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https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Frequently_asked_questions#Is_Arch_Linux_a_stable_distribution?_Will_I_get_frequent_breakage https://wiki.archlinux.org/ind

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.
        AnonymousPlanet 7y ago
        And that is precisely what you should not. The dist-upgrade is something you can plan for and set time aside for. The risky rolling mini upgrade every couple of weeks you can not. That is a huge difference!
        shakna 7y ago
        > The dist-upgrade is something you can plan for and set time aside for. The risky rolling mini upgrade every couple of weeks you can not. I can plan for it? You can see if you're upgrading your kernel. Nothing breaks if you decide not to run an upgrade.
        7y ago
- rumanator 7y ago
  > 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. This assertion makes no sense. Debian Stable has always the paragon of stability to the point that it's actually criticised for it. The Debian Testing release is even famous for being more solid than other distro's stable releases. Breaking changes in Debian are practically only remotely possible in Debian Unstable or if you purposely install packages from backports or PPA repositories that have no assurance of stability or even maintenance.
  - Carpetsmoker 7y ago
    The problem isn't so much that Debian packages or the ecosystem "breaks" as such, but that you run in to bugs (sometimes already fixed ones), and that you're then basically stuck with that unless you, the maintainer, or someone else decides to backport the fix, and they frequently don't get backported especially not for "minor" bugs.
    - kevin_thibedeau 7y ago
      Just compile it yourself and put it in /usr/local.
      - Carpetsmoker 7y ago
        Well, yeah, but that's bypassing the package manager. You can say that in response to pretty much every argument about "I don't like package manager X because Y".
        useragent86 7y ago
        Use "checkinstall" instead of "make install". It builds and installs packages automatically.
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.

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.
      - AnonymousPlanet 7y ago
        And that is precisely what you should not. The dist-upgrade is something you can plan for and set time aside for. The risky rolling mini upgrade every couple of weeks you can not. That is a huge difference!
        shakna 7y ago
        > The dist-upgrade is something you can plan for and set time aside for. The risky rolling mini upgrade every couple of weeks you can not. I can plan for it? You can see if you're upgrading your kernel. Nothing breaks if you decide not to run an upgrade.
        7y ago
rumanator 7y ago
> 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. This assertion makes no sense. Debian Stable has always the paragon of stability to the point that it's actually criticised for it. The Debian Testing release is even famous for being more solid than other distro's stable releases. Breaking changes in Debian are practically only remotely possible in Debian Unstable or if you purposely install packages from backports or PPA repositories that have no assurance of stability or even maintenance.
- Carpetsmoker 7y ago
  The problem isn't so much that Debian packages or the ecosystem "breaks" as such, but that you run in to bugs (sometimes already fixed ones), and that you're then basically stuck with that unless you, the maintainer, or someone else decides to backport the fix, and they frequently don't get backported especially not for "minor" bugs.
  - kevin_thibedeau 7y ago
    Just compile it yourself and put it in /usr/local.
    - Carpetsmoker 7y ago
      Well, yeah, but that's bypassing the package manager. You can say that in response to pretty much every argument about "I don't like package manager X because Y".
      - useragent86 7y ago
        Use "checkinstall" instead of "make install". It builds and installs packages automatically.

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.