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Fedora has been rock solid for a few years (minus Zoom + Nvidia), as my primary work OS. I'm always nervous to jump to an Arch-based distro as my daily driver,

Fedora has been rock solid for a few years (minus Zoom + Nvidia), as my primary work OS. I'm always nervous to jump to an Arch-based distro as my daily driver, for fear of having to regularly fix issues. Is this a legitimate concern in 2025? Would my experience (especially with graphics) be improved on something like Cachy?

embedding-shape 11mo ago
> Is this a legitimate concern in 2025? I've used Arch Linux (always with a nvidia GPU no less!) since 2017 sometime, moved over to CachyOS just this year, and had no issues that weren't caused by myself in all this time. I initially moved away from Ubuntu at that time, as I got so tired of dist-upgrade breaking my system every single time I tried to upgrade, so figured I'll at least understand the breakages better when they happen with Arch. But I never got Arch to break something by itself, it always end up being my fault.
- distances 11mo ago
  Yes, dist-upgrade was the biggest pain with the Ubuntu based KDE neon too. I'd wait for multiple months after a new version was published before I'd upgrade, and still would often encounter issues that broke the boot. I made sure to reserve at least half a day for each dist-upgrade -- multiple times I fixed issues with a bootable USB image and mounting the full-disk encrypted partition to fiddle something. I was always able to recover with some insights from random forum or Reddit posts, but I can't say this was the type hacking I wanted to do. I'm hoping a rolling release is easier in the long run, but we'll see. Also this time I used a separate SSD for /home so that at least I could do a full reinstall and still keep my data.
vbezhenar 11mo ago
I'm using ordinary Arch for the last year and I didn't have a single issue.
jaapz 11mo ago
I have been running arch for about 5 years now, and I think there were about 3 or 4 instances where I'd have to do some manual intervention to fix an update, but those interventions were generally all fixable by commands posted on arch linux's blog (which, for some weird reason, the arch devs expect you to check every time you run `sudo pacman -Syu`) Arch devs know how much friction manual intervention updates cause, so they try to keep them to a minimum. Honestly, I've had more problems running windows than running arch.
- embedding-shape 11mo ago
  > Honestly, I've had more problems running windows than running arch. Worst thing with Windows isn't the occasional "wtf, how do I undo this change Microsoft forced upon me?" but more "Damn, it's that time of the month where Windows force me to do X", most recently being upgrades that you cannot shutdown or restart your computer without doing. Used to be you could run some command to avoid it, but literally all the hacks stopped working. So now I'm slightly afraid of booting Windows which I do sometimes, because I don't want to end up in the situation where I need to boot Linux for five seconds to do something quickly, but Windows is refusing to do so without first doing a 20 minute upgrade. Fucking disrespectful of people's time!
WD-42 11mo ago
Arch being unstable is a myth. I’ve had far more issues with major upgrades between versions of Debian, fedora and Ubuntu than I ever had on arch. I think my install is almost 6 years old now.
- deleted 11mo ago
  [deleted]
- embedding-shape 11mo ago
  Same. My first Linux was Ubuntu 9.x, every time I upgraded the major version something broke. Eventually ignored the "Arch is unstable" as I saw my co-workers having zero issues, and been using Arch since 2017 now with zero breakages that I myself wasn't responsible for.
  - bavell 11mo ago
    Same here as well, using arch as daily driver for 10+ years now. I think just twice I've had major headaches due to package/kernel upgrades which required a few hours troubleshooting. Otherwise, smooth sailing and a pleasure to work with. Love the AUR (w/ pikaur)!
    - embedding-shape 11mo ago
      > Love the AUR (w/ pikaur)! Never heard about pikaur before (Rua gang here), but judging by the screenshots, does it not allow you to review the PKGBUILD before building the package? Seems to me like the most basic feature a AUR helper has to have, since AUR is all user-contributed without reviews. Is pikaur really letting you install packages blindly like that?
- theevilsharpie 11mo ago
  > Arch being unstable is a myth. Arch follows a rolling release model. It's inherently unstable, by design.
  - 11mo ago
deryilz 11mo ago
As another commenter said, sometimes upgrades require manual intervention. You can fix this using a tool like informant which shows you all the interventions you have to do before you upgrade. Also, you can use a tool like snapper + btrfs-assistant (both of which come pre-installed on Cachy IIRC) which lets you fully revert your filesystem (snapper rollback) or partially (snapper undochange) if something breaks. Just make sure to use a btrfs filesystem for that.
deleted 11mo ago
[deleted]
TiredOfLife 11mo ago
For example. Last week there was a time period where updating CachyOS led to unbootable system. https://discuss.cachyos.org/t/qt6-upgrade-to-6-10-1-breaks-sddm-plasma-delay-upgrading-until-plasma-workspace-6-5-3-2/19029 https://discuss.cachyos.org/t/qt6-upgrade-to-6-10-1-breaks-s...

embedding-shape 11mo ago

> Is this a legitimate concern in 2025? I've used Arch Linux (always with a nvidia GPU no less!) since 2017 sometime, moved over to CachyOS just this year, and had no issues that weren't caused by myself in all this time. I initially moved away from Ubuntu at that time, as I got so tired of dist-upgrade breaking my system every single time I tried to upgrade, so figured I'll at least understand the breakages better when they happen with Arch. But I never got Arch to break something by itself, it always end up being my fault.

distances 11mo ago
Yes, dist-upgrade was the biggest pain with the Ubuntu based KDE neon too. I'd wait for multiple months after a new version was published before I'd upgrade, and still would often encounter issues that broke the boot. I made sure to reserve at least half a day for each dist-upgrade -- multiple times I fixed issues with a bootable USB image and mounting the full-disk encrypted partition to fiddle something. I was always able to recover with some insights from random forum or Reddit posts, but I can't say this was the type hacking I wanted to do. I'm hoping a rolling release is easier in the long run, but we'll see. Also this time I used a separate SSD for /home so that at least I could do a full reinstall and still keep my data.

vbezhenar 11mo ago

I'm using ordinary Arch for the last year and I didn't have a single issue.

jaapz 11mo ago

I have been running arch for about 5 years now, and I think there were about 3 or 4 instances where I'd have to do some manual intervention to fix an update, but those interventions were generally all fixable by commands posted on arch linux's blog (which, for some weird reason, the arch devs expect you to check every time you run `sudo pacman -Syu`) Arch devs know how much friction manual intervention updates cause, so they try to keep them to a minimum. Honestly, I've had more problems running windows than running arch.

embedding-shape 11mo ago
> Honestly, I've had more problems running windows than running arch. Worst thing with Windows isn't the occasional "wtf, how do I undo this change Microsoft forced upon me?" but more "Damn, it's that time of the month where Windows force me to do X", most recently being upgrades that you cannot shutdown or restart your computer without doing. Used to be you could run some command to avoid it, but literally all the hacks stopped working. So now I'm slightly afraid of booting Windows which I do sometimes, because I don't want to end up in the situation where I need to boot Linux for five seconds to do something quickly, but Windows is refusing to do so without first doing a 20 minute upgrade. Fucking disrespectful of people's time!

WD-42 11mo ago

Arch being unstable is a myth. I’ve had far more issues with major upgrades between versions of Debian, fedora and Ubuntu than I ever had on arch. I think my install is almost 6 years old now.

deleted 11mo ago
[deleted]
embedding-shape 11mo ago
Same. My first Linux was Ubuntu 9.x, every time I upgraded the major version something broke. Eventually ignored the "Arch is unstable" as I saw my co-workers having zero issues, and been using Arch since 2017 now with zero breakages that I myself wasn't responsible for.
- bavell 11mo ago
  Same here as well, using arch as daily driver for 10+ years now. I think just twice I've had major headaches due to package/kernel upgrades which required a few hours troubleshooting. Otherwise, smooth sailing and a pleasure to work with. Love the AUR (w/ pikaur)!
  - embedding-shape 11mo ago
    > Love the AUR (w/ pikaur)! Never heard about pikaur before (Rua gang here), but judging by the screenshots, does it not allow you to review the PKGBUILD before building the package? Seems to me like the most basic feature a AUR helper has to have, since AUR is all user-contributed without reviews. Is pikaur really letting you install packages blindly like that?
theevilsharpie 11mo ago
> Arch being unstable is a myth. Arch follows a rolling release model. It's inherently unstable, by design.
- 11mo ago

deryilz 11mo ago

As another commenter said, sometimes upgrades require manual intervention. You can fix this using a tool like informant which shows you all the interventions you have to do before you upgrade. Also, you can use a tool like snapper + btrfs-assistant (both of which come pre-installed on Cachy IIRC) which lets you fully revert your filesystem (snapper rollback) or partially (snapper undochange) if something breaks. Just make sure to use a btrfs filesystem for that.

deleted 11mo ago

[deleted]

TiredOfLife 11mo ago

For example. Last week there was a time period where updating CachyOS led to unbootable system. https://discuss.cachyos.org/t/qt6-upgrade-to-6-10-1-breaks-sddm-plasma-delay-upgrading-until-plasma-workspace-6-5-3-2/19029 https://discuss.cachyos.org/t/qt6-upgrade-to-6-10-1-breaks-s...