Thanks for the quick response, even though it is curt and pushes customers away.

I’ll look elsewhere for a service that strangely discriminates against the number 3 Linux distribution but is happy to support numbers 4, 5, 6.

1 Mint 2878
2 Ubuntu 2102
3 Arch 1779
4 Debian 1630
5 Mageia 1187
6 Fedora 1134

Figures for Manjaro=Arch + an installer, were added to Arch.
www.distrowatch.com

DO, you are appearing to be very weird. Can’t you explain this discrimination? or do you just want Community 3 to go away?

Bye

We removed Arch support some time ago, and provided our users with months of warning that this was coming. We hope to add support for custom user supplied images at some point in the future which will allow for people to use Arch if they want. There has already been some ground work done for that, and we’re excited about opening up our platform for users of all distros.

The number of users that actually were running Arch on DigitalOcean when it was available was never more than ~1.5% while Ubuntu accounts for more than two-thirds of our users. The amount of effort currently needed to support Arch was too high a cost to continue doing so at this point.

Just one note: there wasn’t “months of warning” in my experience, but closer to “days”. I was / am running Arch on DO, and the first time I’ve been told that there’s no more chance to choose that as an image was about a week before it happened. It’s possible that I didn’t see the notice for months (doubt it), but then it’s still communication issue....

Touting the user numbers on both sides (for proponents how high it is, and DO of how low it is) is not really a great way to decide what to support. There will always be disparity and big differences even in the most common choices (that’s “power law distribution” for you…)

Arch is a very tech-savvy community, and the distro itself is different enough to provide a real alternative to many of the other mainstream distros. I’m sure that there’s some support effort required - as it is for everything that people are learning about. It’s all the matter of time. You started the tutorials on this site around the time or after it was deprecated. Might have saved some support effort if tried to use them to guide people a bit, instead of dropping them. Just some thoughts.

@imrehg
What support are we talking about?

1. DO upgrading the install images? or

2. Supporting users in forums etc.

3. is insignificant for an organisation with millions of subscribers.

4. is insignificant because “Arch is a very tech-savvy community, ”

@DO
I’d really like to know what is the reason for deprecating Community #3.
If it really is 2. then just close em down for Arch users. The Arch distribution has the best community support and documentation than any other distro. So no need for DO to “support”

Cmon (DO guys why did you deprecate? Don’t be shy.

What concrete steps are being takem for a Community sourced image? I’m sure if that was posted on Arch Linux forums it would get implemnted by volunteers in a flash. What’s the delay, or are you stringing us along?

I’ve been running an arch image since I subscribed, and now that I wanted to create another one i didn’t find arch, I would like to know how you call this months of warning, I never even got an email saying you will not support it any more, or not even a warning when I login to this page for example..