4 ms·

> What you lose is access to the "latest and greatest", because it takes time for the new stuff to filter in. Depends on the distro. Archlinux is pretty fast t

by jolmg 7y ago

> What you lose is access to the "latest and greatest", because it takes time for the new stuff to filter in. Depends on the distro. Archlinux is pretty fast to update packages.

archi42 7y ago
This! Our company OpenSUSE Tumbleweeds were still vulnerable on Friday. On Arch, the package was already available for two days then. The thing is, the distro maintainers need to decide whether they want a fast moving "latest and greatest" approach, which might break stuff by accident, or go a "slow but always dependable" route, which you can depend on as company, with painful losses if things go south (in which case there should be an express lane for important security fixes).
- snazz 7y ago
  As I mentioned downthread, surprisingly little stuff breaks by accident nowadays on Arch (on my desktop, zero breakage in the last year with a fairly complex stack; on one server machine I had one strange interaction between a language package manager and pacman that ended up being my fault). The "slow but dependable" solution ends up breaking as soon as software becomes too complex for maintainers to be able to backport security fixes onto old versions, so they just ship the latest version of those packages, negating the dependability aspect (like Debian's treatment of Firefox and Chromium).
- jolmg 7y ago
  It's perhaps coincidental, but I don't remember ever having a trouble on an update that I couldn't find a quick fix for in the Archlinux homepage. In my opinion, the reason why Archlinux can be so dependable is that packaging is based on really simple ideas, like not starting or stopping services on installation like Ubuntu would, and that most if not all system files belong to a package. The package manager can do a whole OS installation just by installing the basic packages on a directory different from /. The package format is also really simple. Getting into the guts of Archlinux packaging is really approachable and that makes me feel at ease for whatever trouble I may find myself in.
celticmusic 7y ago
and breaks constantly, which is why I stopped using it.
- jolmg 7y ago
  "brake" makes it sound like one would have to reinstall the whole thing. I don't think I've ever had that happen in the 10 years since I started using it for nearly everything. I've had my drive fail, but that was the drive's fault, and even in that case I also didn't need to reinstall everything. I just copied the good files and reinstalled only the packages whose files got corrupted.
  - celticmusic 7y ago
    That's a semantic point. If I sit down in front of my PC and can't do work, it's broken. That I can spend an hour or two fixing it rather than reinstalling is irrelevant.
    - jolmg 7y ago
      I see, when you said "break", I thought you meant because of a bug or other error, but now I guess the fact that it needs configuration and learning how to do that configuration is what you're calling broken. Certainly, Arch is definitely not a "it just works" OS. It's a tinkerer's OS. Different distros favor different types of users. By what you said, probably something like Ubuntu or Mint is better, something that "just works" with minimal learning curve for someone not familiar with Linux in general and that does not wish to invest the time in learning it. (Not saying that you're not at least familiar with it, but that's what these distros optimize for, I believe.)
      - chousuke 7y ago
        Arch is not an easy distro to use even if you know what you're doing. Every Arch user essentially creates their own distribution which can break at any point depending on their particular environment. You need to take care of all the little things yourself. Personally I didn't experience all that much breakage, but eventually got frustrated by kernel updates breaking hotplug kernel module loading until reboot because Arch removes kernel modules for the running kernel. This breaks random things like plugging in a USB drive unless you happened to load the module previously, so you're essentially forced to reboot every time you upgrade the kernel or take care to manually exclude it. I'm grateful for Arch because their wiki is beyond excellent, but I wouldn't recommend it to anyone unless they just want to tinker.

by jolmg 7y ago

> What you lose is access to the "latest and greatest", because it takes time for the new stuff to filter in. Depends on the distro. Archlinux is pretty fast to update packages.

archi42 7y ago

This! Our company OpenSUSE Tumbleweeds were still vulnerable on Friday. On Arch, the package was already available for two days then. The thing is, the distro maintainers need to decide whether they want a fast moving "latest and greatest" approach, which might break stuff by accident, or go a "slow but always dependable" route, which you can depend on as company, with painful losses if things go south (in which case there should be an express lane for important security fixes).

snazz 7y ago
As I mentioned downthread, surprisingly little stuff breaks by accident nowadays on Arch (on my desktop, zero breakage in the last year with a fairly complex stack; on one server machine I had one strange interaction between a language package manager and pacman that ended up being my fault). The "slow but dependable" solution ends up breaking as soon as software becomes too complex for maintainers to be able to backport security fixes onto old versions, so they just ship the latest version of those packages, negating the dependability aspect (like Debian's treatment of Firefox and Chromium).
jolmg 7y ago
It's perhaps coincidental, but I don't remember ever having a trouble on an update that I couldn't find a quick fix for in the Archlinux homepage. In my opinion, the reason why Archlinux can be so dependable is that packaging is based on really simple ideas, like not starting or stopping services on installation like Ubuntu would, and that most if not all system files belong to a package. The package manager can do a whole OS installation just by installing the basic packages on a directory different from /. The package format is also really simple. Getting into the guts of Archlinux packaging is really approachable and that makes me feel at ease for whatever trouble I may find myself in.

celticmusic 7y ago

and breaks constantly, which is why I stopped using it.

jolmg 7y ago
"brake" makes it sound like one would have to reinstall the whole thing. I don't think I've ever had that happen in the 10 years since I started using it for nearly everything. I've had my drive fail, but that was the drive's fault, and even in that case I also didn't need to reinstall everything. I just copied the good files and reinstalled only the packages whose files got corrupted.
- celticmusic 7y ago
  That's a semantic point. If I sit down in front of my PC and can't do work, it's broken. That I can spend an hour or two fixing it rather than reinstalling is irrelevant.
  - jolmg 7y ago
    I see, when you said "break", I thought you meant because of a bug or other error, but now I guess the fact that it needs configuration and learning how to do that configuration is what you're calling broken. Certainly, Arch is definitely not a "it just works" OS. It's a tinkerer's OS. Different distros favor different types of users. By what you said, probably something like Ubuntu or Mint is better, something that "just works" with minimal learning curve for someone not familiar with Linux in general and that does not wish to invest the time in learning it. (Not saying that you're not at least familiar with it, but that's what these distros optimize for, I believe.)
    - chousuke 7y ago
      Arch is not an easy distro to use even if you know what you're doing. Every Arch user essentially creates their own distribution which can break at any point depending on their particular environment. You need to take care of all the little things yourself. Personally I didn't experience all that much breakage, but eventually got frustrated by kernel updates breaking hotplug kernel module loading until reboot because Arch removes kernel modules for the running kernel. This breaks random things like plugging in a USB drive unless you happened to load the module previously, so you're essentially forced to reboot every time you upgrade the kernel or take care to manually exclude it. I'm grateful for Arch because their wiki is beyond excellent, but I wouldn't recommend it to anyone unless they just want to tinker.