4 ms·

I have been an arch user for more than 10 years now and three things make the difference for me: - a very mature community of users. The arch docs and forums a

I have been an arch user for more than 10 years now and three things make the difference for me: - a very mature community of users. The arch docs and forums are really good. If you ever have a problem, you'll find a solution in no more than a few clicks - an extremely tidy package manager. The choice of packages is huge and - more importantly - creating and maintaining a package is extremely easy. Way easier than making .debs or .rpms - it just works. I've used arch for more than a decade on all my machines, including servers. I never had major issues. Annoyances coming from upstream are unavoidable of course, but the distro is well organised that identify the problem and rolling back is super easy.

jiggunjer 9y ago
I hate the "it just works" marketing bs. Sounds exactly like Apple. It didn't work when I tried to update after being away for 3 months. It wouldn't even boot because they changed to systemd in the meantime. So it only works if you sink in significant time.
- KozmoNau7 9y ago
  It really does require you to be subscribed to the Arch news feed, in case any packages require special manual procedures to install correctly. And don't wait too long between updates, because apparently some newer versions of packages don't know how to properly upgrade from older versions.
- AsyncAwait 9y ago
  > I hate the "it just works" marketing bs. Sounds exactly like Apple. It didn't work when I tried to update after being away for 3 months It does indeed 'just work', it only doesn't if you fail to understand what rolling release means. There is usually a painless way to upgrade even after a long time, you just have to use pacdiff and read archlinux.org a bit more carefully than if you update daily/weekly. Also, how does Apple not 'just work'?* * 'just works' refers to a general idea of it being in good working condition and not behaving unexpectedly, if you use it in a reasonable manner, it doesn't mean that every cranky misconfiguration of a tool you just came up with will somehow read you mind and deduce how you intend it to behave.
  - jiggunjer 9y ago
    When's the last time you had to read documentation to update your Mac? To most people "it just works" means crash free and hassle free, i.e. your grandma can use it. I never said it was inappropriate for Apple, though it was often implied competetitors don't "just work".
  - KozmoNau7 9y ago
    "Oh it just works, as long as you read the documentation before every update and follow the update news feed, which usually has a bunch of information on packages your either don't use or don't care about. And you may have to fix shit manually. So yeah, it Just Works." With Mint (or Mac OS or Windows or Ubuntu), it updates automatically. Or if it doesn't, it flashes an icon, I click the icon, it updates for me. That's what "it just works" means.
    - AsyncAwait 9y ago
      a. There's no need to 'read the documentation' before every update a quick glance at the news feed will do. b. macOS doesn't track and update every package on your system. c. in that sense, nothing just works, i.e. had to repair Windows after a botched MS update quite a few times and while macOS is not usually completely broken after significant updates, (it shouldn't, they control the hw), it tends to be broken in subtle and annoying ways nonetheless, 10.7 for example was particularly bad. d. That Ubuntu just works is your experience, there are plenty of people who try it and it either cannot detect something, or the GPU driver is broken or Wifi doesn't work, (see the reports on that regarding 16.04 LTS) etc. so it is very subjective, but if you don't experience these issues with Ubuntu, it's great. All I'm saying is that it is the same way for Arch.
      - KozmoNau7 9y ago
        "a. There's no need to 'read the documentation' before every update a quick glance at the news feed will do." That is part of the documentation. Users shouldn't have to subscribe to a news feeds in order to correctly update their systems. Do you subscribe to Microsoft's or Apple's update news feed? If you do, you're unlike 99.999% of users. "b. macOS doesn't track and update every package on your system." Mint does. Ubuntu does. A large number of other desktop-oriented distros do, without requiring their users to read news feeds for instructions on manual procedures. "c. in that sense, nothing just works, i.e. had to repair Windows after a botched MS update quite a few times and while macOS is not usually completely broken after significant updates, (it shouldn't, they control the hw), it tends to be broken in subtle and annoying ways nonetheless, 10.7 for example was particularly bad." Shit happens. Shit just seems to happen a lot more often on Arch (and Gentoo, for that matter). "d. That Ubuntu just works is your experience, there are plenty of people who try it and it either cannot detect something, or the GPU driver is broken or Wifi doesn't work, (see the reports on that regarding 16.04 LTS) etc. so it is very subjective, but if you don't experience these issues with Ubuntu, it's great. All I'm saying is that it is the same way for Arch." I used Arch for ~9 years. I've had systems where it worked fine, and systems that required a lot of fiddling to work. In contrast, Mint and Ubuntu has worked flawlessly, on those same systems.
- crocowhile 9y ago
  I do understand your point of view. Technology hardly ever "just works". Probably the only device that never went guru meditation on me is my microwave. Having said this, when it comes to updates, archlinux is really orders of magnitudes more efficient than any other distro I have ever tried.

jiggunjer 9y ago

I hate the "it just works" marketing bs. Sounds exactly like Apple. It didn't work when I tried to update after being away for 3 months. It wouldn't even boot because they changed to systemd in the meantime. So it only works if you sink in significant time.

KozmoNau7 9y ago
It really does require you to be subscribed to the Arch news feed, in case any packages require special manual procedures to install correctly. And don't wait too long between updates, because apparently some newer versions of packages don't know how to properly upgrade from older versions.
AsyncAwait 9y ago
> I hate the "it just works" marketing bs. Sounds exactly like Apple. It didn't work when I tried to update after being away for 3 months It does indeed 'just work', it only doesn't if you fail to understand what rolling release means. There is usually a painless way to upgrade even after a long time, you just have to use pacdiff and read archlinux.org a bit more carefully than if you update daily/weekly. Also, how does Apple not 'just work'?* * 'just works' refers to a general idea of it being in good working condition and not behaving unexpectedly, if you use it in a reasonable manner, it doesn't mean that every cranky misconfiguration of a tool you just came up with will somehow read you mind and deduce how you intend it to behave.
- jiggunjer 9y ago
  When's the last time you had to read documentation to update your Mac? To most people "it just works" means crash free and hassle free, i.e. your grandma can use it. I never said it was inappropriate for Apple, though it was often implied competetitors don't "just work".
- KozmoNau7 9y ago
  "Oh it just works, as long as you read the documentation before every update and follow the update news feed, which usually has a bunch of information on packages your either don't use or don't care about. And you may have to fix shit manually. So yeah, it Just Works." With Mint (or Mac OS or Windows or Ubuntu), it updates automatically. Or if it doesn't, it flashes an icon, I click the icon, it updates for me. That's what "it just works" means.
  - AsyncAwait 9y ago
    a. There's no need to 'read the documentation' before every update a quick glance at the news feed will do. b. macOS doesn't track and update every package on your system. c. in that sense, nothing just works, i.e. had to repair Windows after a botched MS update quite a few times and while macOS is not usually completely broken after significant updates, (it shouldn't, they control the hw), it tends to be broken in subtle and annoying ways nonetheless, 10.7 for example was particularly bad. d. That Ubuntu just works is your experience, there are plenty of people who try it and it either cannot detect something, or the GPU driver is broken or Wifi doesn't work, (see the reports on that regarding 16.04 LTS) etc. so it is very subjective, but if you don't experience these issues with Ubuntu, it's great. All I'm saying is that it is the same way for Arch.
    - KozmoNau7 9y ago
      "a. There's no need to 'read the documentation' before every update a quick glance at the news feed will do." That is part of the documentation. Users shouldn't have to subscribe to a news feeds in order to correctly update their systems. Do you subscribe to Microsoft's or Apple's update news feed? If you do, you're unlike 99.999% of users. "b. macOS doesn't track and update every package on your system." Mint does. Ubuntu does. A large number of other desktop-oriented distros do, without requiring their users to read news feeds for instructions on manual procedures. "c. in that sense, nothing just works, i.e. had to repair Windows after a botched MS update quite a few times and while macOS is not usually completely broken after significant updates, (it shouldn't, they control the hw), it tends to be broken in subtle and annoying ways nonetheless, 10.7 for example was particularly bad." Shit happens. Shit just seems to happen a lot more often on Arch (and Gentoo, for that matter). "d. That Ubuntu just works is your experience, there are plenty of people who try it and it either cannot detect something, or the GPU driver is broken or Wifi doesn't work, (see the reports on that regarding 16.04 LTS) etc. so it is very subjective, but if you don't experience these issues with Ubuntu, it's great. All I'm saying is that it is the same way for Arch." I used Arch for ~9 years. I've had systems where it worked fine, and systems that required a lot of fiddling to work. In contrast, Mint and Ubuntu has worked flawlessly, on those same systems.
crocowhile 9y ago
I do understand your point of view. Technology hardly ever "just works". Probably the only device that never went guru meditation on me is my microwave. Having said this, when it comes to updates, archlinux is really orders of magnitudes more efficient than any other distro I have ever tried.