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I have arch on two machines and I must say that I kind of regret it at this point. Every update it's a coin toss whether there'll be a regression in some packag

I have arch on two machines and I must say that I kind of regret it at this point. Every update it's a coin toss whether there'll be a regression in some package and pacman seems very limited as a package manager. It basically gives up on conflicts -- there is no sophisticated automated conflict resolution like in aptitude and no way to powerful way to do pinning like with apt_preferences.

laumars 10y ago
Weirdly I've found the opposite to be true when comparing Debian's command line package tools with pacman. I've found pacman to be much more powerful and cleaner to use. Granted some stuff is a little more hands on rather than things silently working in the background. But pacman's query tools are light years ahead of apt and that really makes the difference when needing to do complicated updates like the stuff you mentioned. Agreed about regression though, that's one of the issues of running a bleeding edge distro though, which most Debian-based distros are not. The general advice is to check ArchLinux's news page before running system updates. Personally I rarely bother as I have a ZFS root so I just create rollback points - a little like Windows Restore, but at the filesystem level so super quick.
anbotero 10y ago
Interesting. I liked Arch at home, but I could never really use it. I would end up going back to Windows for gaming. Anyways, three-and-half years ago at work I got the chance to install Arch. Three years later, the only issue I ever had with wildly doing 'pacman -Syu' was GRUB, which got screwed at some point. I got scared back then, but I had the Live USB dongle to the rescue and I could access Arch own wiki with my phone. Anyways, I could quickly solve the problem. Six months ago I did the install from scratch, and this time I have yet to face any issues with package installation/upgrade/dependency resolution. Even AUR packages sometimes if they fail you just have to make small adjustments to the PKGBUILD file and be done with it. It’d be nice to know what kind of packages you’ve been having issues with: at work I deal mostly with Ruby, Erlang, and database engines. As for other packages, Synaptics input and... probably that’s what. Also, whatever dependencies Awesome WM and fish shell require.

laumars 10y ago

Weirdly I've found the opposite to be true when comparing Debian's command line package tools with pacman. I've found pacman to be much more powerful and cleaner to use. Granted some stuff is a little more hands on rather than things silently working in the background. But pacman's query tools are light years ahead of apt and that really makes the difference when needing to do complicated updates like the stuff you mentioned. Agreed about regression though, that's one of the issues of running a bleeding edge distro though, which most Debian-based distros are not. The general advice is to check ArchLinux's news page before running system updates. Personally I rarely bother as I have a ZFS root so I just create rollback points - a little like Windows Restore, but at the filesystem level so super quick.

anbotero 10y ago

Interesting. I liked Arch at home, but I could never really use it. I would end up going back to Windows for gaming. Anyways, three-and-half years ago at work I got the chance to install Arch. Three years later, the only issue I ever had with wildly doing 'pacman -Syu' was GRUB, which got screwed at some point. I got scared back then, but I had the Live USB dongle to the rescue and I could access Arch own wiki with my phone. Anyways, I could quickly solve the problem. Six months ago I did the install from scratch, and this time I have yet to face any issues with package installation/upgrade/dependency resolution. Even AUR packages sometimes if they fail you just have to make small adjustments to the PKGBUILD file and be done with it. It’d be nice to know what kind of packages you’ve been having issues with: at work I deal mostly with Ruby, Erlang, and database engines. As for other packages, Synaptics input and... probably that’s what. Also, whatever dependencies Awesome WM and fish shell require.