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I fell in love with Arch, after having used Gentoo for years, and Debian before that. The straightforwardness appealed to me, it's a binary distribution with a

I fell in love with Arch, after having used Gentoo for years, and Debian before that. The straightforwardness appealed to me, it's a binary distribution with a rolling release cycle and no custom-finagled packages. But after a while, I got tired of manually configuring everything, doing all kinds of weird house-keeping and having to randomly boot from a USB stick to rescue my system from some update with untested consequences. And this was while running the supposedly "stable" update branch. I also got tired of the countless updates that required manual convoluted update procedures and Pacman tricks to function correctly. Maybe this was because my install was relatively old, and thus had stuff like Pulseaudio and Systemd grafted on top of it, but I never had any issues immediately after those updates. So around a year ago when Linux Mint 18 was released, I made the switch and I haven't looked back. I know it's a hackneyed phrase, but Everything. Just. Works. I have not had to do anything at all on my refurbed T420, I just installed it, and it just works, it's wonderful. I cannot be arsed to mess around with configuration files and whatnot on my computers anymore, I have much more interesting things to do than mess around trying to keep my personal computer running correctly. I was also a hardcore KDE-head for years, but Cinnamon has really grown on me. It does what I need, the way I want it (I grew up on Win9x, so that's the interface style I prefer), without getting bogged down in obscure configurations or arcane frameworks. Maybe this all marks me as fallen from the ranks of the Linux cognoscenti, but I don't care. I just want to get on with my life. In the same way that I see a lot of people gush about Mac OS, Mint simply gets out of my way and lets me get on with stuff I actually want/need to do.

a3n 9y ago
Similar Mint fan. I used Arch for awhile, and enjoyed learning how FDE and other things work (because I had to), but it's nice not to have to. My only concern with Mint is, what happens when Ubuntu goes away or becomes nonviable as a distro base? Canonical seems intent on making Ubuntu cool in some area, and even more intent on monetizing Ubuntu, and there's a risk that their pivots, and forward and back steps, could cripple Ubuntu.
- KozmoNau7 9y ago
  I have wondered about that, and I'm sure the Mint devs have a contingency plan in place (probably convert to being a properly Debian-based distro). If they don't and Mint becomes unavailable or nonviable for some reason, I will find another distro similar to Mint, or simply go back to Debian proper. I don't care much which distro I use, my important files are the same no matter which distro I use to access them.
- honestoHeminway 9y ago
  I know its a little early, but what are the ubuntu plans for AR?
enobrev 9y ago
I honestly have this experience with plain Ubuntu, provided I wait at least a month to upgrade (my triple-monitor setup does not play well with brand new releases, but does fine soon after). I have it running on two laptops (which I never have an issue upgrading) and my desktop and I almost never deal with maintenance, nor do I ever want to anymore. I've considered Mint, but even just switching to another "Just Works" distro seems like more effort than I'm willing to commit to my desktop.
- pjmlp 9y ago
  Same here with Ubuntu. I started with Slackware 2.0 back in the day, used all major distros, had a FOSS zealot phase for a few years. Now all my desktop devices run either Windows or Ubuntu.
- KozmoNau7 9y ago
  I'm sure Ubuntu delivers the same general experience, I just don't like Unity and what they've doing with their DEs in general. Ubuntu MATE may be better for me, but I've found myself very comfortable with Cinnamon, so just like you I am not in a hurry to switch distros :-)
  - PeanutNore 9y ago
    I've been giving Ubuntu MATE a try for a couple weeks, and with the "Redmond" panel style it's pretty much frictionless for me.
auxym 9y ago
The main reason I stay away from anything debian based these days is apt. I've been stuck in apt-hell a few too many times. Antergos (arch-based) seems to be treating me well.
- KozmoNau7 9y ago
  Personally, I have literally never had any issues with apt. Not when I ran straight Debian, not when I tried Ubuntu and not now with Mint. I may not be stretching its capabilities quite as far as you may be doing, admittedly.
- pizza234 9y ago
  What do you refer to apt-hell exactly? I've been using Ubuntu for years, and I can't remember any problem with the package manager. The apt-related annoyance is that some PPAs don't carry updated packages (for all the recent Ubuntu versions), but has nothing to do with apt itself. Maybe you refer to distro upgrades? To be fair I have little experience with those, as I never upgrade, only perform fresh installs.
  - auxym 9y ago
    I was not able to update anything anymore due to some complex dependency problem that could not be resolved and seemed to be circular. This happened twice with Ubuntu and another debian-based distro. Granted, I admit I mess around a bit with debian sources. I sometimes pin things, and often times pull packages from sid or unoffficial repos to get fresher versions. With arch though, packages are always fresh, and the AUR has always worked well for me when I needed something not in the official repo. No issue so far.
    - favadi 9y ago
      > Granted, I admit I mess around a bit with debian sources. I sometimes pin things, and often times pull packages from sid or unoffficial repos to get fresher versions. Found your problem.
- deepanchor 9y ago
sevensor 9y ago
> Maybe this all marks me as fallen from the ranks of the Linux cognoscenti, but I don't care. I just want to get on with my life. In the same way that I see a lot of people gush about Mac OS, Mint simply gets out of my way and lets me get on with stuff I actually want/need to do. Interesting -- this is what I would say about Arch. I switched to Arch right after the systemd transition, so I'm sure I missed a big opportunity for breakage. But in those four years I've barely had to think about system administration, beyond routinely running pacman -Syu. I used to have to do a fresh install every six months when a new Fedora would break everything. I don't think this makes me a member of the cognoscenti at all, and I think the whole "Arch is for the l33t" meme is wildly inaccurate. Arch is by far the easiest distro I've ever used.
- AsyncAwait 9y ago
  > I switched to Arch right after the systemd transition, so I'm sure I missed a big opportunity for breakage. I experienced that transition and while you had to read the wiki somewhat carefully, I remember being a bit 'disappointed' afterwards as to how smooth/uneventful it was, it sounded way more scary than it actually was.
  - saimiam 9y ago
    Well, just yesterday, I had to go back a release from Ubuntu 17.04 to 16.04 because of some oscure DNS related systemd-resolved bug which I spent all day trying to fix. Mind you, this bug has been under active discussion for a while now. Since my 16.04 server is just a day old now, I'm thinking I'll bite the bullet and switch to a troublefree distro recommended in this thread. (Not a Linux cognoscenti.)
    - traverseda 9y ago
      Huh, I had to do the same thing yesterday. Interesting coincidence. Did you add DNSSEC=no to /etc/systemd/resolved.conf? That fixed the problem I had yesterday, which is probably a different problem.
ekianjo 9y ago
It's not exactly like Arch (there's no AUR and way less packages available) but Solus is another new Rolling Release distro, written from scratch, that is worth looking at these days.
discreditable 9y ago
Regarding Linux Mint, how do you feel about their issues surrounding timely delivery of security updates? https://www.infoworld.com/article/3182824/ https://www.infoworld.com/article/3182824/ Another problem with any Ubuntu-based distro is that packages in Universe don't receive security update support.
- KozmoNau7 9y ago
  I don't see any issues there at all. The update manager specifically lets you choose your update strategy and tells you the risks/benefits of each choice. As far as receiving timely updates, they come straight from Ubuntu/Debian, so Mint is updated exactly as quickly as the mother distros. I get that there is a lot of hate for Mint because it's not a h4rdc0re h4xx0r distro, but the accusations are simply baseless and often based more in personal convictions than anything else. If you read the linked Reddit thread, in between the rapid haters, there are a couple of posts that lay it out in a very sensible way. Worst-case a Mint user is going to be a couple of days behind an Ubuntu user. Not exactly the end of the world. If ASAP updates are critical for your systems, you probably shouldn't be running a purely desktop-focused distro anyway.
Wheaties466 9y ago
I felt and feel the same way about Arch. If you are still feeling slightly adventurous I would suggest you try manjaro. It seems to be Arch but with the Mint feel of it just working.
- KozmoNau7 9y ago
  I've used Linux as my primary OS for ~17 years now (Mandrake->Debian->Gentoo->Arch->Mint with a few experiments here and there, eg. Fedora and Elementary). I have absolutely no desire for OS tinkering anymore. I basically need a web browser and the desktop Spotify client. That takes care of ~95% of my computing needs these days.
AsyncAwait 9y ago
> But after a while, I got tired of manually configuring everything, doing all kinds of weird house-keeping and having to randomly boot from a USB stick to rescue my system from some update with untested consequences Honestly, this was my experience in the first months with the distro, back in 2011, but then I started feeling like I 'know' Arch, like I understand how to use pacdiff, what news to pay attention to and what commands to run, as well as what not to forget to avoid trouble and honestly, it's been the most stable OS I've known. So yes, there's a 'bump' you have to overcome with Arch, but once you 'get it', it becomes second nature.
- KozmoNau7 9y ago
  I honestly cannot remember how long I had Arch installed on my main system, but I replaced it with Mint about a year ago, and I have files in my home folder dating back to 2007, so give or take around 9 years. So I would definitely say I "got it", but I just couldn't be arsed to do it anymore. I'm not really into unpaid sysadmin work :-)
  - AsyncAwait 9y ago
    Yeah, sure, what I meant by 'get it' is not how long have you been using the system, (I still don't get Windows), but whether you connected with the way the developers meant it to be used, i.e. if it became second nature. I am just sharing an experience that I had it similar, but not anymore, I definitely don't find it requiring sysadmin amount of work to maintain, my daily routine is: read archlinux.org, pacman -Syu, pacdiff, very occasional manual step that took me 5mins - I know it may not be like that for everyone, but not everybody also has the issues you described, is my point.
    - KozmoNau7 9y ago
      Don't get me wrong, I definitely get the Arch way of doing things, if that's what you like and how you want your system to work. My daily routine was exactly the same as yours, except I experienced several boot-breaking errors over the years, where I had to spend hours getting my system running again. I consider that a waste of time. In contrast, Mint takes care of itself, which leaves me to get on with my life in peace.
Hello71 9y ago
This sounds suspiciously to me like "I rewrote my program in <x> new language and it was 20% faster and 200% easier!" in that yes, your new experience may be better, but that's not necessarily attributable to the new language/operating system, but instead that you just got rid of all the old cruft. It's entirely possible (and sounds to me likely, based on your story) that you could have just reinstalled Arch with the same positive effects. Also, you may have lost features in the process. For example, if you rewrote your C program in Python, the code may be much cleaner, but also much slower. If you didn't need it to be fast in the first place, that might be a good compromise for you. If you did need speed, then making the Python program faster might require complicated work, like C FFI, and you might have been better off staying with the original C. Comparably, Arch's PKGBUILD makes packaging new programs very easy, whereas despite having spent a number of hours trying, I still do not understand Debian's packaging format(s). If you rarely use uncommon programs, that may not be an issue for you.
- j7ake 9y ago
  Reinstalling arch Linux means that you have to reconfigure everything. Arch does not work right out of the box.
  - AsyncAwait 9y ago
    You can also keep your configs in git and just pull.
    - KozmoNau7 9y ago
      Because that's perfectly reasonable to expect. After all, everyone has a git repo, right?
      - styren 9y ago
        Oh okey, dropbox then? Do you mean we can not assume that arch users have a way to store away their config files?
      - 9y ago
adtac 9y ago
>manual convoluted update procedures and Pacman tricks to function correctly Maybe it's just me, but I've never had to do this once in the past two years (since I started using Arch). Literally every single update has been perfect.
alyandon 9y ago
I had a very similar experience running Arch on a desktop. After borking my system twice in a six month period during updates (which was admittedly my fault for not following pre-upgrade instructions to the letter) I decided that I'll stick to distros that take care of those details for me.
mezuzza 9y ago
I've used Arch since at least 2011 and I know exactly what you're talking about. When I first started using it, it had the stupid blue install script (pacstrap was it?). Around that time, I had to reinstall arch ~4 times for some reason or another. It was not a great experience. It made me learn a lot of Linux stuff just to keep it up and hitting `pacman -Syyu` was always a scary thing to do. You could never hit yes to prompts without first going to archlinux.org first to make sure that there was no arcane ceremony to conduct before you upgraded your system (I probably know enough now that it would no longer be arcane, but, hey, we all have to start from nothing). My experience since around 2014 has been drastically different. Things have been incredibly stable and I've never had to reinstall arch in the past 3 years. I don't really know what caused the change - maybe it was just maturity - but I do welcome it and working on arch has been amazing. I'm saying this not to convince you to go back, but to allay others' fears that Arch is unapproachable or impossible to deal with. At this point, it's still a hard Linux to work with, but it's no harder than any Linux in which you have to work on the command line.
- Shikadi 9y ago
  I started using Arch sometime before you did, and had the exact same experience - Something happened between 2012 and 2014 that made Arch the most stable Linux distro I've ever used. Arguably more stable than Windows 10, depending on your opinions of Microsoft's execution of forced updates.
zamber 9y ago
From my 4 years with Mint on a light usage PC I can say is no better than a rolling release. The main difference is that you can be sure Mint will break after a version upgrade. Arch on the other hand will make you copy/paste wiki issue solutions after each update. Also there's systemd, netctl, choosing a DE, etc. Also there's no way to reliably do non-interactive updates on Arch because otherwise it's not secure enough (I guess?).
- KozmoNau7 9y ago
  I've updated both my desktop and my laptop from 18 to 18.1 to 18.2 with absolutely no issues at all. Or are you talking about major versions?
  - zamber 9y ago
    Yep, though I've been upgrading that system since Mint 14 (with Cinnamon). Compared to Arch the maintenance cost is orders of magnitude lower. Compared to Ubuntu (2y, at work, upgraded from 16.04 LTS -> 16.10) it feels higher mainly because stuff is less tested and can also break with regular updates (unless they fixed their workflow to remedy that). - For mortal-level usage -> Ubuntu - For mortal-level usage when you don't like Ubuntu -> Mint - For Linux junkies -> Arch EDIT - formatting
    - ernst_klim 9y ago
      >For mortal-level usage I had to choose distro for my gf, so I'd looked for some newbie friendly. I'd installed ubuntu 16.04 in qemu and I found that gnome-software does not work properly: there are a few packages available to install from gui (no scribus, no emacs, no kicad etc). Literally a year passed since lt came out and it has such unacceptable issue for a newbie-friendly distro. Hopefully fedora just works.
      - zamber 9y ago
        Package availability issues -> there are PPA's for everything. A less known thing about LTS releases is that the repos are smaller because of the testing they have to do to make it up to LTS standards. Main reason I moved from 16.04 to 16.10. I don't have direct experience with fedora but I heard that it's nice. Will have to try it someday ;).
barsonme 9y ago
> doing all kinds of weird house-keeping and having to randomly boot from a USB stick to rescue my system from some update with untested consequences Weird! I ran dev versions of everything, updated once every couple days, and can only remember one time that I had to fix a catastrophic bug.
Accacin 9y ago
Not saying you're wrong, just chipping in my opinion. I've been using it for about three years and in that time I've broke something when updating exactly once. I've got around 1100 packages installed, so I'm not a really heavy or really light user. Configuration wise, most of my stuff is stored in dotfiles and if I ever need to reinstall then I pull them down from github and I'm back where I was. That said Mint is a wonderful OS and I can see the appeal.
Scottn1 9y ago
I am very similar. Love to thinker sometimes so early this year downloading and installing many of the top and some obscure distro's. Just sort of felt like going doing an a No-Windows 30 days. Antergos (arch made easy) was one of the distro's I tried last and it stayed on my Asus netbook the longest. I was fairy impressed with Antergos as it installed nice and felt pretty quick. But then things got too manual for my tastes. I just wanted to install Brave Browser. The tgz package didn't run and I couldn't obviously use the deb or rpm version. It wasn't in the default software add/remove when I searched. So I was thrown to using the command line (yaourt) and researching it's commands to get the repository correct, download and install a browser I simply wanted to try that would be a download from website and install on Windows as well as the more popular linux distro's. That was one. Then a week later a update knocked out my wifi. I had to again mess around with some command line fix that worked. The real kicker was when I had not touched the netbook in about a month and when I finally did, I did the routine Pacman -Syu. This I found out the hard way was supposed to not go more than a week or so of not doing. This wrecked the distro so bad I couldn't even get the GUI. That was enough tinkering for me with Arch. I don't have time to research that as I didn't care anymore. Formatted. I was most impressed with PClinuxOS. I just worked and had pretty recent packages on a rolling release. Never had any breakage and it also held hand enough I never touched the command line (even to install Brave). OpenSUSE, Korora and KDE Neon all were also decent and feel I could have used them long term if forced to. In the end of about two months, I just wanted to crawl back into my comfy Windows 7 world and get some work done again. Be able to use literally any software I want and not be confined to lesser quality alternatives. Not have updates kill my install. Etc. I seriously applaud all the coders and individuals dedicating their free time to open source and thank them for that, but I guess I am fine with proprietary closed source that I've grown up on since 1984.
- majewsky 9y ago
  > I did the routine Pacman -Syu. This I found out the hard way was supposed to not go more than a week or so of not doing. This wrecked the distro so bad I couldn't even get the GUI. Wow. Would be really interesting to know what happened there exactly. In 2016, I installed an Arch VM using an image from 2014. Against all odds, I could update it. I had to download a few packages (pacman and its dependencies) manually, verify the digests against the package cache on another machine, and install them. After that, `pacman -Sy archlinux-keyring && pacman -Su` just worked.
thomastjeffery 9y ago
Try NixOS. The Wiki/Manual isn't quite there yet, but it's so manageable that that isn't important right away. > having to randomly boot from a USB stick to rescue my system from some update with untested consequences. Just imagine: Your OS broke after installing an update. You reboot, and pick the second to last GRUB/syslinux entry, and literally boot into the system you had before.

a3n 9y ago

Similar Mint fan. I used Arch for awhile, and enjoyed learning how FDE and other things work (because I had to), but it's nice not to have to. My only concern with Mint is, what happens when Ubuntu goes away or becomes nonviable as a distro base? Canonical seems intent on making Ubuntu cool in some area, and even more intent on monetizing Ubuntu, and there's a risk that their pivots, and forward and back steps, could cripple Ubuntu.

KozmoNau7 9y ago
I have wondered about that, and I'm sure the Mint devs have a contingency plan in place (probably convert to being a properly Debian-based distro). If they don't and Mint becomes unavailable or nonviable for some reason, I will find another distro similar to Mint, or simply go back to Debian proper. I don't care much which distro I use, my important files are the same no matter which distro I use to access them.
honestoHeminway 9y ago
I know its a little early, but what are the ubuntu plans for AR?

enobrev 9y ago

I honestly have this experience with plain Ubuntu, provided I wait at least a month to upgrade (my triple-monitor setup does not play well with brand new releases, but does fine soon after). I have it running on two laptops (which I never have an issue upgrading) and my desktop and I almost never deal with maintenance, nor do I ever want to anymore. I've considered Mint, but even just switching to another "Just Works" distro seems like more effort than I'm willing to commit to my desktop.

pjmlp 9y ago
Same here with Ubuntu. I started with Slackware 2.0 back in the day, used all major distros, had a FOSS zealot phase for a few years. Now all my desktop devices run either Windows or Ubuntu.
KozmoNau7 9y ago
I'm sure Ubuntu delivers the same general experience, I just don't like Unity and what they've doing with their DEs in general. Ubuntu MATE may be better for me, but I've found myself very comfortable with Cinnamon, so just like you I am not in a hurry to switch distros :-)
- PeanutNore 9y ago
  I've been giving Ubuntu MATE a try for a couple weeks, and with the "Redmond" panel style it's pretty much frictionless for me.

auxym 9y ago

The main reason I stay away from anything debian based these days is apt. I've been stuck in apt-hell a few too many times. Antergos (arch-based) seems to be treating me well.

KozmoNau7 9y ago
Personally, I have literally never had any issues with apt. Not when I ran straight Debian, not when I tried Ubuntu and not now with Mint. I may not be stretching its capabilities quite as far as you may be doing, admittedly.
pizza234 9y ago
What do you refer to apt-hell exactly? I've been using Ubuntu for years, and I can't remember any problem with the package manager. The apt-related annoyance is that some PPAs don't carry updated packages (for all the recent Ubuntu versions), but has nothing to do with apt itself. Maybe you refer to distro upgrades? To be fair I have little experience with those, as I never upgrade, only perform fresh installs.
- auxym 9y ago
  I was not able to update anything anymore due to some complex dependency problem that could not be resolved and seemed to be circular. This happened twice with Ubuntu and another debian-based distro. Granted, I admit I mess around a bit with debian sources. I sometimes pin things, and often times pull packages from sid or unoffficial repos to get fresher versions. With arch though, packages are always fresh, and the AUR has always worked well for me when I needed something not in the official repo. No issue so far.
  - favadi 9y ago
    > Granted, I admit I mess around a bit with debian sources. I sometimes pin things, and often times pull packages from sid or unoffficial repos to get fresher versions. Found your problem.
deepanchor 9y ago

sevensor 9y ago

> Maybe this all marks me as fallen from the ranks of the Linux cognoscenti, but I don't care. I just want to get on with my life. In the same way that I see a lot of people gush about Mac OS, Mint simply gets out of my way and lets me get on with stuff I actually want/need to do. Interesting -- this is what I would say about Arch. I switched to Arch right after the systemd transition, so I'm sure I missed a big opportunity for breakage. But in those four years I've barely had to think about system administration, beyond routinely running pacman -Syu. I used to have to do a fresh install every six months when a new Fedora would break everything. I don't think this makes me a member of the cognoscenti at all, and I think the whole "Arch is for the l33t" meme is wildly inaccurate. Arch is by far the easiest distro I've ever used.

AsyncAwait 9y ago
> I switched to Arch right after the systemd transition, so I'm sure I missed a big opportunity for breakage. I experienced that transition and while you had to read the wiki somewhat carefully, I remember being a bit 'disappointed' afterwards as to how smooth/uneventful it was, it sounded way more scary than it actually was.
- saimiam 9y ago
  Well, just yesterday, I had to go back a release from Ubuntu 17.04 to 16.04 because of some oscure DNS related systemd-resolved bug which I spent all day trying to fix. Mind you, this bug has been under active discussion for a while now. Since my 16.04 server is just a day old now, I'm thinking I'll bite the bullet and switch to a troublefree distro recommended in this thread. (Not a Linux cognoscenti.)
  - traverseda 9y ago
    Huh, I had to do the same thing yesterday. Interesting coincidence. Did you add DNSSEC=no to /etc/systemd/resolved.conf? That fixed the problem I had yesterday, which is probably a different problem.

ekianjo 9y ago

It's not exactly like Arch (there's no AUR and way less packages available) but Solus is another new Rolling Release distro, written from scratch, that is worth looking at these days.

discreditable 9y ago

Regarding Linux Mint, how do you feel about their issues surrounding timely delivery of security updates? https://www.infoworld.com/article/3182824/ https://www.infoworld.com/article/3182824/ Another problem with any Ubuntu-based distro is that packages in Universe don't receive security update support.

KozmoNau7 9y ago
I don't see any issues there at all. The update manager specifically lets you choose your update strategy and tells you the risks/benefits of each choice. As far as receiving timely updates, they come straight from Ubuntu/Debian, so Mint is updated exactly as quickly as the mother distros. I get that there is a lot of hate for Mint because it's not a h4rdc0re h4xx0r distro, but the accusations are simply baseless and often based more in personal convictions than anything else. If you read the linked Reddit thread, in between the rapid haters, there are a couple of posts that lay it out in a very sensible way. Worst-case a Mint user is going to be a couple of days behind an Ubuntu user. Not exactly the end of the world. If ASAP updates are critical for your systems, you probably shouldn't be running a purely desktop-focused distro anyway.

Wheaties466 9y ago

I felt and feel the same way about Arch. If you are still feeling slightly adventurous I would suggest you try manjaro. It seems to be Arch but with the Mint feel of it just working.

KozmoNau7 9y ago
I've used Linux as my primary OS for ~17 years now (Mandrake->Debian->Gentoo->Arch->Mint with a few experiments here and there, eg. Fedora and Elementary). I have absolutely no desire for OS tinkering anymore. I basically need a web browser and the desktop Spotify client. That takes care of ~95% of my computing needs these days.

AsyncAwait 9y ago

> But after a while, I got tired of manually configuring everything, doing all kinds of weird house-keeping and having to randomly boot from a USB stick to rescue my system from some update with untested consequences Honestly, this was my experience in the first months with the distro, back in 2011, but then I started feeling like I 'know' Arch, like I understand how to use pacdiff, what news to pay attention to and what commands to run, as well as what not to forget to avoid trouble and honestly, it's been the most stable OS I've known. So yes, there's a 'bump' you have to overcome with Arch, but once you 'get it', it becomes second nature.

KozmoNau7 9y ago
I honestly cannot remember how long I had Arch installed on my main system, but I replaced it with Mint about a year ago, and I have files in my home folder dating back to 2007, so give or take around 9 years. So I would definitely say I "got it", but I just couldn't be arsed to do it anymore. I'm not really into unpaid sysadmin work :-)
- AsyncAwait 9y ago
  Yeah, sure, what I meant by 'get it' is not how long have you been using the system, (I still don't get Windows), but whether you connected with the way the developers meant it to be used, i.e. if it became second nature. I am just sharing an experience that I had it similar, but not anymore, I definitely don't find it requiring sysadmin amount of work to maintain, my daily routine is: read archlinux.org, pacman -Syu, pacdiff, very occasional manual step that took me 5mins - I know it may not be like that for everyone, but not everybody also has the issues you described, is my point.
  - KozmoNau7 9y ago
    Don't get me wrong, I definitely get the Arch way of doing things, if that's what you like and how you want your system to work. My daily routine was exactly the same as yours, except I experienced several boot-breaking errors over the years, where I had to spend hours getting my system running again. I consider that a waste of time. In contrast, Mint takes care of itself, which leaves me to get on with my life in peace.

Hello71 9y ago

This sounds suspiciously to me like "I rewrote my program in <x> new language and it was 20% faster and 200% easier!" in that yes, your new experience may be better, but that's not necessarily attributable to the new language/operating system, but instead that you just got rid of all the old cruft. It's entirely possible (and sounds to me likely, based on your story) that you could have just reinstalled Arch with the same positive effects. Also, you may have lost features in the process. For example, if you rewrote your C program in Python, the code may be much cleaner, but also much slower. If you didn't need it to be fast in the first place, that might be a good compromise for you. If you did need speed, then making the Python program faster might require complicated work, like C FFI, and you might have been better off staying with the original C. Comparably, Arch's PKGBUILD makes packaging new programs very easy, whereas despite having spent a number of hours trying, I still do not understand Debian's packaging format(s). If you rarely use uncommon programs, that may not be an issue for you.

j7ake 9y ago
Reinstalling arch Linux means that you have to reconfigure everything. Arch does not work right out of the box.
- AsyncAwait 9y ago
  You can also keep your configs in git and just pull.
  - KozmoNau7 9y ago
    Because that's perfectly reasonable to expect. After all, everyone has a git repo, right?
    - styren 9y ago
      Oh okey, dropbox then? Do you mean we can not assume that arch users have a way to store away their config files?
    - 9y ago

adtac 9y ago

>manual convoluted update procedures and Pacman tricks to function correctly Maybe it's just me, but I've never had to do this once in the past two years (since I started using Arch). Literally every single update has been perfect.

alyandon 9y ago

I had a very similar experience running Arch on a desktop. After borking my system twice in a six month period during updates (which was admittedly my fault for not following pre-upgrade instructions to the letter) I decided that I'll stick to distros that take care of those details for me.

mezuzza 9y ago

I've used Arch since at least 2011 and I know exactly what you're talking about. When I first started using it, it had the stupid blue install script (pacstrap was it?). Around that time, I had to reinstall arch ~4 times for some reason or another. It was not a great experience. It made me learn a lot of Linux stuff just to keep it up and hitting `pacman -Syyu` was always a scary thing to do. You could never hit yes to prompts without first going to archlinux.org first to make sure that there was no arcane ceremony to conduct before you upgraded your system (I probably know enough now that it would no longer be arcane, but, hey, we all have to start from nothing). My experience since around 2014 has been drastically different. Things have been incredibly stable and I've never had to reinstall arch in the past 3 years. I don't really know what caused the change - maybe it was just maturity - but I do welcome it and working on arch has been amazing. I'm saying this not to convince you to go back, but to allay others' fears that Arch is unapproachable or impossible to deal with. At this point, it's still a hard Linux to work with, but it's no harder than any Linux in which you have to work on the command line.

Shikadi 9y ago
I started using Arch sometime before you did, and had the exact same experience - Something happened between 2012 and 2014 that made Arch the most stable Linux distro I've ever used. Arguably more stable than Windows 10, depending on your opinions of Microsoft's execution of forced updates.

zamber 9y ago

From my 4 years with Mint on a light usage PC I can say is no better than a rolling release. The main difference is that you can be sure Mint will break after a version upgrade. Arch on the other hand will make you copy/paste wiki issue solutions after each update. Also there's systemd, netctl, choosing a DE, etc. Also there's no way to reliably do non-interactive updates on Arch because otherwise it's not secure enough (I guess?).

KozmoNau7 9y ago
I've updated both my desktop and my laptop from 18 to 18.1 to 18.2 with absolutely no issues at all. Or are you talking about major versions?
- zamber 9y ago
  Yep, though I've been upgrading that system since Mint 14 (with Cinnamon). Compared to Arch the maintenance cost is orders of magnitude lower. Compared to Ubuntu (2y, at work, upgraded from 16.04 LTS -> 16.10) it feels higher mainly because stuff is less tested and can also break with regular updates (unless they fixed their workflow to remedy that). - For mortal-level usage -> Ubuntu - For mortal-level usage when you don't like Ubuntu -> Mint - For Linux junkies -> Arch EDIT - formatting
  - ernst_klim 9y ago
    >For mortal-level usage I had to choose distro for my gf, so I'd looked for some newbie friendly. I'd installed ubuntu 16.04 in qemu and I found that gnome-software does not work properly: there are a few packages available to install from gui (no scribus, no emacs, no kicad etc). Literally a year passed since lt came out and it has such unacceptable issue for a newbie-friendly distro. Hopefully fedora just works.
    - zamber 9y ago
      Package availability issues -> there are PPA's for everything. A less known thing about LTS releases is that the repos are smaller because of the testing they have to do to make it up to LTS standards. Main reason I moved from 16.04 to 16.10. I don't have direct experience with fedora but I heard that it's nice. Will have to try it someday ;).

barsonme 9y ago

> doing all kinds of weird house-keeping and having to randomly boot from a USB stick to rescue my system from some update with untested consequences Weird! I ran dev versions of everything, updated once every couple days, and can only remember one time that I had to fix a catastrophic bug.

Accacin 9y ago

Not saying you're wrong, just chipping in my opinion. I've been using it for about three years and in that time I've broke something when updating exactly once. I've got around 1100 packages installed, so I'm not a really heavy or really light user. Configuration wise, most of my stuff is stored in dotfiles and if I ever need to reinstall then I pull them down from github and I'm back where I was. That said Mint is a wonderful OS and I can see the appeal.

Scottn1 9y ago

I am very similar. Love to thinker sometimes so early this year downloading and installing many of the top and some obscure distro's. Just sort of felt like going doing an a No-Windows 30 days. Antergos (arch made easy) was one of the distro's I tried last and it stayed on my Asus netbook the longest. I was fairy impressed with Antergos as it installed nice and felt pretty quick. But then things got too manual for my tastes. I just wanted to install Brave Browser. The tgz package didn't run and I couldn't obviously use the deb or rpm version. It wasn't in the default software add/remove when I searched. So I was thrown to using the command line (yaourt) and researching it's commands to get the repository correct, download and install a browser I simply wanted to try that would be a download from website and install on Windows as well as the more popular linux distro's. That was one. Then a week later a update knocked out my wifi. I had to again mess around with some command line fix that worked. The real kicker was when I had not touched the netbook in about a month and when I finally did, I did the routine Pacman -Syu. This I found out the hard way was supposed to not go more than a week or so of not doing. This wrecked the distro so bad I couldn't even get the GUI. That was enough tinkering for me with Arch. I don't have time to research that as I didn't care anymore. Formatted. I was most impressed with PClinuxOS. I just worked and had pretty recent packages on a rolling release. Never had any breakage and it also held hand enough I never touched the command line (even to install Brave). OpenSUSE, Korora and KDE Neon all were also decent and feel I could have used them long term if forced to. In the end of about two months, I just wanted to crawl back into my comfy Windows 7 world and get some work done again. Be able to use literally any software I want and not be confined to lesser quality alternatives. Not have updates kill my install. Etc. I seriously applaud all the coders and individuals dedicating their free time to open source and thank them for that, but I guess I am fine with proprietary closed source that I've grown up on since 1984.

majewsky 9y ago
> I did the routine Pacman -Syu. This I found out the hard way was supposed to not go more than a week or so of not doing. This wrecked the distro so bad I couldn't even get the GUI. Wow. Would be really interesting to know what happened there exactly. In 2016, I installed an Arch VM using an image from 2014. Against all odds, I could update it. I had to download a few packages (pacman and its dependencies) manually, verify the digests against the package cache on another machine, and install them. After that, `pacman -Sy archlinux-keyring && pacman -Su` just worked.

thomastjeffery 9y ago

Try NixOS. The Wiki/Manual isn't quite there yet, but it's so manageable that that isn't important right away. > having to randomly boot from a USB stick to rescue my system from some update with untested consequences. Just imagine: Your OS broke after installing an update. You reboot, and pick the second to last GRUB/syslinux entry, and literally boot into the system you had before.