does it for me.

I don’t use either now. I have tried both. When I started with Ubuntu i was great; fast, light, all the good stuff. Then it started to get bloated and wouldn’t run on my old machine… So I moved to Arch and it saved me and I used it for years.

Because of all the programming socks adverts with Arch in the background.

My way of thinking and working is incompatible with most premade automatism, it utterly confuses me when a system is doing something on its own without me configuring it that way.

That’s why I have issues with many of the “easy” distributions like Ubuntu. Those want to be to helpful for my taste. Don’t take me wrong, I am not against automatism or helper tools/functions, not at all. I just want to have full knowledge and full control of them.

I used Gentoo for years and it was heaven for me, the possibility to turn every knob exactly like I wanted them to be was so great, but in the end was the time spend compiling everything not worth it.

That’s why I changed to Arch Linux. The bare bone nature of the base install and the high flexibility of pacman and the AUR are ideal for me. I love that Arch is not easy, that it doesn’t try to anticipate what I want to do. If something happens automatically it is because I configured the system do behave that way.

Ubuntu? Its a can’t make up its mind what it is trying to be while always becoming a crashy mess. When it first came out I remember trying it and immediately broke it.

The last time I installed it recently it had issues out of the box.

So I love Debian but it prides itself on stability so packages tend to be older. I think this is good for a server but probably not great for a desktop. Ubuntu came along and was like we’ll be like Debian but newer packages. Everything was cool for a while but then they started doing shitty things. The first that I can think of was ads in the terminal. This was not great for an open source app. Then when you did apt install firefox it installed Firefox as a snap. WTF?!?!? (apt should install .deb files, not snaps). Because of this, lately I’ve decided to avoid Ubuntu.

I used Gentoo for a while and it was great but configuring and compiling everything took forever. I’m getting too old for that. Arch seems like a good alternative for people who want to mess with their system. So it’s become a way for people to claim they know what they are doing without having to recompile everything. (Note: I haven’t used Arch, this is just my perception)

Recently I got a new laptop and I had decided to put Linux on it and had to decide what distro. Arch was in consideration but I ended up going with OpenSUSE Tumbleweed because it’s got the latest but I don’t really have to configure anything. If I had more time, I might go with something like Arch but I don’t really want to do that much fiddling right now.

I wonder if it’s just me or if other people who were around before Ubuntu feel the same way but the reason I hate Ubuntu is that it seemed to take over the Linux world.

A lot of the information about how to do something in Linux was drowned out by how to do it in Ubuntu. When searching for information you have to scroll down in the search results for something that sounds unrelated to Ubuntu.

Ubuntu material was often titled “how to do it in Linux” and you thought you had a good long tutorial until you read a few paragraphs in and realized it was for Ubuntu and wouldn’t work for you for whatever reason.

Even some software that says it’s available on Windows and Linux just means they have a Ubuntu package and if you’re really good there’s a chance you might be able to figure out how to use it on a non Ubuntu system.

It’s like when Ubuntu came out, people just assumed that Linux was Ubuntu. I’ve never used Ubuntu so a lot of the information I’ve came across regarding it has just been in the way of me finding useful information.

Ubuntu is the windows of the Linux world

Arch has a cult like following because it emphasizes simplicity and customizability. If you have the time to fully administer your own system, there is no better choice.

Ubuntu is corporate, frequently out of date, and sometimes incompetent. They got big a long time ago when they were a significantly easier option than their competitors, but I really don’t think there’s compelling reason for a new user to install Ubuntu today.

Maybe it’s masochism, but I like Arch because it forces me to make mistakes and learn. No default DE, several network management choices, lots of configuration for non-defaults. These are all decisions I have to make, and if I try to cut corners I usually get punished for it.

However, I think the real reason I stick with arch is because this paradigm means that I always feel capable of fixing issues. As people solve the issues they face, forum posts and wiki articles (and sometimes big fixes) get pushed out, and knowledge is shared. That sense of community and building on something I feel like Arch promotes.

For me, Ubuntu is ugly as all hell and comes with so much I dont need. It also ran slow on the first machine I ever installed it on. I like Arch because I got my feet wet there. It was my classroom.

The Arch users being so vocal is more of a trope to me. Never fails to make me smile.

Ubuntu started as a great endeavour. They made Linux much more approachable to the less tech inclined user.

It is an achievement to get a distro capable of basically work out of the box that hides the hard/technical stuff under the hood and delivers a working machine, and they did it and popularized Linux in the process.

Unfortunately, they abused the good faith they garnered. The Amazon partnership, their desktop that nobody really enjoyed, the Snap push. These are the ones I was made aware of but I risk there were more issues.

I was a user of Ubuntu for less than six months. Strange as it may sound, after trying SUSE and Debian, when I actively searched for a more friendly distro, I rolled back to Debian exactly because Ubuntu felt awkward.

Ubuntu is still a strong contributor but unless they grow a spine and actually create a product people will want to pay for, with no unpopular or weird options on the direction the OS “must” take, they won’t get much support from the wide user community.

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