8 ms·

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 wi

by 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.
      - AnonymousPlanet 7y ago
        Huh, when does anything break in Ubuntu LTS if you don't do a dist-upgrade? There's nothing to break if nothing changes. And the minor version upgrades along the years have not broken anything on any of my installs. Arch on the other hand ...
        shakna 7y ago
        > Huh, when does anything break in Ubuntu LTS if you don't do a dist-upgrade? That's a fist-full of caveats. Arch is willing to upgrade the kernel, maybe you should include a dist-upgrade in the comparison.
- kick 7y ago
  But I also want to point out that "it hasn't broke in a year" is cute Why be condescending? The above user has a good point, and your view is clearly against the majority of Arch Linux users.
  - scythe 7y ago
    Obviously this is true for "Arch Linux users", but that is a self-selected set of individuals with correspondingly biased circumstances/behaviors etc... I wonder if your statement still holds holds when we change the domain to people who have used Arch Linux at some point in the past? As I understand it, Arch Linux is like having a pet. It requires constant care and feeding to keep it alive but can be very rewarding (allegedly)
    - kick 7y ago
      You misunderstand it, then. Arch is stable enough that (unless you're doing stupid things, like grabbing half of your system from the AUR) there will only be a breaking change every three years or so. Just set a cron job to update it for you and you have nothing to worry about. It was literally created for lazy system administrators, and it's only gotten better for them as time goes on.
      - celticmusic 7y ago
        if that were true their FAQ wouldn't tell you that broken packages weren't their responsibility.
        xorfish 7y ago
        That faq doesn't make a claim about how frequent such things are. In my experience it happens very rarely and is often quite easily resolved.
        pnako 7y ago
        >happens very rarely >is often quite Well you sure convinced me!
- djsumdog 7y ago
  They first time I tried Arch, I installed it, did a system update and libc completely broke and my system was unusable. I went back to Gentoo. I went through some hell when I ran Gentoo unstable(~) but for the past several years I've been on Gentoo stable and have very few issues. I've even used it on work laptops at three different companies. It is definitely more of a do-it-yourself distro than Arch for sure, but I enjoy working with it.
  - thaumasiotes 7y ago
    I used to run Gentoo. At one point, trying to resolve dependency conflicts, and not knowing what I was trying to do, I uninstalled libc. Obviously, my system immediately became unusable. I actually appreciate that Gentoo is set up to allow me to run that command if I want to. But I did move off of Gentoo due to constant dependency conflicts. They took forever to deal with and they were pretty well guaranteed to happen whenever you didn't hold to a strict and frequent update schedule.
  - celticmusic 7y ago
    I ran Gentoo until shortly after Daniel Robbins left the project. It just started to have problems. A good example is that installing KDE would break to the point of needing to throw everything away unless you installed a few other packages in a very specific order. That never seemed acceptable to me and I ended up moving over to Arch Linux for a good 10+ years before the instability of it finally got to me and I moved to Ubuntu. Having said all of that, I'm glad to hear that Gentoo is stable for you. I really enjoyed my time with Gentoo and I got the feeling that after he left there were mistakes made in terms of everything working reasonably. Your description of Arch reminds me of an experience I had with linode and arch years back. Due to an internal hardware issue, they basically lost my server. When I went to recreate, I discovered that you couldn't just update the world because it would immediately result in a broken system. You instead had to reconfigure a few things before updating the world. I no longer use Linode. At some point the vendor has to take responsibility. That's a large part of why I like Ubuntu, they do. It works every day without me having to worry about it.
- otabdeveloper2 7y ago
  > Of course a rolling release system is going to have more breakages. Well, no. The point of a rolling release system is that you upgrade by little increments, so you never have a moment when a 'major upgrade' happens and breaks your system or forces a reinstall.
  - tuananh 7y ago
    I think a rolling release is going to have more breakages, but smaller.
- chmln 7y ago
  > The last straw was me sitting down to get paying work done and spending half my day trying to recover my work environment. Maybe don't pacman -Syu before work or if you're working the next day? It's not strictly necessary to update every day. And no one said Arch never breaks, I just provided anecdotal counterevidence that it's really not that bad.
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.

by 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.
    - AnonymousPlanet 7y ago
      Huh, when does anything break in Ubuntu LTS if you don't do a dist-upgrade? There's nothing to break if nothing changes. And the minor version upgrades along the years have not broken anything on any of my installs. Arch on the other hand ...
      - shakna 7y ago
        > Huh, when does anything break in Ubuntu LTS if you don't do a dist-upgrade? That's a fist-full of caveats. Arch is willing to upgrade the kernel, maybe you should include a dist-upgrade in the comparison.
kick 7y ago
But I also want to point out that "it hasn't broke in a year" is cute Why be condescending? The above user has a good point, and your view is clearly against the majority of Arch Linux users.
- scythe 7y ago
  Obviously this is true for "Arch Linux users", but that is a self-selected set of individuals with correspondingly biased circumstances/behaviors etc... I wonder if your statement still holds holds when we change the domain to people who have used Arch Linux at some point in the past? As I understand it, Arch Linux is like having a pet. It requires constant care and feeding to keep it alive but can be very rewarding (allegedly)
  - kick 7y ago
    You misunderstand it, then. Arch is stable enough that (unless you're doing stupid things, like grabbing half of your system from the AUR) there will only be a breaking change every three years or so. Just set a cron job to update it for you and you have nothing to worry about. It was literally created for lazy system administrators, and it's only gotten better for them as time goes on.
    - celticmusic 7y ago
      if that were true their FAQ wouldn't tell you that broken packages weren't their responsibility.
      - xorfish 7y ago
        That faq doesn't make a claim about how frequent such things are. In my experience it happens very rarely and is often quite easily resolved.
        pnako 7y ago
        >happens very rarely >is often quite Well you sure convinced me!
djsumdog 7y ago
They first time I tried Arch, I installed it, did a system update and libc completely broke and my system was unusable. I went back to Gentoo. I went through some hell when I ran Gentoo unstable(~) but for the past several years I've been on Gentoo stable and have very few issues. I've even used it on work laptops at three different companies. It is definitely more of a do-it-yourself distro than Arch for sure, but I enjoy working with it.
- thaumasiotes 7y ago
  I used to run Gentoo. At one point, trying to resolve dependency conflicts, and not knowing what I was trying to do, I uninstalled libc. Obviously, my system immediately became unusable. I actually appreciate that Gentoo is set up to allow me to run that command if I want to. But I did move off of Gentoo due to constant dependency conflicts. They took forever to deal with and they were pretty well guaranteed to happen whenever you didn't hold to a strict and frequent update schedule.
- celticmusic 7y ago
  I ran Gentoo until shortly after Daniel Robbins left the project. It just started to have problems. A good example is that installing KDE would break to the point of needing to throw everything away unless you installed a few other packages in a very specific order. That never seemed acceptable to me and I ended up moving over to Arch Linux for a good 10+ years before the instability of it finally got to me and I moved to Ubuntu. Having said all of that, I'm glad to hear that Gentoo is stable for you. I really enjoyed my time with Gentoo and I got the feeling that after he left there were mistakes made in terms of everything working reasonably. Your description of Arch reminds me of an experience I had with linode and arch years back. Due to an internal hardware issue, they basically lost my server. When I went to recreate, I discovered that you couldn't just update the world because it would immediately result in a broken system. You instead had to reconfigure a few things before updating the world. I no longer use Linode. At some point the vendor has to take responsibility. That's a large part of why I like Ubuntu, they do. It works every day without me having to worry about it.
otabdeveloper2 7y ago
> Of course a rolling release system is going to have more breakages. Well, no. The point of a rolling release system is that you upgrade by little increments, so you never have a moment when a 'major upgrade' happens and breaks your system or forces a reinstall.
- tuananh 7y ago
  I think a rolling release is going to have more breakages, but smaller.
chmln 7y ago
> The last straw was me sitting down to get paying work done and spending half my day trying to recover my work environment. Maybe don't pacman -Syu before work or if you're working the next day? It's not strictly necessary to update every day. And no one said Arch never breaks, I just provided anecdotal counterevidence that it's really not that bad.

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.