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>This meme largely came about from ~10 years ago with the filesystem changes and migration to systemd. But it's been a pretty smooth ride since. It's not a mem

by dTal 5y ago

>This meme largely came about from ~10 years ago with the filesystem changes and migration to systemd. But it's been a pretty smooth ride since. It's not a meme. Just this week I attempted to update an Arch system that had been left unattended for only a couple years. It got caught in some kind of cycle where it didn't have the GPG keys required to download the latest GPG keys. Then there was some package conflict issue. Finally after much wailing and gnashing of teeth I completed the update and rebooted... "kernel not found". I gave up on it. And lest I be accused of incompetence, here's another Arch user's 3-year update story, only a few weeks ago, on our very own HN: "Somehow the upgrade didn't completely hose everything. It just took a bit of finagling in the form of looking through any packages that gave errors (errors like cyclic dependency stuff and conflicts from bad use of pip) and uninstalling those that I didn't see a need for or switching them to the package manager instead of pip. About an hour of babysitting it and I had a completely updated and working Arch setup." -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29872053 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29872053 So I'm sorry, but "pretty smooth ride" my ass.

hnlmorg 5y ago
A minute ago you were complaining about updating Arch every day and now you're talking about not updating it over time spans lasting years! Talk about hopping from one extreme to another... Yeah, if you're not going to update Arch in 3 years then I'd expect some issues but in fairness to Arch, the duration you're talking about here is literally the entire support life for some distros. So I certainly wouldn't call Arch "needy" for that. I mean there does need to be a cut off point somewhere and the fact that it's still possible to recover from that state at all -- even if it isn't a smooth ride -- is pretty fscking impressive in my opinion. So yeah, I agree that if you're the kind of person to install an OS and then not touch it again for three(!!!) years and expect it to still update then a bleeding edge rolling release distro isn't going to be your best choice. But nobody was suggesting that Arch (or any distro for that matter) is perfectly suited for every edge case out there. And while I'm sorry you've been burnt in the past, I do think the way you've presented your arguments here is rather disingenuous.

by dTal 5y ago

hnlmorg 5y ago

A minute ago you were complaining about updating Arch every day and now you're talking about not updating it over time spans lasting years! Talk about hopping from one extreme to another... Yeah, if you're not going to update Arch in 3 years then I'd expect some issues but in fairness to Arch, the duration you're talking about here is literally the entire support life for some distros. So I certainly wouldn't call Arch "needy" for that. I mean there does need to be a cut off point somewhere and the fact that it's still possible to recover from that state at all -- even if it isn't a smooth ride -- is pretty fscking impressive in my opinion. So yeah, I agree that if you're the kind of person to install an OS and then not touch it again for three(!!!) years and expect it to still update then a bleeding edge rolling release distro isn't going to be your best choice. But nobody was suggesting that Arch (or any distro for that matter) is perfectly suited for every edge case out there. And while I'm sorry you've been burnt in the past, I do think the way you've presented your arguments here is rather disingenuous.