7 ms·

I left arch linux because I got tired of all the breakages, so not a great example.

bscphil 7y ago
Unless Arch Linux broke for you because they ship multiple versions of some packages, that's not really relevant. This is a thing all the popular Linux distributions do as far as I know. Also, personally I've stuck with Arch Linux for 6-7 years now because it's the first distribution I found that consistently works for me, so I don't know that anecdotes will get us very far either way.
chmln 7y ago
This has to be one of the most inaccurate memes of all time. To counter with anecdata: I've been running Arch Linux testing repositories for over a year now with no issues whatsoever.
- celticmusic 7y ago
  https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Frequently_asked_questions#Is_Arch_Linux_a_stable_distribution?_Will_I_get_frequent_breakage https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Frequently_asked_questi...? > It is the user who is ultimately responsible for the stability of their own rolling release system. The user decides when to upgrade, and merges necessary changes when required. If the user reaches out to the community for help, it is often provided in a timely manner. The difference between Arch and other distributions in this regard is that Arch is truly a 'do-it-yourself' distribution; __complaints of breakage are misguided and unproductive, since upstream changes are not the responsibility of Arch devs__. Even their wiki is very clear to inform you that you're at the whims of the package upgrades. But I also want to point out that "it hasn't broke in a year" is cute, but I ran arch for probably 10+ years until I finally got tired of it and moved to Ubuntu. The last straw was me sitting down to get paying work done and spending half my day trying to recover my work environment. In the 2-3 years since I moved to Ubuntu I've never once sat down at my PC and had something stop working that was working before. This defense of your favorite distro is especially silly when you think about it logically. Of course a rolling release system is going to have more breakages. The sensible response isn't "it never breaks!", but is instead "that's the nature of rolling release, you opt into it when you choose Arch".
  - tobias2014 7y ago
    This is funny, I could tell exactly the same story the other way around. I came as a 10+ year Debian user to Archlinux because it did too much automagic under the hood that broke and took a lot of time to fix. No breakage on arch because no automagic behind your back. For a long time before using arch I thought too that rolling release might be more unstable, but I have come to the conclusion that quite the opposite might be true.
    - rascul 7y ago
      Could you give some examples of the automagic stuff Debian does under the hood?
      - hendry 7y ago
        debhelper
        morelisp 7y ago
        debhelper is a library of tools for building packages. Debian users should not need to be aware debhelper exists, or even have it installed. Maybe you meant debconf? When I was a DD it was an RC bug if your package used debconf to do "magic", i.e. using it as a registry for an application, or not properly re-seeding answers from the configuration and assuming the debconf db was the source of truth.
    - celticmusic 7y ago
      thankfully I said Ubuntu and not Debian.
      - shakna 7y ago
        Ubuntu has _more_ magic that breaks a lot more frequently in less expected ways than Debian.
        7y ago
- fao_ 7y ago
  I ran a stable arch system for 4 years with only one breaking change introduced. Everything else was minor with clear instructions on how to solve it on either main page or the forums
- AnonymousPlanet 7y ago
  That's awfully nice for you. But my experience was horrible every single time I've tried Arch. The main problem is, every time you choose to update you have to brace yourself for possibly wasting another hour to repair the subtle breakage the new package version of some minor piece of software introduced. I had Arch on a laptop I used for my freelance business once and took notes of the time spent on maintenance. So I actually have the numbers and know how much money I wasted compared to the time I used an Ubuntu LTS. Guess how many hours I wasted on repairing breakage on Ubuntu LTS. Exactly zero.
  - MegaDeKay 7y ago
    How long ago was your experience? That might be a factor. I have been using Arch for a long time, and if my memory serves, stability was a bigger issue years ago than it is now. These days, I have found Arch to be really solid.
    - AnonymousPlanet 7y ago
      That might be a factor, yes. Last time I tried Arch was around 2015. However, I come from a business perspective here. You really don't need an operating system that introduces new versions on a whim in the middle of operations. There's a reason businesses run RHEL/Centos or macOS and whatever has LTS in Windows land: cost of maintenance and reliably wide windows of no possible breakage. As a business, it's kind of a dodgy position to be at relying on "yeah, randomly upgrading versions worked for me so far. Fingers crossed, lol". So I'm interested in what people use their Arch Linux for and what didn't work for them on any other stable platform. My personal observations point towards the Arch Linux users being the tinkerers who like to use cutting edge and hose their Debians trying to wedge some newer version into it. While the ones that ran screaming away from Arch pretty much never had the desire to change the underlying system and were happy with a security backport now and then.
      - mekster 7y ago
        Apparently businesses don't use rolling distro. You don't want your PHP version to endlessly get updated during your operation when you build your app at a specific version. It would mean not only you have to take care of distro update gotchas but you have to go through all the breaking changes the language introduces. Stick with LTS. Rolling is for enthusiasts, though Arch does have put decent efforts on their wiki but I did find errors on minor pages that didn't make it work as written.
- serf 7y ago
  I like Arch. I run it at home. That said, just because you had good luck doesn't mean that it's stable. Here's the most trivial way I can think to explain this: Check out Arch News.[0] Ctrl-F (Find) 'manual intervention'. Six years of results on the first page ; 13 instances of 'manual intervention required'. Reliability != stability. Stability usually implies a platform on which one can use and develop for without expecting common major changes, if ever. As for the anecdote of using the [Testing] repositories, a users experience with such things really depends on their use of new and currently developing software. A simple computer with simple peripherals that is used to run emacs all day isn't likely to be broken by the Testing repositories. Personally , my anecdote : the second someone starts using Arch for something new-fringe (hi-dpi, touch, tablets, SPDIF, SLI, NVRAM, new window managers, new x-windows replacements, prototype schedulers, filesystems, or kernels, PCI pass-through, exotic RAID configurations..) [Testing] repository is an act of masochism. It's only a matter of time before something drops out. I found that my best bet was chicken sacrifice and Opus Dei-style self flagellation before each [Testing] 'pacman -Syu' . At least then I had a 50/50 chance of the next boot. But, granted, I use a lot of weird or fringe hardware. All that said : other distributions don't have better [Testing] repositories. It's just that [Testing] is for .. testing. It's unstable by its' very nature. [0]:https://www.archlinux.org/news/ https://www.archlinux.org/news/
  - alpaca128 7y ago
    I don't know about your experience, but if at most 13 little manual interventions in 6 years would be the only problem of most "stable" distros I would have never switched to Arch. I've had various non-rolling distros fall apart on all sides within 6 months. With Arch I've had one manual intervention(aka one copy-pasted command) in over a year and one minor issue where I needed to restart a service. That's amazing and something I'll gladly take in exchange for painless and straightforward setup of pretty much anything. Not to mention with regular backups(that should be done either way) and delaying updates in critical time periods you can easily minimize the risk.
    - celticmusic 7y ago
      > Not to mention with regular backups(that should be done either way) and delaying updates in critical time periods you can easily minimize the risk. That's the minimum that you should be doing regardless of the OS. And thus, that's not where the risk is at. It's probably more difficult to understand if you get paid regardless of whether you can get meaningful work done. But for those of us who live on the other side, losing an unplanned half a day due to an OS issue that actively causes us to lose money, it matters. Arch is bleeding edge, this means software bugs are far more likely on it.
swsieber 7y ago
Oh man. This seems to have spawned an anecdota war. I think the main issue/benefit with arch linux is that it wont try to do anything for you, except give you extra instructions for when a package change requires "manual intervention". I put that in quotes because I don't think of that as breakage, I think of that as normal upkeep. We'll, as long as it's listed. Anyway, the implications are that things can be stable longer on arch because there is no magic under the hood. But there will be times (though I haven't experienced it myself), where something unexpectedly breaks, and it'll be hard to recover unless you know what your doing... though maybe it's actually easy with the rolling back packages? The package manage does keep copies of old versions of packages, I've just never needed them. As an example if this, my co worker and I have very similar thinkpad laptops. His graphics start doing wierd things that hes has to go fix after every update (Fedora or Ubuntu, can't remember). I took 4+ hours to get mine working how I want, with research and experimentation, but nothing has broke it since.
- mxmilkb 7y ago
  Out-of-date software and related dependency hell is the breakage that rolling-release/Arch gets me away from. More UX anecdote; I use Arch (btw) but trying Manjaro just now for something so I grabed an image from osboxes.org; the system update fails after hitting enter on the default options https://i.imgur.com/OTNRMrH.png https://i.imgur.com/OTNRMrH.png 'y' for the last would have continued things, but "ugh, I have to think about something" is breakage to some.
- bscphil 7y ago
  > But there will be times (though I haven't experienced it myself), where something unexpectedly breaks, and it'll be hard to recover unless you know what your doing... The thing is, my experience with Ubuntu is that there will be times when something unexpectedly breaks, and because of the added complexity, it will be nearly impossible to recover even if you know what you're doing.
bibyte 7y ago
Sometimes it feels like I am living in an alternate reality. After I started using Arch Linux as my main OS I was fully prepared for it to break every few months. But it's been more then 2 years (maybe even 3 or 4 ?) and not one breakage. Also keep in mind that I update it every single day. From time to time I check the Arch Linux news site to see if anything needs manual intervention. So far I haven't needed to do anything.
- jcelerier 7y ago
  can confirm, went to arch linux due to constant breakage under Debian & Ubuntu, it's be so much more pleasant since then. No more everything exploding left and right as soon as I need a newer GCC or libav version.
  - kursus 7y ago
    That's funny because I've been running Debian Sid for 15 years as my main OS doing weekly updates and the two single cases of breakage I've seen were glibc6 transition (which was announced and expected) and proprietary video card drivers. You must be thinking of Ubuntu specifically.
    - wolrah 7y ago
      To keep the anecdotes going, I've been using a mix of Debian and Ubuntu, both stable/LTS and testing/biannual, for pretty much exactly the same 15 years as you've been running Sid and I've never had any breakage that wasn't caused by me fucking around with binary drivers. ndiswrapper was the main cause back in the day, shockingly giving Windows drivers access to the Linux kernel can cause problems. The most recent time was when VDPAU was new and I was trying to get HD video playback working on a mini-PC with an nVidia Ion GPU by running a version of the nVidia driver much newer than Ubuntu packaged. Now that I think about it that must have been around a full decade ago.
      - bayindirh 7y ago
        I'm running Debian testing since 4.0 beta and never had an un-bootable system or something got broken due to normal updates. I've just reinstalled the system once to migrate it to 64 bit, since there was no proven procedure to migrate a running 32 bit system to 64 bit. There were rough patches along the way but, all distros were having the same problem in someway or another (vdpau, fglrx, multi-gpu support, ndiswrapper & wireless stuff, etc.) but it's a set it and forget it affair for a very very long time. ...and obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/963/ https://xkcd.com/963/
otabdeveloper2 7y ago
If we're honest: Arch is annoying, but the reason people (including me) run it is because they don't want their OS to explode in a shitstorm every time a 'major upgrade' cycle happens. (Looking at you, Ubuntu.) So, your comment is 180 degrees off the mark. Arch exists for people who don't want breakages to happen. (On the other hand, if you're conditioned by Windows to reinstall the system every year, then Ubuntu might work fine for you.)
- alpaca128 7y ago
  > Arch exists for people who don't want breakages to happen. Or, for people who don't want breakages but also want/need current software versions. Debian-based stuff can be pretty nice and stable as well, but on Arch installing and setting up anything usually "just works" without missing dependencies, renamed packages etc.
- celticmusic 7y ago
  The difference is I that I know the dist-upgrade is coming and can plan for it. With Arch it's on that one day that I really needed to get work done, but Arch decided it wasn't happening. I think I'll take the planned upgrade, thanks.
scalableUnicon 7y ago
Docker to the rescue! For development, docker is godsend. It is a developer must have just like git, I regret I didn't learn it sooner.
ekianjo 7y ago
Strange, the story has been quite the opposite for me, Since I moved to Arch Linux I only had one minor breakage (bluetooth) that was fixed in a day, whereas in Ubuntu I cannot count how many times an update or a PPA broke something.
- mekster 7y ago
  It depends if your Ubuntu is LTS or not. I'd say LTS Ubuntu > Arch > non LTS Ubuntu as Arch tries to be stable on its only version but Ubuntu can be more aggressive between LTS. PPA breaking is apparently not Ubuntu's fault.

Unless Arch Linux broke for you because they ship multiple versions of some packages, that's not really relevant. This is a thing all the popular Linux distributions do as far as I know. Also, personally I've stuck with Arch Linux for 6-7 years now because it's the first distribution I found that consistently works for me, so I don't know that anecdotes will get us very far either way.

chmln 7y ago

This has to be one of the most inaccurate memes of all time. To counter with anecdata: I've been running Arch Linux testing repositories for over a year now with no issues whatsoever.

celticmusic 7y ago
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Frequently_asked_questions#Is_Arch_Linux_a_stable_distribution?_Will_I_get_frequent_breakage https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Frequently_asked_questi...? > It is the user who is ultimately responsible for the stability of their own rolling release system. The user decides when to upgrade, and merges necessary changes when required. If the user reaches out to the community for help, it is often provided in a timely manner. The difference between Arch and other distributions in this regard is that Arch is truly a 'do-it-yourself' distribution; __complaints of breakage are misguided and unproductive, since upstream changes are not the responsibility of Arch devs__. Even their wiki is very clear to inform you that you're at the whims of the package upgrades. But I also want to point out that "it hasn't broke in a year" is cute, but I ran arch for probably 10+ years until I finally got tired of it and moved to Ubuntu. The last straw was me sitting down to get paying work done and spending half my day trying to recover my work environment. In the 2-3 years since I moved to Ubuntu I've never once sat down at my PC and had something stop working that was working before. This defense of your favorite distro is especially silly when you think about it logically. Of course a rolling release system is going to have more breakages. The sensible response isn't "it never breaks!", but is instead "that's the nature of rolling release, you opt into it when you choose Arch".
- tobias2014 7y ago
  This is funny, I could tell exactly the same story the other way around. I came as a 10+ year Debian user to Archlinux because it did too much automagic under the hood that broke and took a lot of time to fix. No breakage on arch because no automagic behind your back. For a long time before using arch I thought too that rolling release might be more unstable, but I have come to the conclusion that quite the opposite might be true.
  - rascul 7y ago
    Could you give some examples of the automagic stuff Debian does under the hood?
    - hendry 7y ago
      debhelper
      - morelisp 7y ago
        debhelper is a library of tools for building packages. Debian users should not need to be aware debhelper exists, or even have it installed. Maybe you meant debconf? When I was a DD it was an RC bug if your package used debconf to do "magic", i.e. using it as a registry for an application, or not properly re-seeding answers from the configuration and assuming the debconf db was the source of truth.
  - celticmusic 7y ago
    thankfully I said Ubuntu and not Debian.
    - shakna 7y ago
      Ubuntu has _more_ magic that breaks a lot more frequently in less expected ways than Debian.
      - 7y ago
fao_ 7y ago
I ran a stable arch system for 4 years with only one breaking change introduced. Everything else was minor with clear instructions on how to solve it on either main page or the forums
AnonymousPlanet 7y ago
That's awfully nice for you. But my experience was horrible every single time I've tried Arch. The main problem is, every time you choose to update you have to brace yourself for possibly wasting another hour to repair the subtle breakage the new package version of some minor piece of software introduced. I had Arch on a laptop I used for my freelance business once and took notes of the time spent on maintenance. So I actually have the numbers and know how much money I wasted compared to the time I used an Ubuntu LTS. Guess how many hours I wasted on repairing breakage on Ubuntu LTS. Exactly zero.
- MegaDeKay 7y ago
  How long ago was your experience? That might be a factor. I have been using Arch for a long time, and if my memory serves, stability was a bigger issue years ago than it is now. These days, I have found Arch to be really solid.
  - AnonymousPlanet 7y ago
    That might be a factor, yes. Last time I tried Arch was around 2015. However, I come from a business perspective here. You really don't need an operating system that introduces new versions on a whim in the middle of operations. There's a reason businesses run RHEL/Centos or macOS and whatever has LTS in Windows land: cost of maintenance and reliably wide windows of no possible breakage. As a business, it's kind of a dodgy position to be at relying on "yeah, randomly upgrading versions worked for me so far. Fingers crossed, lol". So I'm interested in what people use their Arch Linux for and what didn't work for them on any other stable platform. My personal observations point towards the Arch Linux users being the tinkerers who like to use cutting edge and hose their Debians trying to wedge some newer version into it. While the ones that ran screaming away from Arch pretty much never had the desire to change the underlying system and were happy with a security backport now and then.
    - mekster 7y ago
      Apparently businesses don't use rolling distro. You don't want your PHP version to endlessly get updated during your operation when you build your app at a specific version. It would mean not only you have to take care of distro update gotchas but you have to go through all the breaking changes the language introduces. Stick with LTS. Rolling is for enthusiasts, though Arch does have put decent efforts on their wiki but I did find errors on minor pages that didn't make it work as written.
serf 7y ago
I like Arch. I run it at home. That said, just because you had good luck doesn't mean that it's stable. Here's the most trivial way I can think to explain this: Check out Arch News.[0] Ctrl-F (Find) 'manual intervention'. Six years of results on the first page ; 13 instances of 'manual intervention required'. Reliability != stability. Stability usually implies a platform on which one can use and develop for without expecting common major changes, if ever. As for the anecdote of using the [Testing] repositories, a users experience with such things really depends on their use of new and currently developing software. A simple computer with simple peripherals that is used to run emacs all day isn't likely to be broken by the Testing repositories. Personally , my anecdote : the second someone starts using Arch for something new-fringe (hi-dpi, touch, tablets, SPDIF, SLI, NVRAM, new window managers, new x-windows replacements, prototype schedulers, filesystems, or kernels, PCI pass-through, exotic RAID configurations..) [Testing] repository is an act of masochism. It's only a matter of time before something drops out. I found that my best bet was chicken sacrifice and Opus Dei-style self flagellation before each [Testing] 'pacman -Syu' . At least then I had a 50/50 chance of the next boot. But, granted, I use a lot of weird or fringe hardware. All that said : other distributions don't have better [Testing] repositories. It's just that [Testing] is for .. testing. It's unstable by its' very nature. [0]:https://www.archlinux.org/news/ https://www.archlinux.org/news/
- alpaca128 7y ago
  I don't know about your experience, but if at most 13 little manual interventions in 6 years would be the only problem of most "stable" distros I would have never switched to Arch. I've had various non-rolling distros fall apart on all sides within 6 months. With Arch I've had one manual intervention(aka one copy-pasted command) in over a year and one minor issue where I needed to restart a service. That's amazing and something I'll gladly take in exchange for painless and straightforward setup of pretty much anything. Not to mention with regular backups(that should be done either way) and delaying updates in critical time periods you can easily minimize the risk.
  - celticmusic 7y ago
    > Not to mention with regular backups(that should be done either way) and delaying updates in critical time periods you can easily minimize the risk. That's the minimum that you should be doing regardless of the OS. And thus, that's not where the risk is at. It's probably more difficult to understand if you get paid regardless of whether you can get meaningful work done. But for those of us who live on the other side, losing an unplanned half a day due to an OS issue that actively causes us to lose money, it matters. Arch is bleeding edge, this means software bugs are far more likely on it.

swsieber 7y ago

Oh man. This seems to have spawned an anecdota war. I think the main issue/benefit with arch linux is that it wont try to do anything for you, except give you extra instructions for when a package change requires "manual intervention". I put that in quotes because I don't think of that as breakage, I think of that as normal upkeep. We'll, as long as it's listed. Anyway, the implications are that things can be stable longer on arch because there is no magic under the hood. But there will be times (though I haven't experienced it myself), where something unexpectedly breaks, and it'll be hard to recover unless you know what your doing... though maybe it's actually easy with the rolling back packages? The package manage does keep copies of old versions of packages, I've just never needed them. As an example if this, my co worker and I have very similar thinkpad laptops. His graphics start doing wierd things that hes has to go fix after every update (Fedora or Ubuntu, can't remember). I took 4+ hours to get mine working how I want, with research and experimentation, but nothing has broke it since.

mxmilkb 7y ago
Out-of-date software and related dependency hell is the breakage that rolling-release/Arch gets me away from. More UX anecdote; I use Arch (btw) but trying Manjaro just now for something so I grabed an image from osboxes.org; the system update fails after hitting enter on the default options https://i.imgur.com/OTNRMrH.png https://i.imgur.com/OTNRMrH.png 'y' for the last would have continued things, but "ugh, I have to think about something" is breakage to some.
bscphil 7y ago
> But there will be times (though I haven't experienced it myself), where something unexpectedly breaks, and it'll be hard to recover unless you know what your doing... The thing is, my experience with Ubuntu is that there will be times when something unexpectedly breaks, and because of the added complexity, it will be nearly impossible to recover even if you know what you're doing.

bibyte 7y ago

Sometimes it feels like I am living in an alternate reality. After I started using Arch Linux as my main OS I was fully prepared for it to break every few months. But it's been more then 2 years (maybe even 3 or 4 ?) and not one breakage. Also keep in mind that I update it every single day. From time to time I check the Arch Linux news site to see if anything needs manual intervention. So far I haven't needed to do anything.

jcelerier 7y ago
can confirm, went to arch linux due to constant breakage under Debian & Ubuntu, it's be so much more pleasant since then. No more everything exploding left and right as soon as I need a newer GCC or libav version.
- kursus 7y ago
  That's funny because I've been running Debian Sid for 15 years as my main OS doing weekly updates and the two single cases of breakage I've seen were glibc6 transition (which was announced and expected) and proprietary video card drivers. You must be thinking of Ubuntu specifically.
  - wolrah 7y ago
    To keep the anecdotes going, I've been using a mix of Debian and Ubuntu, both stable/LTS and testing/biannual, for pretty much exactly the same 15 years as you've been running Sid and I've never had any breakage that wasn't caused by me fucking around with binary drivers. ndiswrapper was the main cause back in the day, shockingly giving Windows drivers access to the Linux kernel can cause problems. The most recent time was when VDPAU was new and I was trying to get HD video playback working on a mini-PC with an nVidia Ion GPU by running a version of the nVidia driver much newer than Ubuntu packaged. Now that I think about it that must have been around a full decade ago.
    - bayindirh 7y ago
      I'm running Debian testing since 4.0 beta and never had an un-bootable system or something got broken due to normal updates. I've just reinstalled the system once to migrate it to 64 bit, since there was no proven procedure to migrate a running 32 bit system to 64 bit. There were rough patches along the way but, all distros were having the same problem in someway or another (vdpau, fglrx, multi-gpu support, ndiswrapper & wireless stuff, etc.) but it's a set it and forget it affair for a very very long time. ...and obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/963/ https://xkcd.com/963/

otabdeveloper2 7y ago

If we're honest: Arch is annoying, but the reason people (including me) run it is because they don't want their OS to explode in a shitstorm every time a 'major upgrade' cycle happens. (Looking at you, Ubuntu.) So, your comment is 180 degrees off the mark. Arch exists for people who don't want breakages to happen. (On the other hand, if you're conditioned by Windows to reinstall the system every year, then Ubuntu might work fine for you.)

alpaca128 7y ago
> Arch exists for people who don't want breakages to happen. Or, for people who don't want breakages but also want/need current software versions. Debian-based stuff can be pretty nice and stable as well, but on Arch installing and setting up anything usually "just works" without missing dependencies, renamed packages etc.
celticmusic 7y ago
The difference is I that I know the dist-upgrade is coming and can plan for it. With Arch it's on that one day that I really needed to get work done, but Arch decided it wasn't happening. I think I'll take the planned upgrade, thanks.

scalableUnicon 7y ago

Docker to the rescue! For development, docker is godsend. It is a developer must have just like git, I regret I didn't learn it sooner.

ekianjo 7y ago

Strange, the story has been quite the opposite for me, Since I moved to Arch Linux I only had one minor breakage (bluetooth) that was fixed in a day, whereas in Ubuntu I cannot count how many times an update or a PPA broke something.

mekster 7y ago
It depends if your Ubuntu is LTS or not. I'd say LTS Ubuntu > Arch > non LTS Ubuntu as Arch tries to be stable on its only version but Ubuntu can be more aggressive between LTS. PPA breaking is apparently not Ubuntu's fault.