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Arch is just too much time for me doing sysadmin and keeping up with breaking changes (it's a rolling distro, so all kinds of system configurations are possible

Arch is just too much time for me doing sysadmin and keeping up with breaking changes (it's a rolling distro, so all kinds of system configurations are possible, many are untested or just bleeding edge). If you like using an unstable bleeding edge system where you have to configure everything yourself by hand with absolutely zero tolerance for user error, use Arch. If I'm on a tight schedule with doing mission critical projects on my work computer where there are hard deadlines and Murphy's Law involved, forget it. If you're curious, I'm currently using Mint with Cinnamon.

RealityVoid 9y ago
I thought the same thing but I set up arch on my main machine a couple of months ago and apart from the setup pain, it has been a much smaller hassle than I anticipated. It's pretty stable, didn't have any breakage until now. I love it! But I do admit the initial setup was pretty intense, I loved the learning experience. I'm also using Cinnamon, on Arch. It's quite clean and nice. :)
- Zancarius 9y ago
  > I thought the same thing but I set up arch on my main machine a couple of months ago and apart from the setup pain, it has been a much smaller hassle than I anticipated. It's pretty stable, didn't have any breakage until now. I love it! As an Arch user of ~5-6 years, I do have some advice outside the obvious realm of "keep regular (working) backups" that can help minimize future headaches (not necessarily for you since you've likely already encountered these points; mostly for others who may be interested in dabbling with Arch): 1) Update often (at least once every 1-2 months; try not to let it get more than 6 months out of date), and keep a close eye on the news items--or, better yet, subscribe to the arch-announce mailing list. You'll get a heads up on anything that could be a potentially breaking change. When breaking changes come down the turnpike, don't panic--the Arch maintainers post upgrade instructions walking you through the process along with the appropriate news entry and it's usually fairly straightforward. There's also the forums if you get into a bind, and there's tons of great people willing to help (but search first!). 2) Keep your configurations up to date (either with `yaourt -C` or examining the .pacnew files by hand with vimdiff or similar). This isn't really Arch-specific, but because Arch is* a rolling release distribution, sometimes new versions of things come out fast enough that existing configurations can fall out of date and present unique challenges. But it all very much depends on the upgrade policy of upstream packages. Usually this isn't a problem unless. Fortunately, the lion's share of "breaking" changes you'll encounter will be minor. The most recent one you've probably encountered by now may have been the certificate path issue with ca-certificates existing already. I suspect most of the major architectural changes are in the past at this point (mostly due to the disruption caused by systemd), but keeping your system relatively up to date is a great way to inoculate it against unnecessary future effort. It's always possible to upgrade ancient installs if you let them lapse (I should know!), but it's better to avoid that if possible. I hope you continue to enjoy Arch for many years to come!
  - eikenberry 9y ago
    One concern I've had with Arch was how they would handle the big C/C++ library ABI changes. It only seems to happen about once a decade, but when it does it is a giant pain. Last time this happened while I was using Debian testing you had to pin a ton of packages for many months while everything moved over to the new ABI. How does Arch manage these core library ABI changes?
    - pritambaral 9y ago
      Arch is currently transitioning to GCC 7 and OpenSSL 1.1.0 (yes, both). The GCC transition is a straight up replacement of packages, gcc and those built with the new gcc. Some AUR packages may need to be rebuilt, but the community of users agrees in some measure that that's something a user of AUR must know already. The OpenSSL transition is keeping both versions around for a while, shunting the older version from package `openssl` to `openssl-1.0`, which will eventually go away too. I guess the GCC 6 to 7 transition was not a big deal, but that could be partly because Arch tries to stick with upstream code and doesn't add patches of its own much.
      - Zancarius 9y ago
        > The OpenSSL transition is keeping both versions around for a while, shunting the older version from package `openssl` to `openssl-1.0`, which will eventually go away too. In my experience, this hasn't been a terribly unsettling transition and has gone quite smoothly except for a few individuals unlucky enough to update during a mirror turnover (or so I gathered from the forums as their problems often went away after updating again a short time later). Mostly, insofar as OpenSSL 1.1.x is concerned vs. openssl-1.0, I've only had problems with projects that make heavy use of cmake as there's no easy workaround outside either a) creating/linking a few directories that cmake expects to find OpenSSL 1.0 in, or b) (my preferred approach because it avoids polluting the file system) patching the FindOpenSSL macro. But, I don't think this is a problem Arch needs to resolve as this is most certainly an upstream issue and only affects AUR packages (which, as you said, users of the AUR should already have some experience in this area anyway!). You're absolutely spot on with that last statement--one of the reasons I love Arch is because package maintainers keep things as close to upstream as possible and GCC updates have largely been painless. Certainly more so than I recall under Gentoo. Now that I think about it, the few pain points I've encountered with less frequently updated Arch installations have almost always involved multiple incompatible changes to core/filesystem layered with pacman updates. There are others, sure, but those ones seem to stick out in my mind the most. It's better to avoid them entirely by updating regularly, of course, but it happens.
- Hydraulix989 9y ago
  Yes, I remember once I needed to print something on my laptop and I realized I hadn't set up printing yet on my Arch system (a non-trivial process that requires at least 30 minutes of time reading the Wiki) because I hadn't printed anything in years. The thing I was printing was an important legal document for my startup, and it was very frustrating to my other founders that everyone on their Macs had already printed and signed their copies right away but me. Now, if I want to print something on Mint/Ubuntu, all I have to do is just plug the printer into my USB port, and it Just Works. We also had an intern who could code but never used Arch who spent the majority of his first month learning how to set up and use Arch. Not very productive time spent. Arch is fine if you're looking to use a hobby distro (I had the showstopper problem once where I was trying to work remotely and couldn't connect to wifi but I didn't have wifi to read the Wiki to figure out how to troubleshoot it and so I was screwed -- after all, who remembers how to use wpa_supplicant by heart from command line?), but for getting shit done, it's far from ideal. This was a simple auth based network too where my Mac user founders were just typing in the username and password they got from the receptionist and they were good to go. Meanwhile, I was still trying to figure out what the hell mschapv2 is, unable to get any real work done for at least a half hour. By the time it was working (I was using the GUI wifi frontend recommended on the Arch Linux and it still required me to manually select from every permutation of encryption possible instead of autodetecting like any friendly OS does for you -- how would the receptionist possibly know if the network uses WPA2 Personal, WPA2 Enterprise, ...), my brain was already wore out from the troubleshooting and frustration and so I really wasn't able to write as much code as I wanted to -- we had to leave shortly after anyways, so effectively, I got nothing done. I also remember Arch choking on connecting to a wifi network that had an ampersand (&) in the password. I was stuck using NetworkManager because I needed to connect to wifi in command line to unbreak Xorg (NVIDIA driver update hosed it), and while I was perfectly able to connect to this wifi network from the GUI (the only one I had access to in the vicinity -- this was a desktop computer), I just couldn't connect to it at all from command line no matter what escape sequences I tried (quotes, \&, etc.) and no amount of troubleshooting trying to Google and read Arch Wiki and manually copying and pasting on my 4" phone screen (since I had no Internet access otherwise) could fix it. Even the guys on Arch Linux's IRC channel were stumped. Yeah, I'm just going to continue using Mint.
  - 9y ago
klodolph 9y ago
That's my experience too—I used to use Arch, but switched to Debian because I have better things to do with my time. I know quite a few people IRL who have made the same switch (or to Ubuntu).
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
majewsky 9y ago
Cannot agree. I have 5 machines on Arch (a notebook, a desktop, three servers), and the administrative cost is pretty much negligible (unless, of course, I decide to install a new application or something like that). Maybe 3 minutes a day total for interacting with the guided auto-update cronjob and reading the system health report.

RealityVoid 9y ago

I thought the same thing but I set up arch on my main machine a couple of months ago and apart from the setup pain, it has been a much smaller hassle than I anticipated. It's pretty stable, didn't have any breakage until now. I love it! But I do admit the initial setup was pretty intense, I loved the learning experience. I'm also using Cinnamon, on Arch. It's quite clean and nice. :)

Zancarius 9y ago
> I thought the same thing but I set up arch on my main machine a couple of months ago and apart from the setup pain, it has been a much smaller hassle than I anticipated. It's pretty stable, didn't have any breakage until now. I love it! As an Arch user of ~5-6 years, I do have some advice outside the obvious realm of "keep regular (working) backups" that can help minimize future headaches (not necessarily for you since you've likely already encountered these points; mostly for others who may be interested in dabbling with Arch): 1) Update often (at least once every 1-2 months; try not to let it get more than 6 months out of date), and keep a close eye on the news items--or, better yet, subscribe to the arch-announce mailing list. You'll get a heads up on anything that could be a potentially breaking change. When breaking changes come down the turnpike, don't panic--the Arch maintainers post upgrade instructions walking you through the process along with the appropriate news entry and it's usually fairly straightforward. There's also the forums if you get into a bind, and there's tons of great people willing to help (but search first!). 2) Keep your configurations up to date (either with `yaourt -C` or examining the .pacnew files by hand with vimdiff or similar). This isn't really Arch-specific, but because Arch is* a rolling release distribution, sometimes new versions of things come out fast enough that existing configurations can fall out of date and present unique challenges. But it all very much depends on the upgrade policy of upstream packages. Usually this isn't a problem unless. Fortunately, the lion's share of "breaking" changes you'll encounter will be minor. The most recent one you've probably encountered by now may have been the certificate path issue with ca-certificates existing already. I suspect most of the major architectural changes are in the past at this point (mostly due to the disruption caused by systemd), but keeping your system relatively up to date is a great way to inoculate it against unnecessary future effort. It's always possible to upgrade ancient installs if you let them lapse (I should know!), but it's better to avoid that if possible. I hope you continue to enjoy Arch for many years to come!
- eikenberry 9y ago
  One concern I've had with Arch was how they would handle the big C/C++ library ABI changes. It only seems to happen about once a decade, but when it does it is a giant pain. Last time this happened while I was using Debian testing you had to pin a ton of packages for many months while everything moved over to the new ABI. How does Arch manage these core library ABI changes?
  - pritambaral 9y ago
    Arch is currently transitioning to GCC 7 and OpenSSL 1.1.0 (yes, both). The GCC transition is a straight up replacement of packages, gcc and those built with the new gcc. Some AUR packages may need to be rebuilt, but the community of users agrees in some measure that that's something a user of AUR must know already. The OpenSSL transition is keeping both versions around for a while, shunting the older version from package `openssl` to `openssl-1.0`, which will eventually go away too. I guess the GCC 6 to 7 transition was not a big deal, but that could be partly because Arch tries to stick with upstream code and doesn't add patches of its own much.
    - Zancarius 9y ago
      > The OpenSSL transition is keeping both versions around for a while, shunting the older version from package `openssl` to `openssl-1.0`, which will eventually go away too. In my experience, this hasn't been a terribly unsettling transition and has gone quite smoothly except for a few individuals unlucky enough to update during a mirror turnover (or so I gathered from the forums as their problems often went away after updating again a short time later). Mostly, insofar as OpenSSL 1.1.x is concerned vs. openssl-1.0, I've only had problems with projects that make heavy use of cmake as there's no easy workaround outside either a) creating/linking a few directories that cmake expects to find OpenSSL 1.0 in, or b) (my preferred approach because it avoids polluting the file system) patching the FindOpenSSL macro. But, I don't think this is a problem Arch needs to resolve as this is most certainly an upstream issue and only affects AUR packages (which, as you said, users of the AUR should already have some experience in this area anyway!). You're absolutely spot on with that last statement--one of the reasons I love Arch is because package maintainers keep things as close to upstream as possible and GCC updates have largely been painless. Certainly more so than I recall under Gentoo. Now that I think about it, the few pain points I've encountered with less frequently updated Arch installations have almost always involved multiple incompatible changes to core/filesystem layered with pacman updates. There are others, sure, but those ones seem to stick out in my mind the most. It's better to avoid them entirely by updating regularly, of course, but it happens.
Hydraulix989 9y ago
Yes, I remember once I needed to print something on my laptop and I realized I hadn't set up printing yet on my Arch system (a non-trivial process that requires at least 30 minutes of time reading the Wiki) because I hadn't printed anything in years. The thing I was printing was an important legal document for my startup, and it was very frustrating to my other founders that everyone on their Macs had already printed and signed their copies right away but me. Now, if I want to print something on Mint/Ubuntu, all I have to do is just plug the printer into my USB port, and it Just Works. We also had an intern who could code but never used Arch who spent the majority of his first month learning how to set up and use Arch. Not very productive time spent. Arch is fine if you're looking to use a hobby distro (I had the showstopper problem once where I was trying to work remotely and couldn't connect to wifi but I didn't have wifi to read the Wiki to figure out how to troubleshoot it and so I was screwed -- after all, who remembers how to use wpa_supplicant by heart from command line?), but for getting shit done, it's far from ideal. This was a simple auth based network too where my Mac user founders were just typing in the username and password they got from the receptionist and they were good to go. Meanwhile, I was still trying to figure out what the hell mschapv2 is, unable to get any real work done for at least a half hour. By the time it was working (I was using the GUI wifi frontend recommended on the Arch Linux and it still required me to manually select from every permutation of encryption possible instead of autodetecting like any friendly OS does for you -- how would the receptionist possibly know if the network uses WPA2 Personal, WPA2 Enterprise, ...), my brain was already wore out from the troubleshooting and frustration and so I really wasn't able to write as much code as I wanted to -- we had to leave shortly after anyways, so effectively, I got nothing done. I also remember Arch choking on connecting to a wifi network that had an ampersand (&) in the password. I was stuck using NetworkManager because I needed to connect to wifi in command line to unbreak Xorg (NVIDIA driver update hosed it), and while I was perfectly able to connect to this wifi network from the GUI (the only one I had access to in the vicinity -- this was a desktop computer), I just couldn't connect to it at all from command line no matter what escape sequences I tried (quotes, \&, etc.) and no amount of troubleshooting trying to Google and read Arch Wiki and manually copying and pasting on my 4" phone screen (since I had no Internet access otherwise) could fix it. Even the guys on Arch Linux's IRC channel were stumped. Yeah, I'm just going to continue using Mint.
- 9y ago

klodolph 9y ago

That's my experience too—I used to use Arch, but switched to Debian because I have better things to do with my time. I know quite a few people IRL who have made the same switch (or to Ubuntu).

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

majewsky 9y ago

Cannot agree. I have 5 machines on Arch (a notebook, a desktop, three servers), and the administrative cost is pretty much negligible (unless, of course, I decide to install a new application or something like that). Maybe 3 minutes a day total for interacting with the guided auto-update cronjob and reading the system health report.