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One of my devices is an offline device that I bring online every few months for updates (my VPN only gives me limited spots, so some devices take turns using the VPN). I guarantee you updates this infrequent would break most distros, including Arch. But since I use an atomic/immutable distro, it works every time.
This is what’s so great about atomic distros. Super reliable and hard to break. Just set and forget.
I guarantee you updates this infrequent would break most distros
This is a complete non-issue for any fixed-release distro I’ve ever heard of. You’re supposed to update more often for security reasons (on internet-connected devices, anyway), not because it would break on updates.
You’re right, somehow I forgot about point releases. I was thinking Fedora, which has broken on my before when I waited too long to update (multiple months). And yeah updates are good for security. I just keep my device offline 99% of the time
The first time debian oldstable broke a package after an incremental update, i reconsidered my long running hard stance against arch
Updated my endeavour install last night from 6.18 to 7.1 without issue: daily -Syu is for the birds
In the past 3 years of using arch daily I’ve had to remove some renamed packages after an update once, thats about it
wtf is this bullshit
and more importantly, why is it so condescending?!
It’s meant to be an attempt at humor/sarcasm/engagement bait I think.
Arch user (btw) here. I use xorg and a custom tiling window manager. I had 0 breakage regarding my config. Nvidie fked me 2 times and grub was broken 1 time. Thats it. 10 years 3 chroot. Pacman runs when I feel like it. I used two weeks to configure my setup, and I hardly ever change a thing nowdays.
Tried Hyperland on an “old” thinkpad, each update broke something. So no thanks, I’ll stick to mature, battle tested components, where my config and sanity will remain stable, and leave the tamagotchi for ricers/thinkerers.
ex arch user for 5 yrs
current fedora user since 2024
i’ve been getting a lot of “recommended” youtube videos on gentoo and nixos
send help plezz
Early on in Linux journey rolling distros are great.
I started my Linux journey with a rolling distro and I’m thankful for that. It broke every other day I spend hours upon hours on stackoverflow and other forums trying to find solutions and to fix it. That led to understanding linux in general to a greater depth. I’m now on a stable distro because I’ve a job now but I was only able to land that job because I knew Linux well enough. I know even after 10+ years I’m nowhere near the level others are at but it’s about the journey and not the destination. I’ve grown along the way.
I love my EndeavourOS. 💜
Ironically, it’s the rolling release that’s much more stable for me.
“Stable” distros often had a long and risky process of upgrading to the next major release.
Meanwhile, my Arch install has been pretty damn stable for over 10 years and went through several different PCs.
You’re confusing two different meanings of stable. When people refer to “stable” distros such as Debian, they are referring to the meaning of stable as “unchanging,” not the meaning of stable as “doesn’t crash.”
A rolling release distro by that definition cannot be stable.
TBF “doesn’t crash” is generally why LTS-distros do “unchanging”.
Same, and next year when bcachefs has nailed down the kinks it’ll be basically bullet proof with snapshotting prior to its daily updates.
Why bcachefs over btrfs?
https://bartosz.fenski.pl/modern-fs-benchmark/ benchmarks say it all.
Sure bcachefs sounds like a pretty good idea, especially since the author thinks his AI coding assistant is sentient and a “her”. What is it with file system maintainers and mental illness…
From what I know, the AI Assistant is the least of Kent Overstreet’s problems. If anything it’s a blessing he’s fixanting on a random number generator instead of risking becoming Hans Raiser 2.0.
Fair, I’m always scared to upgrade to a new Debian release and the process is always painful. But that happens every couple years and I can take a week or two to look into it before doing it.
Every time I did pacman -Syu it was a Russian roulette. Most of the times everything was fine, but often enough there was a problem and something was broken and I had to spend a couple days figuring out what was the problem.
I always just rollback then wait until I feel like they might’ve pushed an update to fix it.
Stable over rolling release?
These are not mutually exclusive.
Can haz stable rolling.
E.g. use Gentoo, and avoid the ~ and ** keywords.
Gentoo’s all about choice. You can choose to configure it so it does not require hand holding, and running it like a tamagochi. Or you can choose to fiddle with it so much it’s very time demanding… not the compiling, so much as the system configuration management. There’s official binhost now anyway. But then, if you’re fiddling around alot, you’ll send emerge to compile rather than just get a binary, to meet all your exacting nuances of configuration.
I have one gentoo that’s been rock solid for … about 17 years, with only one blip of downtime when there was a fire. No hand-holding.
Arch is indeed a different beast. In my experience, it’s only a matter of (relatively short) time before Arch eats its kernel or some other catastrophe that requires rescue or abandon.
Respect to Manjaro for what they try do, offer arch with more stability (and conveniences).
On a whim, just now, I made this
But, then, I hear many things have changed in arch, since I last used arch (just before the switch to systemd)… and maybe things have changed, and it does not do that any more…?
`
And then also, can haz arch/artix/etc in a bedrock stratum… then it can carry on in its bloody rolling risky churn, in a safe space, where the more stable strata can pick up the slack when arch tries to faceplant itself again.
i genuinely wonder where people are getting their information when they talk about linux. mass schizophrenic hysteria?
My machines got borked every time I tried to do a Debian or Fedora dist-upgrade following the official guide, like 4 times total. Rolling updates on Arch require manual intervention once in a blue moon and haven’t broken my system since I got rid of Nvidia
Isn’t Debian pretty clear that they don’t support upgrades and it’s likely to break if you try?
So I should just reinstall my system every two years? What is this, Windows?
No, you may be thinking about combining repos from different releases aka frankendebian? That isn’t supported. Upgrades are definitely supported.
Ubuntu will actively break itself via
snapdat like 2am on a Sunday.Fedora could not do a fully system update on a 1GB VPS because
dnfwould OOM.The dumbest thing I’ve seen Arch do in over a decade of using it is put RabbitMQ in its official repos while also rolling the latest version of Erlang which RabbitMQ doesn’t support.
I have Arch (btw) on my laptop which is the tinkering machine that only I use, and a Win10/Linux dual-boot desktop which is the one other people use that I’m not allowed to break. I had Fedora Silverblue on there originally because I figured it would be pretty stable, but it honestly gave me nothing but trouble. I switched that one over to CachyOS and it’s been smooth sailing ever since.
And if I’m a windows normie that’s sick of windows windowing, I’ll be fine using mint… Right? Y’all are good at making this sound very complex.
Mint is super nice for people that don’t like linux stuff. I use it in my workstations and most don’t even know they are on linux.
Mint is perfect for exactly that purpose. There’s a daunting marketplace of alternatives all with different specialties. Mint’s specialty is being as easy and newbie friendly as possible. Out of the box - it just works - etc.
It’s easier just recommending the distro rather than Linux in general.
I know someone who was starting to dislike windows, I sent them the Linux mint site. Had a much more positive interaction compared to when I had just previously said “what about using Linux?”
I actually think this is a similar way to push the fediverse. Just recommend a good instance instead of trying to sell them on federated technology. The federated technology will show them content and “how does this actually work” could be a conversation for later.
Fedora Immutable Desktop users when Arch and Debian users fight about whose system is more stable. (I use Fedora Kinoite btw)
I wonder how many Arch haters have actually used Arch and ever ran into a breaking issue.
In my 8 years of daily driving Arch, I have had 1 ever, and it was only bad bc I didn’t know of BTRFS yet.
That happened 3 years in, and I went on a new distro-hopping spree in between, trying Fedora, NixOS, and others, and they had actual problems. Not “oh an update broke my system and was fixed in a day.”
So now I’ve been back on Arch for more years.
This whole “Arch is always breaking and takes so much maintenance” is a myth. In reality, Arch is the most stable, because it packages everything Vanilla. Everything works the “standard” way. On Debian, things decay, and then some stuff that’s new breaks with some stuff that’s old. On Fedora, there is a Red-Hat tax: configs in weird places, strange scripts, software missing from main repos (COPR sucks btw). On Arch, it’s just “normal” Linux; and that works
I’ve used my current install for at least that long (going back further with Antergos) and you’re correct about non-rolling options… I definitely would’ve had more pain with system upgrades and PPAs etc in those years.
That said, I think the Tamagotchi comparison probably makes sense in a way if it “dies” you probably did something “wrong” as on-paper it’s also not difficult to maintain a digital pet either.
I’m using an outdated system, it’s on three strikes:
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Slow, shared internet for me. This adds friction to updates, and when I don’t update as frequently as Arch expects this is the breakage you won’t see.
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I hate that updating today vs days-from-now might yield drastically different results. Admittedly the actual problem with my last few updates is that the reason-I-updated issues persisted.
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The AUR is the biggest reason to use Arch. But use the AUR very carefully and not for system dependencies! Your graphics card is now legacy, so we put the driver on the AUR* ;)
Though I don’t think these sort of problems are unfixable**, and other rolling distros probably do fix some of them but may also not have as good of a packaging system as Arch.
For instance I’m trying Void Linux on an old machine and have already ran into 2 (non-default) applications missing dependencies (which might be an issue with package maintainers, but also Void doesn’t seem to track optional dependencies).
Tumbleweed/Slowroll would probably be a better fit for me, if not for Patterns.
* also if you update without switching, blank screen for you
** internet+GPU are also material problems as well, but those cannot get fixed today and probably will not be fixed next month either
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Yeah, I’ve noticed there’s this subsection of people that have a completely wrong understanding of what the term “stable” means in the world of distros, and that it often creates as many problems as it solves, particularly on a desktop PC, or even worse, a gaming PC.
And for there record: Stable just means that things don’t change. That doesn’t mean it contains less bugs, is easier to use or is more secure. And on the flip side it doesn’t mean that distros that are not “stable” are necessarily “unstable” in any shape or form.
Well… because of longer testing periods and a lot of stuff never even considered until stale the stable distros indeed have less bugs. The ones that still slip through however will basically not get fixes for years.
On the other hand I have seen a lot of bugs on Arch… but I usually don’t care and just assume (rightfully so in 99% of the cases) that they get fixed within hours.
This mirrors my experience. I -Syu on a weekly basis, spend about 3 minutes doing pacnews, and then I’m done.
