4 ms·

I have been using Arch both for my work and private desktop for about ten years now. It is an absolute joy to work with. The biggest drawback is the very occasi

by blux 9y ago

I have been using Arch both for my work and private desktop for about ten years now. It is an absolute joy to work with. The biggest drawback is the very occasional breakage after doing a system upgrade. I would estimate such an upgrade breaks the system once or twice every year on average, although everything is much more stable for the last few years. I upgrade my system at least once per week. Overall, highly recommended distribution, even for beginners, assuming you are willing to read and understand the excellent installation guide.

tbrock 9y ago
Subscribe to the breakages mailing list and this will never happen again. Will get <10 emails a year.
- blux 9y ago
  Do you have a link? I could not find it here: https://lists.archlinux.org/listinfo/ https://lists.archlinux.org/listinfo/
megous 9y ago
That's probably very system dependent and usage dependent. I've been running a desktop workstation with Arch for 11 years, and experienced serious breakage (kernel didn't boot) perhaps once and some annoyances a few times (systemd migration, freetype2 rendering changes, wayland becoming somehow default and being hard to change back to Xorg). The bulk of the issues is with a need to manually upgrade non-desktop software. (PostgreSQL migrations between major versions, that need to be planned more carefully, etc.) Pacdiff helps greatly here, for config updates, too. Over 11 years I've done only one re-install when moving to SSD. (It was not really necessary, I could have just as well copied rootfs content over and be done with it. But I wanted a clean slate after 7 years or so.) No need for big upgrades is absolutely the biggest benefit of Arch Linux for me. Understanding and being able to fix stuff myself is another one. Close second is makepkg/PKGBUILDs being simplicity itself and a joy to work with. And then wiki/docs. Though, I was a Slackware and Linux From Scratch user before Arch, so I might be blind to things that other people would call breakage. :]

by blux 9y ago

tbrock 9y ago

Subscribe to the breakages mailing list and this will never happen again. Will get <10 emails a year.

blux 9y ago
Do you have a link? I could not find it here: https://lists.archlinux.org/listinfo/ https://lists.archlinux.org/listinfo/

megous 9y ago

That's probably very system dependent and usage dependent. I've been running a desktop workstation with Arch for 11 years, and experienced serious breakage (kernel didn't boot) perhaps once and some annoyances a few times (systemd migration, freetype2 rendering changes, wayland becoming somehow default and being hard to change back to Xorg). The bulk of the issues is with a need to manually upgrade non-desktop software. (PostgreSQL migrations between major versions, that need to be planned more carefully, etc.) Pacdiff helps greatly here, for config updates, too. Over 11 years I've done only one re-install when moving to SSD. (It was not really necessary, I could have just as well copied rootfs content over and be done with it. But I wanted a clean slate after 7 years or so.) No need for big upgrades is absolutely the biggest benefit of Arch Linux for me. Understanding and being able to fix stuff myself is another one. Close second is makepkg/PKGBUILDs being simplicity itself and a joy to work with. And then wiki/docs. Though, I was a Slackware and Linux From Scratch user before Arch, so I might be blind to things that other people would call breakage. :]