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I learned linux by using Arch back in the days when pacman -Syu was almost certain to break something and there was a good chance it would break something uniqu

I learned linux by using Arch back in the days when pacman -Syu was almost certain to break something and there was a good chance it would break something unique to your install. This was also back in the days when most were not connected to the internet 24/7 and many did not have internet, I updated when I went to the library which was generally a weekly thing but sometimes it be a month or two and the system breakage that resulted was rococo. Something was lost by Arch becoming stable and not breaking regularly, it was what drove the wiki and fixing all the things that pacman broke taught you a great deal and taught you quickly. Stability is not all that it is cracked up to be, has its uses but is not the solution to everything.

deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
piekvorst 8mo ago
I have started using Arch in 2016 and it was stable back then. Are you describing an earlier era?
- Semaphor 8mo ago
  > This was also back in the days when most were not connected to the internet 24/7 and many did not have internet That does sound significantly longer ago then 2016 ;)
- ofalkaed 8mo ago
  This would be back in the 00s. I would guess that Arch got stable around 2010? I was using Slackware as my primary system by then so don't know exactly when it happened, someone else can probably fill in the details. I started using Arch when it was quite new, within the first year or two.
- charleslmunger 8mo ago
  Not OP, but used Arch for a while in 2011, and at some point doing an update moved /bin to /usr/bin or something like that and gave me an unbootable system. This was massive inconvenience and it took me many hours to un-hose that system, and I switched to Ubuntu. The Ubuntu became terrible with snaps and other user hostile software, so I switched to PopOS, then I got frustrated with out of date software and Cosmic being incomplete, and am now on Arch with KDE. Back then I used Arch because I thought it would be cool and it's what Linux wizards use. Now Arch has gotten older, I've gotten older, and now I'm using Arch again because I've become (more of a) Linux wizard.
  - mjevans 8mo ago
    The silly move from /bin to /usr/bin broke lots of distros. Probably would have worked out if they'd had cp --reflink=auto --update to help ease migrations from files in /bin to /usr/bin and then just symlinked /bin to /usr/bin . However then any setups where /usr is a distinct filesystem from / would hard-require initramfs to set that up before handoff. The python (is python2) transition was even more silly though. Breaking changes to the API and they wanted (and did!) force re-pointing the command to python3? That's still actively breaking stuff today in places that are forsaken enough to have to support python2 legacy systems.
  - cromka 8mo ago
    Also not OP, I gave up Arch around 2011 as well after I wasn't able to mount a USB pendrive at the uni, as I was rushing somewhere. This was embarrassing and actually a serious issue, took some time to fix upstream and finding workaround was also annoying. This is when I gave up on it and never looked back, but I did, indeed, learn all about Linux internals from dailying Arch for 3 or so years.
  - dboon 8mo ago
    Arch + KDE is pretty sweet. It looks gorgeous out of the box, and gives you a system that mostly just works but is still everything you love about Arch
- benoliver999 8mo ago
  The switch to systemd is the last time I FUBARed my system. 2012 it looks like?? I simply did not even remotely understand what I was doing.
  - ofalkaed 8mo ago
    Systemd was the end of Arch for me, my rarely used Arch install was massively broken by its first update in ~6 months largely because of systemd. With some work I got things sorted out and working again only to fall into a cycle of breaking the system as I discovered that systemd was very different from what I was used to and did not like me treating it like SysV. Going 6 months without updates would most likely have caused issues with Arch regardless of how stable it had gotten even without the systemd change, but my subsequent and repeated breaking of the system made me realize I no longer had any interest in learning new system stuff, I just wanted a system that would stay out of my way and let me do the things I wanted to use the system for. I do miss Arch but there is no way I am going to keep up with updates, I will do them when I discover I can't install anything new and then things will break because it has been so long since my last update. Slackware is far more suited to my nature but it will never be Arch.
  - ambicapter 8mo ago
    > I simply did not even remotely understand what I was doing Why do I miss the stupid unconscious bravery of those days :)
keysersoze33 8mo ago
I've contributed 32 edits (1 new page) in the past 10 years, so despite being stable, there are still many things to add and fix! Sadly, the edit volume will likely drop as LLMs are now the preferred source for technical Linux info/everything...
- fragmede 8mo ago
  Depends on how AI-pilled you are. I set Claude loose on my terminal and just have it fix shit for me. My python versions got all tuckered and it did it instead of me having to fuck around with that noise.
  - xhcuvuvyc 8mo ago
    I'm not there yet. Not on my work system anyway. Seen too many batshit answers from chatgpt when I know the answer but don't remember the exact command.
- resonious 8mo ago
  At the same time, I suspect resources like the Arch Wiki are largely responsible for how good AI is at fixing this kind of stuff. So I'm hoping that somehow people realize this and can continue contributing good human-written content (in general).
  - overfeed 8mo ago
    > So I'm hoping that somehow people realize this and can continue contributing good human-written content (in general). AI walled-gardens break the feedback loop: authors seeing view-counts and seeing "[Solved] thank you!" messages helps morale.
    - integralid 8mo ago
      Definitely, being unpaid LLM trainer for big corporations while nobody actually reads your work is not very encouraging. I wonder what the future will bring.
binsquare 8mo ago
This brings back memories, same here! I even bookmarked a page to remember how to rebuild the kernel because I can always expect it breaking.
- ofalkaed 8mo ago
  I didn't really get into custom kernels until I started using Crux. A few years after I started using Arch I got sick of the rolling release and Arch's constant breakages, so I started looking into the alternatives, that brought me to Crux (which Arch was based off of) and Slackware (which was philosophically the opposite of Arch without sacrificing the base understanding of the OS). Crux would have probably won out over Slackware if it were not for the switch to 64bit, when confronted with having to recompile everything, I went with the path of least resistance. Crux is what taught me to compile a kernel, in my Arch days I was lucky when it came to hardware and only had to change a few things in the config which the Arch wiki guided me through. Crux is a great distro for anyone ok with a source distro and I think it might be the best source distro, unlike the more common source distros, it does not do most of the work for you. Also love its influence from BSD, which came in very handy when I started to explore the BSDs and FreeBSD which is my fallback for when Patrick dies or steps back, Crux deserves more attention.
  - JCattheATM 8mo ago
    Arch always turned me off with it's rolling release schedule, and I wasn't that impressed with pacman to be honest. I used to love Slack, but they lost their way trying to compete with Ubuntu and the like. I remember thinking how ridiculous it was for mplayer to have samba as a dependency, and the community saying a full install was the intended way to run Slack. I ran it as a minimalist without issues until they started wanting to compete in the desktop space. The best successor I've found is Alpine. It's minimal and secure by design, has an excellent package manager (I much prefer apk to pacman or xbps, or apt and rpm for that matter), has stable and LTS releases while letting people who want to be rolling release do so by running edge. People think it's only for containers but it has every desktop package anyone would need, all up to date and well maintained. Their wiki isn't at Arch's level, but it's pretty damn good in its own right.
doubled112 8mo ago
> Arch becoming stable and not breaking regularly I believe this to be the entire ecosystem, not just Arch. It's been a long while since something like moving to 64bit happened. Or swapping out init systems.
- ofalkaed 8mo ago
  Most distros were stable well before Arch because Arch worked out most of the bugs for them and documented them on their wiki. Arch and other bleeding edge distros are still a big part of the stability of linux even if they don't break all that often anymore, they find a lot of the edge cases before they are issue for the big distros. In 2005 it was not difficult to have a stable linux install, you may have had to hunt a bit for the right hardware and it may have taken awhile to get things working but once things were working they tended to be stable. I can only think of one time Slackware broke things for me since I started using it around 2005, it taking on PulseAudio caused me some headaches but I use Slackware for audio work and am not their target so this is to be expected. Crux was rock solid for me into the 10s, nearly a decade of use and not even a hiccup.
- VorpalWay 8mo ago
  Other good examples: Linuxthreads to NTPL (for providing pthreads), XFree86 to Xorg. I was using Gentoo at the time, which meant recompiling the world (in the first case) or everything GUI (in the second case). With a strict order of operations to not brick your system. Back then, before Arch existed (or at least before it was well known), the Gentoo wiki was known to be a really good resource. At some point it languished and the Arch wiki became the goto. (I haven't used Gentoo in well over a decade at this point, but the Arch wiki is useful regardless of when I'm using Arch at home or when I'm using other distros at work.)
  - ofalkaed 8mo ago
    Arch was young in those days but I think fairly well known? we were quite vocal, opinionated and interjecting our views everywhere by the time of the Xfree86/Xorg switch. Perhaps it is just my view from being a part of it but I remember encountering the Arch reputation everywhere I went. Or maybe it is just the nostalgia influencing me.
thr0w4w4y1337 8mo ago
> Something was lost by Arch becoming stable and not breaking regularly ...a smooth sea never made a skilled sailor
ErenayDev 8mo ago
About a year ago, when I installed Arch, my first Linux distro, most things were great. However, while testing some commands in pacman, there were a bunch of Python-related packages (even though I hadn't downloaded them). Since I needed some disk space, I figured deleting them wouldn't hurt. Unfortunately, I couldn't boot again. I guess the ones related to Python were related to Hyprland and Quickshell.
shevy-java 8mo ago
I learned linux on debian first. The xserver (x11 or what as its old name) was not working so I had to use the commandline. I had a short debian handbook and worked through it slowly. Before that I had SUSE and a SUSE handbook with a GUI, which was totally useless. I then went on to use knoppix, kanotix, sidux, GoboLinux, eventually ended up with slackware. These days I tend to use manjaro, despite the drawback that is systemd. Manjaro kind of feels like a mix between arch and slackware. (I compile from source, so I only need a base really for the most part, excluding a few things; I tend to disable most systemd unit files as I don't really need anything systemd offers. Sadly distributions such as slackware kind of died - they are not dead, but too slow in updates, no stable releases in years, this is the hallmark of deadness.)
- jampekka 8mo ago
  > The xserver (x11 or what as its old name) It was XFree86 until around mid 00s after which the X.org fork took over.
- ofalkaed 8mo ago
  Slackware only does long term stable releases but Slackware current is a rolling release that does not really feel like a rolling release because of how Slackware provides a full and complete system as the base system. I avoided Slackware current for years because I did not want to deal with the hassle of rolling release, but it is almost identical in experience to using the release.
- grundrausch3n 8mo ago
  I actually got a lot of Linux knowledge from the Suse handbooks, but when I was still buying a box in the book store because of slow internet connection in the beginning of the 2000. For Linux content nowadays the Arch wiki is still one of my most used resources although I did not use Arch in years.
streetfighter64 8mo ago
> back in the days when pacman -Syu was almost certain to break something and there was a good chance it would break something unique to your install This was still the case when I switched to arch in like 2016 lol
- Pay08 8mo ago
  Not to mention that they broke EAC only a few years ago.
assimpleaspossi 8mo ago
>>Something was lost by Arch becoming stable and not breaking regularly Only a Linux user would consider the instability of a Linux distro to be a good thing.
- badgersnake 8mo ago
  If your goal is to learn how it works this was great, a new challenge every day. Perhaps we need a chaosmonkey Linux distro. Also FreeBSD did this well recently, migrating libc and libsys in the wrong order so you have no kernel API. That was fun.
  - KAMSPioneer 8mo ago
    I was hit with that on a remote box in another country! Should have researched the upgrade more before I did it, but it is a personal thing and not work. However, my IPMI motherboard and FreeBSD's integrated ZFS boot environments might be considered cheating...
- encom 8mo ago
  You don't become a mechanic without fixing broken down cars. So in that sense, the shittier the car, the better. My Linux story is similar. In retrospect I learned it on hard mode, because Gentoo was the first distro I used (as in really used). And Gentoo, especially back around 2004 or so, really gave you fully automatic, armour-piercing, double-barreled footguns.
  - bombcar 8mo ago
    Gentoo foot guns were (are) the best! That you could always just boot from the CD and start again was nice. I think I reinstalled 4-5 times the "first time" before I got it where I wanted to be.
- gosub100 8mo ago
  If you choose not to upgrade, it is stable. There is no QA department for Linux (or windows, they were let go around 2015) so someone has to endure the instability if there is to be any progress. We should all thank those who run nascent software so those who run stable distros can have stability.
ambicapter 8mo ago
I had somebody’s pgp key break something yesterday :) learned about arch-key ring.
estimator7292 8mo ago
Arch linux will still happily blow itself up if you skip updates for too long. It's to the point where if I see 'archlinix-keyring' in my system update, I immediately abort and run through the manual process of updating keys. That's prevented any arch nuclear disasters for the last couple years

deleted 8mo ago

[deleted]

piekvorst 8mo ago

I have started using Arch in 2016 and it was stable back then. Are you describing an earlier era?

Semaphor 8mo ago
> This was also back in the days when most were not connected to the internet 24/7 and many did not have internet That does sound significantly longer ago then 2016 ;)
ofalkaed 8mo ago
This would be back in the 00s. I would guess that Arch got stable around 2010? I was using Slackware as my primary system by then so don't know exactly when it happened, someone else can probably fill in the details. I started using Arch when it was quite new, within the first year or two.
charleslmunger 8mo ago
Not OP, but used Arch for a while in 2011, and at some point doing an update moved /bin to /usr/bin or something like that and gave me an unbootable system. This was massive inconvenience and it took me many hours to un-hose that system, and I switched to Ubuntu. The Ubuntu became terrible with snaps and other user hostile software, so I switched to PopOS, then I got frustrated with out of date software and Cosmic being incomplete, and am now on Arch with KDE. Back then I used Arch because I thought it would be cool and it's what Linux wizards use. Now Arch has gotten older, I've gotten older, and now I'm using Arch again because I've become (more of a) Linux wizard.
- mjevans 8mo ago
  The silly move from /bin to /usr/bin broke lots of distros. Probably would have worked out if they'd had cp --reflink=auto --update to help ease migrations from files in /bin to /usr/bin and then just symlinked /bin to /usr/bin . However then any setups where /usr is a distinct filesystem from / would hard-require initramfs to set that up before handoff. The python (is python2) transition was even more silly though. Breaking changes to the API and they wanted (and did!) force re-pointing the command to python3? That's still actively breaking stuff today in places that are forsaken enough to have to support python2 legacy systems.
- cromka 8mo ago
  Also not OP, I gave up Arch around 2011 as well after I wasn't able to mount a USB pendrive at the uni, as I was rushing somewhere. This was embarrassing and actually a serious issue, took some time to fix upstream and finding workaround was also annoying. This is when I gave up on it and never looked back, but I did, indeed, learn all about Linux internals from dailying Arch for 3 or so years.
- dboon 8mo ago
  Arch + KDE is pretty sweet. It looks gorgeous out of the box, and gives you a system that mostly just works but is still everything you love about Arch
benoliver999 8mo ago
The switch to systemd is the last time I FUBARed my system. 2012 it looks like?? I simply did not even remotely understand what I was doing.
- ofalkaed 8mo ago
  Systemd was the end of Arch for me, my rarely used Arch install was massively broken by its first update in ~6 months largely because of systemd. With some work I got things sorted out and working again only to fall into a cycle of breaking the system as I discovered that systemd was very different from what I was used to and did not like me treating it like SysV. Going 6 months without updates would most likely have caused issues with Arch regardless of how stable it had gotten even without the systemd change, but my subsequent and repeated breaking of the system made me realize I no longer had any interest in learning new system stuff, I just wanted a system that would stay out of my way and let me do the things I wanted to use the system for. I do miss Arch but there is no way I am going to keep up with updates, I will do them when I discover I can't install anything new and then things will break because it has been so long since my last update. Slackware is far more suited to my nature but it will never be Arch.
- ambicapter 8mo ago
  > I simply did not even remotely understand what I was doing Why do I miss the stupid unconscious bravery of those days :)

keysersoze33 8mo ago

I've contributed 32 edits (1 new page) in the past 10 years, so despite being stable, there are still many things to add and fix! Sadly, the edit volume will likely drop as LLMs are now the preferred source for technical Linux info/everything...

fragmede 8mo ago
Depends on how AI-pilled you are. I set Claude loose on my terminal and just have it fix shit for me. My python versions got all tuckered and it did it instead of me having to fuck around with that noise.
- xhcuvuvyc 8mo ago
  I'm not there yet. Not on my work system anyway. Seen too many batshit answers from chatgpt when I know the answer but don't remember the exact command.
resonious 8mo ago
At the same time, I suspect resources like the Arch Wiki are largely responsible for how good AI is at fixing this kind of stuff. So I'm hoping that somehow people realize this and can continue contributing good human-written content (in general).
- overfeed 8mo ago
  > So I'm hoping that somehow people realize this and can continue contributing good human-written content (in general). AI walled-gardens break the feedback loop: authors seeing view-counts and seeing "[Solved] thank you!" messages helps morale.
  - integralid 8mo ago
    Definitely, being unpaid LLM trainer for big corporations while nobody actually reads your work is not very encouraging. I wonder what the future will bring.

binsquare 8mo ago

This brings back memories, same here! I even bookmarked a page to remember how to rebuild the kernel because I can always expect it breaking.

ofalkaed 8mo ago
I didn't really get into custom kernels until I started using Crux. A few years after I started using Arch I got sick of the rolling release and Arch's constant breakages, so I started looking into the alternatives, that brought me to Crux (which Arch was based off of) and Slackware (which was philosophically the opposite of Arch without sacrificing the base understanding of the OS). Crux would have probably won out over Slackware if it were not for the switch to 64bit, when confronted with having to recompile everything, I went with the path of least resistance. Crux is what taught me to compile a kernel, in my Arch days I was lucky when it came to hardware and only had to change a few things in the config which the Arch wiki guided me through. Crux is a great distro for anyone ok with a source distro and I think it might be the best source distro, unlike the more common source distros, it does not do most of the work for you. Also love its influence from BSD, which came in very handy when I started to explore the BSDs and FreeBSD which is my fallback for when Patrick dies or steps back, Crux deserves more attention.
- JCattheATM 8mo ago
  Arch always turned me off with it's rolling release schedule, and I wasn't that impressed with pacman to be honest. I used to love Slack, but they lost their way trying to compete with Ubuntu and the like. I remember thinking how ridiculous it was for mplayer to have samba as a dependency, and the community saying a full install was the intended way to run Slack. I ran it as a minimalist without issues until they started wanting to compete in the desktop space. The best successor I've found is Alpine. It's minimal and secure by design, has an excellent package manager (I much prefer apk to pacman or xbps, or apt and rpm for that matter), has stable and LTS releases while letting people who want to be rolling release do so by running edge. People think it's only for containers but it has every desktop package anyone would need, all up to date and well maintained. Their wiki isn't at Arch's level, but it's pretty damn good in its own right.

doubled112 8mo ago

> Arch becoming stable and not breaking regularly I believe this to be the entire ecosystem, not just Arch. It's been a long while since something like moving to 64bit happened. Or swapping out init systems.

ofalkaed 8mo ago
Most distros were stable well before Arch because Arch worked out most of the bugs for them and documented them on their wiki. Arch and other bleeding edge distros are still a big part of the stability of linux even if they don't break all that often anymore, they find a lot of the edge cases before they are issue for the big distros. In 2005 it was not difficult to have a stable linux install, you may have had to hunt a bit for the right hardware and it may have taken awhile to get things working but once things were working they tended to be stable. I can only think of one time Slackware broke things for me since I started using it around 2005, it taking on PulseAudio caused me some headaches but I use Slackware for audio work and am not their target so this is to be expected. Crux was rock solid for me into the 10s, nearly a decade of use and not even a hiccup.
VorpalWay 8mo ago
Other good examples: Linuxthreads to NTPL (for providing pthreads), XFree86 to Xorg. I was using Gentoo at the time, which meant recompiling the world (in the first case) or everything GUI (in the second case). With a strict order of operations to not brick your system. Back then, before Arch existed (or at least before it was well known), the Gentoo wiki was known to be a really good resource. At some point it languished and the Arch wiki became the goto. (I haven't used Gentoo in well over a decade at this point, but the Arch wiki is useful regardless of when I'm using Arch at home or when I'm using other distros at work.)
- ofalkaed 8mo ago
  Arch was young in those days but I think fairly well known? we were quite vocal, opinionated and interjecting our views everywhere by the time of the Xfree86/Xorg switch. Perhaps it is just my view from being a part of it but I remember encountering the Arch reputation everywhere I went. Or maybe it is just the nostalgia influencing me.

thr0w4w4y1337 8mo ago

> Something was lost by Arch becoming stable and not breaking regularly ...a smooth sea never made a skilled sailor

ErenayDev 8mo ago

About a year ago, when I installed Arch, my first Linux distro, most things were great. However, while testing some commands in pacman, there were a bunch of Python-related packages (even though I hadn't downloaded them). Since I needed some disk space, I figured deleting them wouldn't hurt. Unfortunately, I couldn't boot again. I guess the ones related to Python were related to Hyprland and Quickshell.

shevy-java 8mo ago

I learned linux on debian first. The xserver (x11 or what as its old name) was not working so I had to use the commandline. I had a short debian handbook and worked through it slowly. Before that I had SUSE and a SUSE handbook with a GUI, which was totally useless. I then went on to use knoppix, kanotix, sidux, GoboLinux, eventually ended up with slackware. These days I tend to use manjaro, despite the drawback that is systemd. Manjaro kind of feels like a mix between arch and slackware. (I compile from source, so I only need a base really for the most part, excluding a few things; I tend to disable most systemd unit files as I don't really need anything systemd offers. Sadly distributions such as slackware kind of died - they are not dead, but too slow in updates, no stable releases in years, this is the hallmark of deadness.)

jampekka 8mo ago
> The xserver (x11 or what as its old name) It was XFree86 until around mid 00s after which the X.org fork took over.
ofalkaed 8mo ago
Slackware only does long term stable releases but Slackware current is a rolling release that does not really feel like a rolling release because of how Slackware provides a full and complete system as the base system. I avoided Slackware current for years because I did not want to deal with the hassle of rolling release, but it is almost identical in experience to using the release.
grundrausch3n 8mo ago
I actually got a lot of Linux knowledge from the Suse handbooks, but when I was still buying a box in the book store because of slow internet connection in the beginning of the 2000. For Linux content nowadays the Arch wiki is still one of my most used resources although I did not use Arch in years.

streetfighter64 8mo ago

> back in the days when pacman -Syu was almost certain to break something and there was a good chance it would break something unique to your install This was still the case when I switched to arch in like 2016 lol

Pay08 8mo ago
Not to mention that they broke EAC only a few years ago.

assimpleaspossi 8mo ago

>>Something was lost by Arch becoming stable and not breaking regularly Only a Linux user would consider the instability of a Linux distro to be a good thing.

badgersnake 8mo ago
If your goal is to learn how it works this was great, a new challenge every day. Perhaps we need a chaosmonkey Linux distro. Also FreeBSD did this well recently, migrating libc and libsys in the wrong order so you have no kernel API. That was fun.
- KAMSPioneer 8mo ago
  I was hit with that on a remote box in another country! Should have researched the upgrade more before I did it, but it is a personal thing and not work. However, my IPMI motherboard and FreeBSD's integrated ZFS boot environments might be considered cheating...
encom 8mo ago
You don't become a mechanic without fixing broken down cars. So in that sense, the shittier the car, the better. My Linux story is similar. In retrospect I learned it on hard mode, because Gentoo was the first distro I used (as in really used). And Gentoo, especially back around 2004 or so, really gave you fully automatic, armour-piercing, double-barreled footguns.
- bombcar 8mo ago
  Gentoo foot guns were (are) the best! That you could always just boot from the CD and start again was nice. I think I reinstalled 4-5 times the "first time" before I got it where I wanted to be.
gosub100 8mo ago
If you choose not to upgrade, it is stable. There is no QA department for Linux (or windows, they were let go around 2015) so someone has to endure the instability if there is to be any progress. We should all thank those who run nascent software so those who run stable distros can have stability.

ambicapter 8mo ago

I had somebody’s pgp key break something yesterday :) learned about arch-key ring.

estimator7292 8mo ago

Arch linux will still happily blow itself up if you skip updates for too long. It's to the point where if I see 'archlinix-keyring' in my system update, I immediately abort and run through the manual process of updating keys. That's prevented any arch nuclear disasters for the last couple years