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Arch is not something for people that want to just use their devices. It's something for people who love to tinker. Updates break something so often that I won

by bhaak 5y ago

Arch is not something for people that want to just use their devices. It's something for people who love to tinker. Updates break something so often that I wonder if it somehow is sponsored by other OS developers to make them look good.

rusticpenn 5y ago
That's part of the arch experience.
Grollicus 5y ago
I'm running Arch on my home laptop and my server. Had one breakage in ~5 years where sshd wouldn't start anymore because they deprecated and then removed a config option. What do you do that regularly breaks?
ericwooley 5y ago
Been running it almost a year now, without anything breaking except some gnome extensions.
horsawlarway 5y ago
I mostly agree with you that Arch is for folks who love to tinker. But you must have some strange workflows going - I've been on arch fulltime for 3 years now, and my one breakage was that dash-to-dock didn't play nicely with a new version of gnome. Frankly - it's a far better experience than the 16inch macbook pro my work issued me - that has problems with fans, problems with lag during zoom calls, problems with accelerated rendering in chrome, issues with wifi and bluetooth connections. I literally call it my crapbook it's so bad.
- bhaak 5y ago
  What I didn't know in the beginning (coming from Gentoo) was that Arch doesn't support updating specific packages. That explained some of my initial problems but I still have regular breakages. Right now my sound is broken and it stayed broken even after an update and reboot (That you have to reboot so often is something else that bothers me. Rebooting a Linux/Unix machine feels so wrong). Your MacBook problems sound like hardware problems. That's not something I would expect from any decent laptop these days.
worble 5y ago
Been running it for a few years now, I can only remember two or three times which have required manual intervention (and even then it was a one liner described on the arch news page). Compared to the hell that was upgrading Ubuntu versions every couple of years, I'll take Arch's way any day.
wayneftw 5y ago
Manjaro is and that's based on Arch. They curate the updates for you to prevent breakages and the need to tinker endlessly. I've been running it for 3 years on 4 machines and I've had far less breakage from updates than with my Windows or Mac machines.
- entropea 5y ago
  Manjaro is one of the only distro's I've used that has nuked itself during updates. I moved to Endeavor because I was sick of the Manjaro maintained repos.
i_use_arch_btw 5y ago
I've been daily-driving Arch for two years now, and I've only seen it break a handful of times. And since I set it up using the command line tools, I knew which ones to use to fix it. Arch lets me engage with the open-source community directly and get fixes to issues faster than more curated OSes like Ubuntu. I have access to more diagnostic information and tools that what Windows provides. And privacy and freedom isn't compromised like on MacOS. Also, it's gotten really good for games. It plays pretty much everything I've wanted to play, from Stellaris, Cyberpunk 2077, and Humankind. So, sometimes opinions need updates.
entropea 5y ago
>Arch is not something for people that want to just use their devices. It's something for people who love to tinker. I've been running Arch (Endeavor w/KDE now) as a desktop for probably 7 years and I just use my device. I get updates that break small things in KDE, or give me major screen tearing in Firefox once in awhile, but nothing that "breaks so often". It's pretty good and solid in 2021...

by bhaak 5y ago

rusticpenn 5y ago

That's part of the arch experience.

Grollicus 5y ago

I'm running Arch on my home laptop and my server. Had one breakage in ~5 years where sshd wouldn't start anymore because they deprecated and then removed a config option. What do you do that regularly breaks?

ericwooley 5y ago

Been running it almost a year now, without anything breaking except some gnome extensions.

horsawlarway 5y ago

I mostly agree with you that Arch is for folks who love to tinker. But you must have some strange workflows going - I've been on arch fulltime for 3 years now, and my one breakage was that dash-to-dock didn't play nicely with a new version of gnome. Frankly - it's a far better experience than the 16inch macbook pro my work issued me - that has problems with fans, problems with lag during zoom calls, problems with accelerated rendering in chrome, issues with wifi and bluetooth connections. I literally call it my crapbook it's so bad.

bhaak 5y ago
What I didn't know in the beginning (coming from Gentoo) was that Arch doesn't support updating specific packages. That explained some of my initial problems but I still have regular breakages. Right now my sound is broken and it stayed broken even after an update and reboot (That you have to reboot so often is something else that bothers me. Rebooting a Linux/Unix machine feels so wrong). Your MacBook problems sound like hardware problems. That's not something I would expect from any decent laptop these days.

worble 5y ago

Been running it for a few years now, I can only remember two or three times which have required manual intervention (and even then it was a one liner described on the arch news page). Compared to the hell that was upgrading Ubuntu versions every couple of years, I'll take Arch's way any day.

wayneftw 5y ago

Manjaro is and that's based on Arch. They curate the updates for you to prevent breakages and the need to tinker endlessly. I've been running it for 3 years on 4 machines and I've had far less breakage from updates than with my Windows or Mac machines.

entropea 5y ago
Manjaro is one of the only distro's I've used that has nuked itself during updates. I moved to Endeavor because I was sick of the Manjaro maintained repos.

i_use_arch_btw 5y ago

I've been daily-driving Arch for two years now, and I've only seen it break a handful of times. And since I set it up using the command line tools, I knew which ones to use to fix it. Arch lets me engage with the open-source community directly and get fixes to issues faster than more curated OSes like Ubuntu. I have access to more diagnostic information and tools that what Windows provides. And privacy and freedom isn't compromised like on MacOS. Also, it's gotten really good for games. It plays pretty much everything I've wanted to play, from Stellaris, Cyberpunk 2077, and Humankind. So, sometimes opinions need updates.

entropea 5y ago

>Arch is not something for people that want to just use their devices. It's something for people who love to tinker. I've been running Arch (Endeavor w/KDE now) as a desktop for probably 7 years and I just use my device. I get updates that break small things in KDE, or give me major screen tearing in Firefox once in awhile, but nothing that "breaks so often". It's pretty good and solid in 2021...