9 ms·

Every time my friends show me arch, they always boast about how great their setup is (it's so stable, everything works out of the box !) then proceed to demo gr

Every time my friends show me arch, they always boast about how great their setup is (it's so stable, everything works out of the box !) then proceed to demo great features. But then this little thing doesnt work yet because, they say, they haven't configure it correctly. And this little one, it's nothing mind you, it never worked. And this one, just a small detail, but it broke yesterday. We have a different definition of the box. And so I go back to my Ubuntu LTS. I really want to try arch but I'm not 20 anymore, fiddling with my workstation is not as fun as it used to be. I just want to use it. Maybe with the steam deck it will become so battle tested it will turn into the most stable distro ever. I think their decision makes sense though, they don't want to have to craft every update and spend too much time on it. It's a good strat for them.

voidfunc 5y ago
This was pretty much my experience with Arch and long long ago, Gentoo (where I really started with Linux). Then I adopted Fedora and never looked back for several years. Even more recently I have been using WSL inside of Windows... and it actually covers most of my use cases well enough. I dont have the time or patience anymore to keep up with distro's like Arch, but I also get that some people love tinkering and figuring out how to make their system work like its some kind of puzzle. Edit: One thing about Arch, its possible to dig yourself a real bad hole if you don't keep updating regularly and I get that's sort of the point, but it can cause a lot of issues if for example, you go on vacation for a few weeks.
- BiteCode_dev 5y ago
  Yeah, that could be a problem with the deck, consoles players are not great at keepong their stuff up to date. My switched stay offline for months. Besides, I wanna play, not update, so If I see an update prompt I delay, and if I can't I hate the product.
- jyxent 5y ago
  Yeah, I was wondering about the Arch updates too. I had a machine that wasn't updated for a long time and had to go through the process of updating small bits at a time with archived packages: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Arch_Linux_Archive https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Arch_Linux_Archive
- jorams 5y ago
  > One thing about Arch, its possible to dig yourself a real bad hole if you don't keep updating regularly and I get that's sort of the point, but it can cause a lot of issues if for example, you go on vacation for a few weeks. Any changes that could be problematic are announced on the site and the arch-announce mailing list. It's really not a matter of weeks. I've gone many months without updating, without any problems.
  - BiteCode_dev 5y ago
    If I have to read doc or something online so that my OS stays usable, it's already game over
    - jorams 5y ago
      If you don't update, it'll stay usable indefinitely. If you do, you can skim arch-announce in less time than it takes to keep up with the release cycle of any other OS. In return you'll never need to update a Debian release name in sources.list, click away a nagging update prompt, wait for a double-reboot cycle for some registry changes, or anything of the sort. Yes, you will need to understand what's on your system to know what news is relevant for you. You automatically will because you set it up yourself.
  - snarkypixel 5y ago
    > Any changes that could be problematic are announced on the site and the arch-announce mailing list Yeah.. once I did a normal upgrade and it fucked my whole system. I asked for help and I was told that exact sentence "read the mailing list, it was announced". Thanks, but no thanks.
  - krageon 5y ago
    > announced on the site and the arch-announce mailing list Perhaps there exists some subculture of folks that delight in having to read a set of articles published in the time between the last update and today before they do so again, but I have never encountered it.
    - 5y ago
- edgyquant 5y ago
  I really liked Fedora. The only reason I switched to ubuntu was to keep the graphics card drivers up to date and supported.
readflaggedcomm 5y ago
That's not my experience, but Manjaro is even more tweak-free. I suspect they will do like those Arch derivatives do: holding back updates for testing, which is easy when you target known hardware.
- readflaggedcomm 5y ago
  I'm not wrong. The known hardware is the deciding factor, no matter how much you people hate Arch.
nanis 5y ago
What are these things that do not work? Asking as someone who's been using Arch consistently on my laptop and on a long-lived VPS since 2007 ... Original VPS install was maintained just through regular updates (including the transition from 32-bit to 64-bit). I did reinstall on the laptop for that. Meanwhile, $work server images have been Ubuntu LTS, CentOS, and AL2 with updates introducing breakage several times a year.
- Cu3PO42 5y ago
  Some friends had significant issues with screen sharing on Wayland on Arch. Pipewire wouldn't work correctly, or only allow sharing one screen, but not another. As far as I can tell, they have resolved these issues now, but it was a pain point.
  - beermonster 5y ago
    Pipewire itself has had some issues as it’s still relatively new. But I’ve found the last few releases have ironed them out. bleeding edge is more the issue than Arch
    - Cu3PO42 5y ago
      I agree it's related to maturity, but on the other hand Pipewire was working just fine for me on Fedora without further setup. I understand they're different distros with different philosophies, but in the end I do need my screen sharing to work no questions asked.
      - beermonster 5y ago
        Fedora do seem [1] to make the same versions available. So there doesn't seem to be any' holding back' of unstable versions unless they decide to backport fixes from higher versions? Fedora do work on six-month releases so there will be some version jumps between versions of Fedora but IIRC they will update little and often just like Arch whilst on a given release. https://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/packageinfo?packageID=24555 https://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/packageinfo?packageID=24...
mcbuilder 5y ago
You're describing exactly the Arch Philosophy though, not constantly broken mind you, but as vanilla (close to upstream) as possible. It's not supposed to be an "out of the box" distro at all, as in everything works out of the box. When you sign up to Arch, yeah I think you sign up for a lot of tweaking that would be done for you already. Luckily there is the excellent Arch Wiki to hold your hand through much of it.
handrous 5y ago
I feel that way about Linux generally. I didn't realize how much stuff I wasn't doing just because it rarely worked and often broke things (drag and drop as a general interaction, for instance), how much time I was spending keeping things sorta working, and how many little broken things I was just not even noticing because I was so used to them, until I finally (mostly) abandoned it as a desktop OS after ~10 years as a desktop Linux user.
- hanklazard 5y ago
  That’s a bummer. Have you tried pop!_os? Really stable and usable in my experience on any recent gen Lenovo CX1.
  - handrous 5y ago
    Very much not a fan of recent Gnome last time I tried it (some months ago). Performance is so very bad. Dropped frames everywhere (maybe blame Linux for generally having fine-grained performance that isn't exactly bad but is more variable and unpredictable than other platforms) and generally sluggish. Used to like Gnome, but back then it was much lighter than KDE, but now the tables have (much to my surprise) entirely turned. I like the idea of pop!_os but part of the flagship experience is a big ol' Javascript extension on top of Gnome. I can't imagine I'd find that enjoyable. Last time I had a Linux working and I didn't hate the experience was a "so small I could drown it in a tub" install/config of Void with mostly Suckless tools/programs. I find Linux to be most tolerable in those kinds of configs, these days. Doesn't do much, but what it does do actually works and behaves fairly consistently. Start trying to get fancy, and the machine begins to feel haunted in a hurry.
  - BiteCode_dev 5y ago
    Funnily I just did. My machine has now one entry in grub that doesn't work because pop didn't bother to sign the kernel or prompt me for it and I'm using secure boot.
  - tlowrimore 5y ago
    Oh man, I’ve used Pop exclusively for 2 years now. I run it on a Thinkpad X1 Extreme, and I love it. I switched from using Macs (for the better part of 20 years) after the whole 2018 keyboard debacle. I can’t imagine going back. Only downside is the terrible battery life on the X1 Extreme.
MiddleEndian 5y ago
I had a similar experience, used Arch for awhile got tired of random things breaking, then I overcorrected and switched to Debian, thinking that infrequent changes would mean less breakage. That came with its own problems with things not working, especially if you let Debian fall out of date and it becomes un-upgradable. I also landed on Ubuntu LTS for my Linux needs, reasonably up-to-date, longer support cycles (a decade for security) than Debian versions, allowing me to be lazier than I could otherwise get away with managing other Linux distros. However, the Steam Deck only has three main hardware configurations and Valve presumably has a team dedicated to making sure it runs correctly. So Arch may be a really good value proposition for them.
- beermonster 5y ago
  They will only have the required software dependencies and configuration they need to support those combined hardware/software configurations. So it should be easier for them to regression test and ensure stability even with Arch as a base. Looks like they want to have the ability to be fairly agile and not getting locked into a platform for 2+ years
wayneftw 5y ago
If you're not into fiddling but you still want a nice rolling release, you can try an Arch based distro. I use Manjaro and it's been nothing but smooth sailing for a few years now. I have it on 4 machines - a home desktop, a work desktop, a laptop and an old Mac Pro from 2012.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
throw37388 5y ago
OpenSuse is much better option for rolling distro. It has automated testing before packages are merged, more stable.
- dgan 5y ago
  I second that. Automatic snapshots are priceless
- ex_amazon_sde 5y ago
  Debian has a big CI system to do end-to-end integration test https://ci.debian.net/ https://ci.debian.net/ and https://wiki.debian.org/ReproducibleBuilds https://wiki.debian.org/ReproducibleBuilds It also provides continuous snapshots: https://snapshot.debian.org/ https://snapshot.debian.org/
trey-jones 5y ago
This is a decent comment, and I get it. I also don't want to fool with my setup too much anymore. I use Manjaro for my primary system, and it's great though. I don't want to manage the software that I use everyday through SNAPs or however you do it on Ubuntu nowadays. I just want the very latest of a short(ish) list of things, lets say arbitrarily within about 2 weeks of release, which is what Manjaro basically gives me. pamac upgrade -a Done. Or even better, most of the time: pacman -Syu This could be great for a games platform, because you'll get the latest CPU bytecode, and eg. Vulkan, and graphics drivers as well as the latest compatibility tools. Usually it's best to have the latest. Anyway for Steam deck my first reaction is that they will need to: 1. Do like Manjaro and hold updates for a period of time before distributing them. 2. Provide some sort of one-click revert for when an update randomly prevents your device from booting. These are basically the only big problems that I encounter anymore - it usually takes 20 minutes to an hour to figure out which package is the problem and fix it, but you don't want to be doing that on your $600 steam deck. Edit: As far as updates that brick your system go, my first experience with Arch was that if you don't keep up with the rolling releases, you will brick your system guaranteed when you update. So we'll see how that goes. That was 10+ years ago, and maybe it's not as bad now.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- maxerickson 5y ago
  The last 2 or 3 years I've had 2 or 3 high friction updates on Arch. More than 0, but not a lot.
  - hendersoon 5y ago
    I've had maybe three or four high-friction upgrades on Ubuntu over the past 15 years, where it wouldn't boot properly until I fixed the problem. So yeah it's /better/, but it's far from flawless. Note I don't stick to LTS releases. If I only upgraded to the X.1 LTS releases I expect it would have been smoother.
    - 5y ago
pletnes 5y ago
In arch, everything works straight out of the box. However the box is very small, and you need a lot of other boxes, to get a «normal» working system that can write code and play music and tile windows and…
xfalcox 5y ago
That is one of the reasons I'm running Manjaro, like many replies here. I get new hardware support and access to the many only-arch-pre-packaged software, in a more stable base.
tinus_hn 5y ago
Perhaps it’s easier because it’s a static set of hardware.
2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago
It's based on Arch, it's not purely Arch. Valve takes Arch and distributes their own configured version. I don't see how that would make SteamOS unstable unless Valve makes a mistake in testing.
boudin 5y ago
I don't think it will make arch more stable. It would require a good amount of change on the way the whole package repositories are tested. I'm quite sure that Steam Deck will have its own repositories so that they can validate upstream changes before pushing those to the Steam Deck users.
swiley 5y ago
There's also going the opposite direction and throwing out everything that requires any non trivial amount of configuration. I've been pretty happy doing this.
- BiteCode_dev 5y ago
  Yeah, I don't even change my wallpaper anymore
oblak 5y ago
This is what I came to say. Arch is fine but you are expected to babysit your PC and perform maintenance every week. And do that for each and every build in the house. Things break often and I am not interested in fixing them. And that's not taking into account wife and kids builds. It took me a while to realize the Arch crowd largely doesn't get that not everyone is exciting to thinker with their OS all the time. I get it. I really do. But I am old As you say, hopefully Valve's efforts are going to help with that. In fact, there's hardly a chance they won't because they business depends on it, at least long term.
VortexDream 5y ago
I think people are making too much of Arch in this case. They aren't going to put Arch on Steam Deck and call it a day. It'll be more like putting Manjaro on it. Except it isn't Manjaro, it's their own distro based on Arch that they'll be managing and distributing. And honestly, Manjaro is one of the most stable, easy to use Linux distros I've used and it's based on Arch (in the same way that SteamOS will be based on Arch). So people need to calm their tits. The endless criticism of everything needs to stop.
chmod775 5y ago
I have a 6 years old arch installation, and an Ubuntu installation that has been going and was regularly updated to a recent release for about as long. I spend more time just trying to have up-to-date software on that Ubuntu installation than I spend time configuring anything about the arch installation. Granted, sometimes you need to edit some files after an update (oh device names changed again in pulseaudio so your volume hotkeys need to be fixed!), but that's usually a matter of seconds because I already know how everything fits together. When a package is totally broken for some reason, I just downgrade it. Meanwhile on Ubuntu your only option for getting up to date versions of Jameica/Hibiscus, pretty much any mapping software that OSM contributors/users would want to use, and a bucket list of other productivity software that tends to be useless if outdated, is to compile from source (don't forget to fix incompatibilities with Ubuntu's libraries!) or manual downloads. Oh I forgot to mention Subsurface and TurtleSport. Don't get me started about those. Bonus points for Ubuntu not having disabled the built-in version checks in a lot of software (it's usually just a compile time options or command line argument!), so it nags users that they're running outdated software when there's no way to upgrade! At this point I'm convinced the only noteworthy software that Ubuntu manages to have acceptably recent versions of is Firefox. If all you want to do is browse web, Ubuntu might be less work. I'm not surprised Ubuntu is trying to move to snap packages. That's their last ditch attempt at getting their house in order. Arch will always at least have an automatically installing AUR package for you with a version that isn't from 2018.
- lukeschlather 5y ago
  For me I find PPAs typically make getting the latest versions of software where I want the bleeding edge painless. And I don't need to also have everything bleeding edge the way Arch forces me to.
  - jogu 5y ago
    PPAs work great until they don't, because it's just some random guy building the packages half of the time. The last time I seriously tried to use Ubuntu was probably 8-10 years ago and I ran into a lot of trouble trying to get up to date graphics drivers via PPAs. I also remember being tired of having to go find a random PPA for every piece of software I wanted. Most of the time I would just find some random blog that provided a "PPA for up-to-date package X" and ultimately felt like what I was doing wasn't really any better than downloading random MSIs like you would on Windows. With Arch though you get the AUR which quite literally has every piece of software you could ever want and is at least managed and maintained in a central place so you're not just adding random PPAs for everything.
d_tr 5y ago
You are referring to great features, but Arch just uses the same upstream packages as everyone else and in a more vanilla form, so it seems like it's about user customization. If so, why is this the distribution's fault? The installation is a bit cumbersome but other than that you do not need to do much. I personally keep my configuration small and tidy, following a "bang for the buck" approach and have not faced any issues. Perhaps my usage patterns are just simpler, but even Steam works fine.
Barrin92 5y ago
Fedora is a decent compromise, always very solid and I've actually come to like the default Gnome nowadays so I don't really need to tweak anything. With flatpaks/snaps being so ubiquitous it doesn't really matter much at this point anyway.
bee_rider 5y ago
I wonder to what extent they were showing you the new features that they'd mostly added, because they were proud of them. Most of the stuff I actually use on my install is fully set up, but I wouldn't show it to a friend, because it is boring work stuff.
TomasBaneUK 5y ago
>Maybe with the steam deck it will become so battle tested it will turn into the most stable distro ever. Being a rolling release goes directly against that. It might be the most stable rolling release together with openSUSE Tumbleweed. When you combine it with a modern filesystem and features like snapshots it really feels solid. In the context of the Steam Deck they can just test and hold/fix bugs so that's a very different scenario. There are just too many changes everywhere and different hardware, software combinations, to expect a bug free experience. Not even Apple with a different release model can manage that and they control everything and have most of the hardware combinations to test. Many DEs and bigger applications need a few point releases to be better but maybe you're talking only about the base distro if it's even possible to make that distinction.
l0b0 5y ago
I've used Arch and Ubuntu both for years, so here's my take. Basically, anything you get working in Arch stays working. On Ubuntu, every single major upgrade has been broken so badly that I eventually gave up and reinstalled from scratch. Annoyingly, some super sensible defaults just never make it back up to the original maintainers (or are rejected, I dunno), so the polished Ubuntu experience is because a lot of engineers at Canonical put a lot of time into enabling things which should absolutely be enabled by default in any modern distro. This includes big things like encrypted storage being a single click option in the installer (compared to several hours of research and false starts with GRUB on Arch Linux) and small things like having a reasonably big set of fonts installed by default. Maybe I just haven't discovered the right metapackages yet :) All that said, I can thoroughly recommend NixOS (my setup[1]) as an alternative, and I personally predict SteamOS will show up there eventually. Initial setup is a fair bit easier, and being able to seamlessly boot into any of the previous configurations is a big deal. The main issues so far have been with dev env setups (Nix isn't terrible, but it's another language to add on top of my existing setups) and running out of disk space because each upgrade takes multiple GB. Don't install unless you have ~100GB to spare for the root partition and a decently fast Internet connection. [1] https://gitlab.com/victor-engmark/root/ https://gitlab.com/victor-engmark/root/
Snetry 5y ago
Personally I find the lack of debug symbols to be a turnoff from arch. To me arch tries to be fast moving without checking if anything breaks
perfopt 5y ago
Fiddling with the workstation is not fun anymore. I dont think it was a useful activity even when I was younger. That time could have been spent doing things that are useful - development, writing my thesis etc. I switched to macOS several years ago for my personal desktop. I use Ubuntu (or any Linux) only at work where someone else (IT) manages the machine and ensures things work.
WastingMyTime89 5y ago
My experience with Arch is that I just install everything and it works straight out of the box because as nothing is patched the integration work done by each projects doesn't break. Meanwhile Debian and Ubuntu both are a hodgepot of random patches thrown together by more or less (but rather less) knowledgeable maintainers for reasons which are clear only to themselves and involve goals I don't share such as allowing things to run over weird kernels and maintaining some imaginary philosophical open source purity. I wouldn't touch that with a ten feet pole. I still personnaly believe that the Linux distribution system is the main reason Linux wasn't more successful. I like Arch because amongst all the successful distribution they seem to be the one doing the less.
- jhanschoo 5y ago
  What problems have you faced from Debian's approach?
Abishek_Muthian 5y ago
It's stability vs reliability. I know Arch is reliable enough that I can depend upon the community to take the right decisions, Find what I need in their unparalleled documentation, Find bleeding edge binary packages of open-source tools in the community repo etc. Yes I occasionally don't know what's causing a problem and I have to reinstall some packages. It's definitely not stable. But if I needed stability I would have gone for Cent OS or what ever stands for stability nowadays. And that's the beauty of Linux, There's something for everyone.

voidfunc 5y ago

This was pretty much my experience with Arch and long long ago, Gentoo (where I really started with Linux). Then I adopted Fedora and never looked back for several years. Even more recently I have been using WSL inside of Windows... and it actually covers most of my use cases well enough. I dont have the time or patience anymore to keep up with distro's like Arch, but I also get that some people love tinkering and figuring out how to make their system work like its some kind of puzzle. Edit: One thing about Arch, its possible to dig yourself a real bad hole if you don't keep updating regularly and I get that's sort of the point, but it can cause a lot of issues if for example, you go on vacation for a few weeks.

BiteCode_dev 5y ago
Yeah, that could be a problem with the deck, consoles players are not great at keepong their stuff up to date. My switched stay offline for months. Besides, I wanna play, not update, so If I see an update prompt I delay, and if I can't I hate the product.
jyxent 5y ago
Yeah, I was wondering about the Arch updates too. I had a machine that wasn't updated for a long time and had to go through the process of updating small bits at a time with archived packages: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Arch_Linux_Archive https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Arch_Linux_Archive
jorams 5y ago
> One thing about Arch, its possible to dig yourself a real bad hole if you don't keep updating regularly and I get that's sort of the point, but it can cause a lot of issues if for example, you go on vacation for a few weeks. Any changes that could be problematic are announced on the site and the arch-announce mailing list. It's really not a matter of weeks. I've gone many months without updating, without any problems.
- BiteCode_dev 5y ago
  If I have to read doc or something online so that my OS stays usable, it's already game over
  - jorams 5y ago
    If you don't update, it'll stay usable indefinitely. If you do, you can skim arch-announce in less time than it takes to keep up with the release cycle of any other OS. In return you'll never need to update a Debian release name in sources.list, click away a nagging update prompt, wait for a double-reboot cycle for some registry changes, or anything of the sort. Yes, you will need to understand what's on your system to know what news is relevant for you. You automatically will because you set it up yourself.
- snarkypixel 5y ago
  > Any changes that could be problematic are announced on the site and the arch-announce mailing list Yeah.. once I did a normal upgrade and it fucked my whole system. I asked for help and I was told that exact sentence "read the mailing list, it was announced". Thanks, but no thanks.
- krageon 5y ago
  > announced on the site and the arch-announce mailing list Perhaps there exists some subculture of folks that delight in having to read a set of articles published in the time between the last update and today before they do so again, but I have never encountered it.
  - 5y ago
edgyquant 5y ago
I really liked Fedora. The only reason I switched to ubuntu was to keep the graphics card drivers up to date and supported.

readflaggedcomm 5y ago

That's not my experience, but Manjaro is even more tweak-free. I suspect they will do like those Arch derivatives do: holding back updates for testing, which is easy when you target known hardware.

readflaggedcomm 5y ago
I'm not wrong. The known hardware is the deciding factor, no matter how much you people hate Arch.

nanis 5y ago

What are these things that do not work? Asking as someone who's been using Arch consistently on my laptop and on a long-lived VPS since 2007 ... Original VPS install was maintained just through regular updates (including the transition from 32-bit to 64-bit). I did reinstall on the laptop for that. Meanwhile, $work server images have been Ubuntu LTS, CentOS, and AL2 with updates introducing breakage several times a year.

Cu3PO42 5y ago
Some friends had significant issues with screen sharing on Wayland on Arch. Pipewire wouldn't work correctly, or only allow sharing one screen, but not another. As far as I can tell, they have resolved these issues now, but it was a pain point.
- beermonster 5y ago
  Pipewire itself has had some issues as it’s still relatively new. But I’ve found the last few releases have ironed them out. bleeding edge is more the issue than Arch
  - Cu3PO42 5y ago
    I agree it's related to maturity, but on the other hand Pipewire was working just fine for me on Fedora without further setup. I understand they're different distros with different philosophies, but in the end I do need my screen sharing to work no questions asked.
    - beermonster 5y ago
      Fedora do seem [1] to make the same versions available. So there doesn't seem to be any' holding back' of unstable versions unless they decide to backport fixes from higher versions? Fedora do work on six-month releases so there will be some version jumps between versions of Fedora but IIRC they will update little and often just like Arch whilst on a given release. https://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/packageinfo?packageID=24555 https://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/packageinfo?packageID=24...

mcbuilder 5y ago

You're describing exactly the Arch Philosophy though, not constantly broken mind you, but as vanilla (close to upstream) as possible. It's not supposed to be an "out of the box" distro at all, as in everything works out of the box. When you sign up to Arch, yeah I think you sign up for a lot of tweaking that would be done for you already. Luckily there is the excellent Arch Wiki to hold your hand through much of it.

handrous 5y ago

I feel that way about Linux generally. I didn't realize how much stuff I wasn't doing just because it rarely worked and often broke things (drag and drop as a general interaction, for instance), how much time I was spending keeping things sorta working, and how many little broken things I was just not even noticing because I was so used to them, until I finally (mostly) abandoned it as a desktop OS after ~10 years as a desktop Linux user.

hanklazard 5y ago
That’s a bummer. Have you tried pop!_os? Really stable and usable in my experience on any recent gen Lenovo CX1.
- handrous 5y ago
  Very much not a fan of recent Gnome last time I tried it (some months ago). Performance is so very bad. Dropped frames everywhere (maybe blame Linux for generally having fine-grained performance that isn't exactly bad but is more variable and unpredictable than other platforms) and generally sluggish. Used to like Gnome, but back then it was much lighter than KDE, but now the tables have (much to my surprise) entirely turned. I like the idea of pop!_os but part of the flagship experience is a big ol' Javascript extension on top of Gnome. I can't imagine I'd find that enjoyable. Last time I had a Linux working and I didn't hate the experience was a "so small I could drown it in a tub" install/config of Void with mostly Suckless tools/programs. I find Linux to be most tolerable in those kinds of configs, these days. Doesn't do much, but what it does do actually works and behaves fairly consistently. Start trying to get fancy, and the machine begins to feel haunted in a hurry.
- BiteCode_dev 5y ago
  Funnily I just did. My machine has now one entry in grub that doesn't work because pop didn't bother to sign the kernel or prompt me for it and I'm using secure boot.
- tlowrimore 5y ago
  Oh man, I’ve used Pop exclusively for 2 years now. I run it on a Thinkpad X1 Extreme, and I love it. I switched from using Macs (for the better part of 20 years) after the whole 2018 keyboard debacle. I can’t imagine going back. Only downside is the terrible battery life on the X1 Extreme.

MiddleEndian 5y ago

I had a similar experience, used Arch for awhile got tired of random things breaking, then I overcorrected and switched to Debian, thinking that infrequent changes would mean less breakage. That came with its own problems with things not working, especially if you let Debian fall out of date and it becomes un-upgradable. I also landed on Ubuntu LTS for my Linux needs, reasonably up-to-date, longer support cycles (a decade for security) than Debian versions, allowing me to be lazier than I could otherwise get away with managing other Linux distros. However, the Steam Deck only has three main hardware configurations and Valve presumably has a team dedicated to making sure it runs correctly. So Arch may be a really good value proposition for them.

beermonster 5y ago
They will only have the required software dependencies and configuration they need to support those combined hardware/software configurations. So it should be easier for them to regression test and ensure stability even with Arch as a base. Looks like they want to have the ability to be fairly agile and not getting locked into a platform for 2+ years

wayneftw 5y ago

If you're not into fiddling but you still want a nice rolling release, you can try an Arch based distro. I use Manjaro and it's been nothing but smooth sailing for a few years now. I have it on 4 machines - a home desktop, a work desktop, a laptop and an old Mac Pro from 2012.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

throw37388 5y ago

OpenSuse is much better option for rolling distro. It has automated testing before packages are merged, more stable.

dgan 5y ago
I second that. Automatic snapshots are priceless
ex_amazon_sde 5y ago
Debian has a big CI system to do end-to-end integration test https://ci.debian.net/ https://ci.debian.net/ and https://wiki.debian.org/ReproducibleBuilds https://wiki.debian.org/ReproducibleBuilds It also provides continuous snapshots: https://snapshot.debian.org/ https://snapshot.debian.org/

trey-jones 5y ago

This is a decent comment, and I get it. I also don't want to fool with my setup too much anymore. I use Manjaro for my primary system, and it's great though. I don't want to manage the software that I use everyday through SNAPs or however you do it on Ubuntu nowadays. I just want the very latest of a short(ish) list of things, lets say arbitrarily within about 2 weeks of release, which is what Manjaro basically gives me. pamac upgrade -a Done. Or even better, most of the time: pacman -Syu This could be great for a games platform, because you'll get the latest CPU bytecode, and eg. Vulkan, and graphics drivers as well as the latest compatibility tools. Usually it's best to have the latest. Anyway for Steam deck my first reaction is that they will need to: 1. Do like Manjaro and hold updates for a period of time before distributing them. 2. Provide some sort of one-click revert for when an update randomly prevents your device from booting. These are basically the only big problems that I encounter anymore - it usually takes 20 minutes to an hour to figure out which package is the problem and fix it, but you don't want to be doing that on your $600 steam deck. Edit: As far as updates that brick your system go, my first experience with Arch was that if you don't keep up with the rolling releases, you will brick your system guaranteed when you update. So we'll see how that goes. That was 10+ years ago, and maybe it's not as bad now.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
maxerickson 5y ago
The last 2 or 3 years I've had 2 or 3 high friction updates on Arch. More than 0, but not a lot.
- hendersoon 5y ago
  I've had maybe three or four high-friction upgrades on Ubuntu over the past 15 years, where it wouldn't boot properly until I fixed the problem. So yeah it's /better/, but it's far from flawless. Note I don't stick to LTS releases. If I only upgraded to the X.1 LTS releases I expect it would have been smoother.
  - 5y ago

pletnes 5y ago

In arch, everything works straight out of the box. However the box is very small, and you need a lot of other boxes, to get a «normal» working system that can write code and play music and tile windows and…

xfalcox 5y ago

That is one of the reasons I'm running Manjaro, like many replies here. I get new hardware support and access to the many only-arch-pre-packaged software, in a more stable base.

tinus_hn 5y ago

Perhaps it’s easier because it’s a static set of hardware.

2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago

It's based on Arch, it's not purely Arch. Valve takes Arch and distributes their own configured version. I don't see how that would make SteamOS unstable unless Valve makes a mistake in testing.

boudin 5y ago

I don't think it will make arch more stable. It would require a good amount of change on the way the whole package repositories are tested. I'm quite sure that Steam Deck will have its own repositories so that they can validate upstream changes before pushing those to the Steam Deck users.

swiley 5y ago

There's also going the opposite direction and throwing out everything that requires any non trivial amount of configuration. I've been pretty happy doing this.

BiteCode_dev 5y ago
Yeah, I don't even change my wallpaper anymore

oblak 5y ago

This is what I came to say. Arch is fine but you are expected to babysit your PC and perform maintenance every week. And do that for each and every build in the house. Things break often and I am not interested in fixing them. And that's not taking into account wife and kids builds. It took me a while to realize the Arch crowd largely doesn't get that not everyone is exciting to thinker with their OS all the time. I get it. I really do. But I am old As you say, hopefully Valve's efforts are going to help with that. In fact, there's hardly a chance they won't because they business depends on it, at least long term.

VortexDream 5y ago

I think people are making too much of Arch in this case. They aren't going to put Arch on Steam Deck and call it a day. It'll be more like putting Manjaro on it. Except it isn't Manjaro, it's their own distro based on Arch that they'll be managing and distributing. And honestly, Manjaro is one of the most stable, easy to use Linux distros I've used and it's based on Arch (in the same way that SteamOS will be based on Arch). So people need to calm their tits. The endless criticism of everything needs to stop.

chmod775 5y ago

I have a 6 years old arch installation, and an Ubuntu installation that has been going and was regularly updated to a recent release for about as long. I spend more time just trying to have up-to-date software on that Ubuntu installation than I spend time configuring anything about the arch installation. Granted, sometimes you need to edit some files after an update (oh device names changed again in pulseaudio so your volume hotkeys need to be fixed!), but that's usually a matter of seconds because I already know how everything fits together. When a package is totally broken for some reason, I just downgrade it. Meanwhile on Ubuntu your only option for getting up to date versions of Jameica/Hibiscus, pretty much any mapping software that OSM contributors/users would want to use, and a bucket list of other productivity software that tends to be useless if outdated, is to compile from source (don't forget to fix incompatibilities with Ubuntu's libraries!) or manual downloads. Oh I forgot to mention Subsurface and TurtleSport. Don't get me started about those. Bonus points for Ubuntu not having disabled the built-in version checks in a lot of software (it's usually just a compile time options or command line argument!), so it nags users that they're running outdated software when there's no way to upgrade! At this point I'm convinced the only noteworthy software that Ubuntu manages to have acceptably recent versions of is Firefox. If all you want to do is browse web, Ubuntu might be less work. I'm not surprised Ubuntu is trying to move to snap packages. That's their last ditch attempt at getting their house in order. Arch will always at least have an automatically installing AUR package for you with a version that isn't from 2018.

lukeschlather 5y ago
For me I find PPAs typically make getting the latest versions of software where I want the bleeding edge painless. And I don't need to also have everything bleeding edge the way Arch forces me to.
- jogu 5y ago
  PPAs work great until they don't, because it's just some random guy building the packages half of the time. The last time I seriously tried to use Ubuntu was probably 8-10 years ago and I ran into a lot of trouble trying to get up to date graphics drivers via PPAs. I also remember being tired of having to go find a random PPA for every piece of software I wanted. Most of the time I would just find some random blog that provided a "PPA for up-to-date package X" and ultimately felt like what I was doing wasn't really any better than downloading random MSIs like you would on Windows. With Arch though you get the AUR which quite literally has every piece of software you could ever want and is at least managed and maintained in a central place so you're not just adding random PPAs for everything.

d_tr 5y ago

You are referring to great features, but Arch just uses the same upstream packages as everyone else and in a more vanilla form, so it seems like it's about user customization. If so, why is this the distribution's fault? The installation is a bit cumbersome but other than that you do not need to do much. I personally keep my configuration small and tidy, following a "bang for the buck" approach and have not faced any issues. Perhaps my usage patterns are just simpler, but even Steam works fine.

Barrin92 5y ago

Fedora is a decent compromise, always very solid and I've actually come to like the default Gnome nowadays so I don't really need to tweak anything. With flatpaks/snaps being so ubiquitous it doesn't really matter much at this point anyway.

bee_rider 5y ago

I wonder to what extent they were showing you the new features that they'd mostly added, because they were proud of them. Most of the stuff I actually use on my install is fully set up, but I wouldn't show it to a friend, because it is boring work stuff.

TomasBaneUK 5y ago

>Maybe with the steam deck it will become so battle tested it will turn into the most stable distro ever. Being a rolling release goes directly against that. It might be the most stable rolling release together with openSUSE Tumbleweed. When you combine it with a modern filesystem and features like snapshots it really feels solid. In the context of the Steam Deck they can just test and hold/fix bugs so that's a very different scenario. There are just too many changes everywhere and different hardware, software combinations, to expect a bug free experience. Not even Apple with a different release model can manage that and they control everything and have most of the hardware combinations to test. Many DEs and bigger applications need a few point releases to be better but maybe you're talking only about the base distro if it's even possible to make that distinction.

l0b0 5y ago

I've used Arch and Ubuntu both for years, so here's my take. Basically, anything you get working in Arch stays working. On Ubuntu, every single major upgrade has been broken so badly that I eventually gave up and reinstalled from scratch. Annoyingly, some super sensible defaults just never make it back up to the original maintainers (or are rejected, I dunno), so the polished Ubuntu experience is because a lot of engineers at Canonical put a lot of time into enabling things which should absolutely be enabled by default in any modern distro. This includes big things like encrypted storage being a single click option in the installer (compared to several hours of research and false starts with GRUB on Arch Linux) and small things like having a reasonably big set of fonts installed by default. Maybe I just haven't discovered the right metapackages yet :) All that said, I can thoroughly recommend NixOS (my setup[1]) as an alternative, and I personally predict SteamOS will show up there eventually. Initial setup is a fair bit easier, and being able to seamlessly boot into any of the previous configurations is a big deal. The main issues so far have been with dev env setups (Nix isn't terrible, but it's another language to add on top of my existing setups) and running out of disk space because each upgrade takes multiple GB. Don't install unless you have ~100GB to spare for the root partition and a decently fast Internet connection. [1] https://gitlab.com/victor-engmark/root/ https://gitlab.com/victor-engmark/root/

Snetry 5y ago

Personally I find the lack of debug symbols to be a turnoff from arch. To me arch tries to be fast moving without checking if anything breaks

perfopt 5y ago

Fiddling with the workstation is not fun anymore. I dont think it was a useful activity even when I was younger. That time could have been spent doing things that are useful - development, writing my thesis etc. I switched to macOS several years ago for my personal desktop. I use Ubuntu (or any Linux) only at work where someone else (IT) manages the machine and ensures things work.

WastingMyTime89 5y ago

My experience with Arch is that I just install everything and it works straight out of the box because as nothing is patched the integration work done by each projects doesn't break. Meanwhile Debian and Ubuntu both are a hodgepot of random patches thrown together by more or less (but rather less) knowledgeable maintainers for reasons which are clear only to themselves and involve goals I don't share such as allowing things to run over weird kernels and maintaining some imaginary philosophical open source purity. I wouldn't touch that with a ten feet pole. I still personnaly believe that the Linux distribution system is the main reason Linux wasn't more successful. I like Arch because amongst all the successful distribution they seem to be the one doing the less.

jhanschoo 5y ago
What problems have you faced from Debian's approach?

Abishek_Muthian 5y ago

It's stability vs reliability. I know Arch is reliable enough that I can depend upon the community to take the right decisions, Find what I need in their unparalleled documentation, Find bleeding edge binary packages of open-source tools in the community repo etc. Yes I occasionally don't know what's causing a problem and I have to reinstall some packages. It's definitely not stable. But if I needed stability I would have gone for Cent OS or what ever stands for stability nowadays. And that's the beauty of Linux, There's something for everyone.