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Stay with Ubuntu LTS. Arch is garbage. Seriously. In ubuntu, when you update, you just update. In arch, when you update, "It is your responsibility to first g

Stay with Ubuntu LTS. Arch is garbage. Seriously. In ubuntu, when you update, you just update. In arch, when you update, "It is your responsibility to first go to arch website and see if there is any breakage or issue that needs to be handled manually. If yes, follow the instructions. If they're unclear, spend hours on Arch Wiki. Then go ahead and update." But wait, there's more. If you don't do arch updates regularly, like if for some reason you couldn't update for 6 months, all bets are off. You'd be lucky if your update works at all. In the 99% chance that it doesn't, "they" advise you to take the snapshots (that are archived every few days) and update snapshot-by-snapshot. So if it's 20 snapshots you've missed, you update from snapshot 0 to 1, then 1 to 2, then 2 to 3, and so on. And if during any of the updates, there was some required manual fixup, you're SOL. If you are in the mood for going hardcore, just clear up your weekend, get a spare hard drive, and do LFS [0]. Once you've completed that project, trash that install (it was only for your learning), and go back to Ubuntu as a daily driver. Now you can tell arch fanboys to go eat a carrot, cz 99.9% of them know jack compared to what you know now. (side note: doing LFS would be enlightening enough that you'll start having ideas and/or future projects of your own. Have at it). If you don't like Ubuntu cruft like bloated desktop, snap, cloud-init on ubuntu server, what not, there's a gazillion ways to go about it. You can simply 'purge' (remove completely) then after install. Or do minimal server install and then install only the packages you want. Or you can pick a sane Ubuntu variant like Xubuntu. If you're a tiling wm user, just pick regolith [1] (it'll make your life so much easier). If Ubuntu LTS packages aren't recent enough and you need to use the latest version of some package, you can either install it in your home directory, or use a docker image if available (or build your own). [0] http://www.linuxfromscratch.org http://www.linuxfromscratch.org [1] https://regolith-linux.org https://regolith-linux.org

spekcular 6y ago
I've used Arch for about a year and agree that the need to attend carefully to updates is annoying. There was a particularly egregious case of this recently with PAM, where if you did not update a certain file following the instructions given by the pacman messages (or just missed it), then you wouldn't be able to log in. I also had another instance of not being able to boot into Arch due to a bug in the package governing my encrypted drive. In both cases it was simple to solve by booting from a rescue USB and changing the appropriate files (downgrading in the second case), but it was still obnoxious. However, as far as I can tell, it should not be a problem to wait 6 months (or even years?) to update. There are periodic reddit threads where someone updates a years-old Arch installation just fine.
- SnowProblem 6y ago
  That PAM issue last month cost me ~8 hours (5 to drive home, long story). Nevertheless, it was the first time in about 2 years that I'd run into this kind of pain with Arch. Mostly the OS has been rock solid and out of the way, and I enjoy being able to dive deep when needed. I'd given linux a try every few years since 2001. Arch was the first distro that stuck for me. It's like the OS equivalent of writing a library from scratch vs plugging into someone else's framework. It's hard to imagine going back at this point.

spekcular 6y ago

I've used Arch for about a year and agree that the need to attend carefully to updates is annoying. There was a particularly egregious case of this recently with PAM, where if you did not update a certain file following the instructions given by the pacman messages (or just missed it), then you wouldn't be able to log in. I also had another instance of not being able to boot into Arch due to a bug in the package governing my encrypted drive. In both cases it was simple to solve by booting from a rescue USB and changing the appropriate files (downgrading in the second case), but it was still obnoxious. However, as far as I can tell, it should not be a problem to wait 6 months (or even years?) to update. There are periodic reddit threads where someone updates a years-old Arch installation just fine.

SnowProblem 6y ago
That PAM issue last month cost me ~8 hours (5 to drive home, long story). Nevertheless, it was the first time in about 2 years that I'd run into this kind of pain with Arch. Mostly the OS has been rock solid and out of the way, and I enjoy being able to dive deep when needed. I'd given linux a try every few years since 2001. Arch was the first distro that stuck for me. It's like the OS equivalent of writing a library from scratch vs plugging into someone else's framework. It's hard to imagine going back at this point.