4 ms·

What part of it breaks for you? It's not that I don't believe you, and I've seen this sentiment before, but I've used Arch as my daily driver for about five yea

What part of it breaks for you? It's not that I don't believe you, and I've seen this sentiment before, but I've used Arch as my daily driver for about five years, and can't recall a single time where it broke from a system update.

Lex-2008 5y ago
not OP, and not Arch, but Manjaro (so you can take it with a grain of salt), reporting from memory so details might be incorrect. * after "BootHole" GRUB vulnerability, I've read that upgrade requires re-installation of the bootloader. And just in case, did run `sudo grub-install …`. After reboot, system didn't boot. Had to use installation USB to restore. * More recently, during routine upgrade pamac (Manjaro's pacman alternative) GUI showed me some "transaction can't be completed" error message. Shuddered it away - few days later pamac wasn't starting at all. Starting it from terminal showed error message about some missing *.so file. Googling showed that this is a required file for pacman (Arch package manager) to function. Typing `pacman` in terminal showed "command not found" error message. Restored the missing *.so file from snapper snapshot (thanks btrfs!), after that pamac started fine and happily upgraded my system. I'm not sure what happened in second case and why pamac left system in broken state (looks like it wanted to upgrade pacman by first removing old files and then putting new files in place, but aborted in the middle), but first one might be quite distro-independent. Also, reading through recent Arch news, I believe this could bite someone: https://archlinux.org/news/sshd-needs-restarting-after-upgrading-to-openssh-82p1/ https://archlinux.org/news/sshd-needs-restarting-after-upgra... > After upgrading to openssh-8.2p1, the existing SSH daemon will be unable to accept new connections. When upgrading remote hosts, please make sure to restart the SSH daemon right after running pacman -Syu. If you are upgrading to openssh-8.2p1-3 or higher, this restart will happen automatically.
- majewsky 5y ago
  > I'm not sure what happened in second case and why pamac left system in broken state FWIW, as a vanilla Arch user, I have not encountered this issue. I remember a time when pacman updates were kind of iffy (and in fact, pacman itself asked you to update it first before proceeding with the rest of the updates), but since 5.0, all subsequent updates have been completely unremarkable in the best way.
paulfurtado 5y ago
I use arch on all my machines and there are really a lot of ways it has broken. - Arch will release a new version of Xorg before the graphics card vendors release new drivers that are compatible with it. Same for kernel versions too. - I've had gedit start crashing in new minor versions of gnome due to a setting being incompatible, needing to track that down and unset - If you have python virtualenvs for development and system python is upgraded to a new major version, all your virtualenvs break - If arch upgrades the major version of glibc during some random package install (rather than a system upgrade), and you don't upgrade the whole system at once, every app that didn't get upgraded will fail to start due to soname mismatches... and that can mean that pacman, sudo, etc are all busted (this has actually happened to me) - If you do a full system upgrade and have AUR stuff installed, you need to be sure to upgrade the AUR stuff otherwise it could break due to being incompatible with any library that was upgraded. - In general (not specific to arch linux), new versions of software break stuff all the time. You tend to hit way more of this on arch if you keep your system up to date.
- formerly_proven 5y ago
  > - If arch upgrades the major version of glibc during some random package install (rather than a system upgrade), and you don't upgrade the whole system at once, every app that didn't get upgraded will fail to start due to soname mismatches... and that can mean that pacman, sudo, etc are all busted (this has actually happened to me) Okay I just wanna point something out here, partial upgrades in Arch are broken by design because they simply can't work. Don't do it. That being said... > - Arch will release a new version of Xorg before the graphics card vendors release new drivers that are compatible with it. Same for kernel versions too. ... kernel ABI is stable and even ancillary interfaces are usually stable, so usually it's quite A-OK to not immediately upgrade the kernel.
  - Liskni_si 5y ago
    Can you elaborate why has Arch chosen to not support partial upgrades by design? They do work in Debian and it's saved my day a number of times. They let me roll back a broken upgrade without holding back upgrades of the rest of the system, and my computer then continues to be usable until the package in question is fixed.
maddyboo 5y ago
I was an XMonad user during the time that Arch switched from statically linked Haskell packages to dynamically linked and oh my god was that a nightmare. Other than that I’ve had far, far fewer issues with Arch than any other distro I’ve used.

Lex-2008 5y ago

not OP, and not Arch, but Manjaro (so you can take it with a grain of salt), reporting from memory so details might be incorrect. * after "BootHole" GRUB vulnerability, I've read that upgrade requires re-installation of the bootloader. And just in case, did run `sudo grub-install …`. After reboot, system didn't boot. Had to use installation USB to restore. * More recently, during routine upgrade pamac (Manjaro's pacman alternative) GUI showed me some "transaction can't be completed" error message. Shuddered it away - few days later pamac wasn't starting at all. Starting it from terminal showed error message about some missing *.so file. Googling showed that this is a required file for pacman (Arch package manager) to function. Typing `pacman` in terminal showed "command not found" error message. Restored the missing *.so file from snapper snapshot (thanks btrfs!), after that pamac started fine and happily upgraded my system. I'm not sure what happened in second case and why pamac left system in broken state (looks like it wanted to upgrade pacman by first removing old files and then putting new files in place, but aborted in the middle), but first one might be quite distro-independent. Also, reading through recent Arch news, I believe this could bite someone: https://archlinux.org/news/sshd-needs-restarting-after-upgrading-to-openssh-82p1/ https://archlinux.org/news/sshd-needs-restarting-after-upgra... > After upgrading to openssh-8.2p1, the existing SSH daemon will be unable to accept new connections. When upgrading remote hosts, please make sure to restart the SSH daemon right after running pacman -Syu. If you are upgrading to openssh-8.2p1-3 or higher, this restart will happen automatically.

majewsky 5y ago
> I'm not sure what happened in second case and why pamac left system in broken state FWIW, as a vanilla Arch user, I have not encountered this issue. I remember a time when pacman updates were kind of iffy (and in fact, pacman itself asked you to update it first before proceeding with the rest of the updates), but since 5.0, all subsequent updates have been completely unremarkable in the best way.

paulfurtado 5y ago

I use arch on all my machines and there are really a lot of ways it has broken. - Arch will release a new version of Xorg before the graphics card vendors release new drivers that are compatible with it. Same for kernel versions too. - I've had gedit start crashing in new minor versions of gnome due to a setting being incompatible, needing to track that down and unset - If you have python virtualenvs for development and system python is upgraded to a new major version, all your virtualenvs break - If arch upgrades the major version of glibc during some random package install (rather than a system upgrade), and you don't upgrade the whole system at once, every app that didn't get upgraded will fail to start due to soname mismatches... and that can mean that pacman, sudo, etc are all busted (this has actually happened to me) - If you do a full system upgrade and have AUR stuff installed, you need to be sure to upgrade the AUR stuff otherwise it could break due to being incompatible with any library that was upgraded. - In general (not specific to arch linux), new versions of software break stuff all the time. You tend to hit way more of this on arch if you keep your system up to date.

formerly_proven 5y ago
> - If arch upgrades the major version of glibc during some random package install (rather than a system upgrade), and you don't upgrade the whole system at once, every app that didn't get upgraded will fail to start due to soname mismatches... and that can mean that pacman, sudo, etc are all busted (this has actually happened to me) Okay I just wanna point something out here, partial upgrades in Arch are broken by design because they simply can't work. Don't do it. That being said... > - Arch will release a new version of Xorg before the graphics card vendors release new drivers that are compatible with it. Same for kernel versions too. ... kernel ABI is stable and even ancillary interfaces are usually stable, so usually it's quite A-OK to not immediately upgrade the kernel.
- Liskni_si 5y ago
  Can you elaborate why has Arch chosen to not support partial upgrades by design? They do work in Debian and it's saved my day a number of times. They let me roll back a broken upgrade without holding back upgrades of the rest of the system, and my computer then continues to be usable until the package in question is fixed.

maddyboo 5y ago

I was an XMonad user during the time that Arch switched from statically linked Haskell packages to dynamically linked and oh my god was that a nightmare. Other than that I’ve had far, far fewer issues with Arch than any other distro I’ve used.