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> Arch is fine hobbyist distro and you for sure have to live on he edge, but I wouldn't use it for anything you expect to be able to use every day at a moments

by spinax 5y ago

> Arch is fine hobbyist distro and you for sure have to live on he edge, but I wouldn't use it for anything you expect to be able to use every day at a moments notice. I disagree 100%. This laptop I'm typing from now was installed 2014-07-06, it's my main personal machine with all the random things your typical desktop does and it works great. I similarly used a work laptop almost as long until I was forced off Arch for compliance reasons this year (sigh). Your anecdotal failures are not everyone's experience, definitely not mine.

hjek 5y ago
> This laptop I'm typing from now was installed 2014-07-06, It goes beyond anecdotal evidence. I mean, if you look at the Arch news feed[0], there are a good few updates since then that are labelled "requires manual intervention". I like Arch and it's great they're posting those notices, but I don't think it can be claimed that upgrading an on-the-edge system is always problem free. [0] https://archlinux.org/news/ https://archlinux.org/news/
- spinax 5y ago
  This is part of the agreement for using Arch, it's not a system you can ignore, you must actually pay attention to these news items. The upgrade tool I use actually shows new news to you front and center when performing an upgrade so you're blatantly aware that you have to follow instructions. Those are not "problems", they are "following instructions to keep up with changes." If you wand a distro to just ignore and hope it all goes well, Arch is not for you. Never was.
- seba_dos1 5y ago
  > there are a good few updates since then that are labelled "requires manual intervention" That's by design. If you choose Arch as your system, you're agreeing to that (otherwise why would you choose it in the first place - that's a direct consequence of its value proposition). I'm not sure I would call that a "problem".
smarx007 5y ago
I have the similar experience to the OP. The last time I had 700 packages or so updating, pressed Ctrl+C (apt or brew never left my system in a broken state after Ctrl+C) and the system no longer worked after reboot. Had to update all packages via a bootable Arch image on a USB to fix it. Also had KDE and Gnome behave weirdly after update to the point of having to reboot immediately – never happened on Ubuntu LTS. Arch is amazing as long as everything is fine but if you do something wrong, it’s far more fragile. I guess it’s ok for a pro user distro but my servers will remain on Debian. Also, I had Arch on an old laptop I use from time to time and it happened at least a few times that if I did not turn it on for 3 months or so, the system was no longer upgradable.
- spinax 5y ago
  > I had 700 packages or so updating You absolutely ignored your Arch system for far too long and most likely missed important News notifications that manual actions were required, it happens now and again. With updating 700 packages at once you've just dug yourself a hole - Arch is not a system you can ignore for that long, by design it's always changing to reflect the newest upstream changes to software. As I posted to the other person, if you want a distro to ignore over time then Arch is not for you.
  - pxc 5y ago
    Imo this is a lame excuse. Some rolling release distros whose packages more or less equally up-to-date are far less brittle, namely NixOS and openSUSE Tumbleweed. Arch's demanding nature with respect to being routinely updated follows directly from the fact that its package manager is stateful and unsophisticated (e.g., its dependency resolver is incomplete (will fail even when solutions are available, because dependency resolution is NP-complete and 'gotta go fast')). It's totally fair to call this an Arch/pacman defect. Part of it is also lack of enduring hacks like Debian and derivatives use (long-lived transitional packages), which is a choice by Arch developers. A glance at the online Arch package listing and some example .PKGINFO files indicates that Pacman also doesn't support metadata like 'provides' and 'replaces' in DEB and RPM, which means the developers have fewer tools at their disposal for dealing with transitions like that, even when they want to. Clearly many users don't mind all these tradeoffs, but others who shy away from Arch after experiences like that mentioned in the GP comment are totally right, as a matter of fact, to blame the design of the package manager for their woes. We're not looking at the price of bleeding edge packages or a rolling release. We're looking at the price of 'keep[ing] it simple, stupid'. Edited to add: the existence of the DUR shows that Debian probably doesn't fall on the right side of the complexity tradeoff for the purpose of maximizing user contributions. The same users who contribute to it could also create their own Debian packages, but they don't, presumably in part because it seems harder to get into. (It's not that bad if you use debhelper, but it is also clearly a crufty system that has evolved this way and that over time.) So Arch's philosophy also clearly has other strengths. But imo we shouldn't give it a pass on the kind of fragility outlined in the GP.
nextlevelwizard 5y ago
>Your anecdotal failures First of all how are these MY failures and not failures of the Arch ecosystem? Running `pacman -Syu` on any given Friday should NOT leave you with a machine that no longer boots. Installing a very stable software such as fucking python3 shouldn't break litereally everything else that is linked to same lib. Everything is anecdotal, but trying to use that to dimiss literally OS breaking incidents feels silly. If I type in `apt update && apt update -y` I can be sure that my computer will be usable after a reboot. I've once ran into an issue where the next kernel update didn't boot, so Ubuntu booted me back into the previous version and told me the issue. This is exactly the kind of thing I want my OS to protect me from. I am not a kernel developer and don't have sufficient knowledge or interest to get into that. I also don't want to be afraid to update my software. I have nothing against Arch or its users, but I wouldn't recommend it to anyone who actually needs to use their computer and isn't willing to spend a day every now and then fixing their OS. Just as a side note on this rant: My experience is by no means unique. The whole reason I even gave Arch a second try (after the python3 library ordeal) was that my colleagues are using Arch as their daily driver, but even with them every now and then I hear how they have to fiddle with their packages to make things work/compile or that they updated something and something broke (often it is audio).
- spinax 5y ago
  > If I type in `apt update && apt update -y` I can be sure that my computer will be usable after a reboot As from my other replies, that's awesome - you're looking for a usage paradigm that is not what Arch is for; it requires attention and regular maintenance, and "keeping up" on a regular basis. You've hit the nail on the head with the followup sentence, you have to be willing to spend a day every now and then keeping up. Arch is not for people who want to ignore their system and hope it all just keeps working, then update 700 packages all at once and have it come crashing down. There is an agreement (the social kind, not the legal kind) you enter into when using Arch that you actually engage with it on a regular basis because you like doing that and like to tinker. It's build for experienced Linux techs who like to engage on a regular basis with the plumbing.
  - nextlevelwizard 5y ago

by spinax 5y ago

hjek 5y ago

> This laptop I'm typing from now was installed 2014-07-06, It goes beyond anecdotal evidence. I mean, if you look at the Arch news feed[0], there are a good few updates since then that are labelled "requires manual intervention". I like Arch and it's great they're posting those notices, but I don't think it can be claimed that upgrading an on-the-edge system is always problem free. [0] https://archlinux.org/news/ https://archlinux.org/news/

spinax 5y ago
This is part of the agreement for using Arch, it's not a system you can ignore, you must actually pay attention to these news items. The upgrade tool I use actually shows new news to you front and center when performing an upgrade so you're blatantly aware that you have to follow instructions. Those are not "problems", they are "following instructions to keep up with changes." If you wand a distro to just ignore and hope it all goes well, Arch is not for you. Never was.
seba_dos1 5y ago
> there are a good few updates since then that are labelled "requires manual intervention" That's by design. If you choose Arch as your system, you're agreeing to that (otherwise why would you choose it in the first place - that's a direct consequence of its value proposition). I'm not sure I would call that a "problem".

smarx007 5y ago

I have the similar experience to the OP. The last time I had 700 packages or so updating, pressed Ctrl+C (apt or brew never left my system in a broken state after Ctrl+C) and the system no longer worked after reboot. Had to update all packages via a bootable Arch image on a USB to fix it. Also had KDE and Gnome behave weirdly after update to the point of having to reboot immediately – never happened on Ubuntu LTS. Arch is amazing as long as everything is fine but if you do something wrong, it’s far more fragile. I guess it’s ok for a pro user distro but my servers will remain on Debian. Also, I had Arch on an old laptop I use from time to time and it happened at least a few times that if I did not turn it on for 3 months or so, the system was no longer upgradable.

spinax 5y ago
> I had 700 packages or so updating You absolutely ignored your Arch system for far too long and most likely missed important News notifications that manual actions were required, it happens now and again. With updating 700 packages at once you've just dug yourself a hole - Arch is not a system you can ignore for that long, by design it's always changing to reflect the newest upstream changes to software. As I posted to the other person, if you want a distro to ignore over time then Arch is not for you.
- pxc 5y ago
  Imo this is a lame excuse. Some rolling release distros whose packages more or less equally up-to-date are far less brittle, namely NixOS and openSUSE Tumbleweed. Arch's demanding nature with respect to being routinely updated follows directly from the fact that its package manager is stateful and unsophisticated (e.g., its dependency resolver is incomplete (will fail even when solutions are available, because dependency resolution is NP-complete and 'gotta go fast')). It's totally fair to call this an Arch/pacman defect. Part of it is also lack of enduring hacks like Debian and derivatives use (long-lived transitional packages), which is a choice by Arch developers. A glance at the online Arch package listing and some example .PKGINFO files indicates that Pacman also doesn't support metadata like 'provides' and 'replaces' in DEB and RPM, which means the developers have fewer tools at their disposal for dealing with transitions like that, even when they want to. Clearly many users don't mind all these tradeoffs, but others who shy away from Arch after experiences like that mentioned in the GP comment are totally right, as a matter of fact, to blame the design of the package manager for their woes. We're not looking at the price of bleeding edge packages or a rolling release. We're looking at the price of 'keep[ing] it simple, stupid'. Edited to add: the existence of the DUR shows that Debian probably doesn't fall on the right side of the complexity tradeoff for the purpose of maximizing user contributions. The same users who contribute to it could also create their own Debian packages, but they don't, presumably in part because it seems harder to get into. (It's not that bad if you use debhelper, but it is also clearly a crufty system that has evolved this way and that over time.) So Arch's philosophy also clearly has other strengths. But imo we shouldn't give it a pass on the kind of fragility outlined in the GP.

nextlevelwizard 5y ago

>Your anecdotal failures First of all how are these MY failures and not failures of the Arch ecosystem? Running `pacman -Syu` on any given Friday should NOT leave you with a machine that no longer boots. Installing a very stable software such as fucking python3 shouldn't break litereally everything else that is linked to same lib. Everything is anecdotal, but trying to use that to dimiss literally OS breaking incidents feels silly. If I type in `apt update && apt update -y` I can be sure that my computer will be usable after a reboot. I've once ran into an issue where the next kernel update didn't boot, so Ubuntu booted me back into the previous version and told me the issue. This is exactly the kind of thing I want my OS to protect me from. I am not a kernel developer and don't have sufficient knowledge or interest to get into that. I also don't want to be afraid to update my software. I have nothing against Arch or its users, but I wouldn't recommend it to anyone who actually needs to use their computer and isn't willing to spend a day every now and then fixing their OS. Just as a side note on this rant: My experience is by no means unique. The whole reason I even gave Arch a second try (after the python3 library ordeal) was that my colleagues are using Arch as their daily driver, but even with them every now and then I hear how they have to fiddle with their packages to make things work/compile or that they updated something and something broke (often it is audio).

spinax 5y ago
> If I type in `apt update && apt update -y` I can be sure that my computer will be usable after a reboot As from my other replies, that's awesome - you're looking for a usage paradigm that is not what Arch is for; it requires attention and regular maintenance, and "keeping up" on a regular basis. You've hit the nail on the head with the followup sentence, you have to be willing to spend a day every now and then keeping up. Arch is not for people who want to ignore their system and hope it all just keeps working, then update 700 packages all at once and have it come crashing down. There is an agreement (the social kind, not the legal kind) you enter into when using Arch that you actually engage with it on a regular basis because you like doing that and like to tinker. It's build for experienced Linux techs who like to engage on a regular basis with the plumbing.
- nextlevelwizard 5y ago