i was once a fan of arch linux, loved having the control of compiling everything. how well is this supported for raspberry pi? it's always nice to know that vendors have tested the exact hardware that i'm using extensively, even if it's just another arm device that looks and smells like the others. also, what package manager is used by arch? it's been like 10 years since i last used it.

Maybe you are thinking of Gentoo? Arch’s core and community software are distributed as binaries that have been compiled for you.

The AUR provides additional software you can compile yourself but most of what makes the system run already built.

It still uses pacman.

I can't confirm this, but it feels like Arch linux has surged in popularity over the last ~3-4 years. I ditched Debian for Arch in 2016 and haven't looked back.

pacman iirc