Made this on a whim, while commenting on that other recent Arch related post… the tamagochi one.

It’s been years since I actually used Arch. I hear much has changed (~ like it has an easy installer now?). Does it still itch to faceplant from time to time, needing rescue or abandon? Does Arch still faceplant itself?

How long have you managed to keep an arch going? How many times needing rescued back to being bootable in that duration?

[And would have posted this from that account, but that lemmy.wtf instance is tempramental, currently 504ing again. Glad I recently made this alt account so I can still post this and carry on with life.]

  • andho@lemmy.zip
    0·
    6 days ago

    It borks all the time but only because the disk becomes full due to snapper snapshots and pacman cache. I keep forgetting to clean up.

    • DefederateLemmyMl@feddit.nl
      0·
      6 days ago

      Just stick these commands in a cron.weekly job or something, so you can forget about it:

      paccache -rk2  # Remove packages from the cache, but keep the latest 2 versions
paccache -ruk0 # Remove packages from cache that are no longer installed
  • Fushuan [he/him]@lemmy.blahaj.zone
    0·
    7 days ago

    It’s been years since I actually used Arch.

    Yeah, as is everyone that makes memes about it. I wonder why no one that actively uses it memes about it hmm…

    Maybe because shit don’t break anymore.

  • MidsizedSedan@lemmy.world
    0·
    7 days ago

    I like to do a fresh install once a year. So even though im not currently on Arch btw, my longest install was about 1 year.

  • Lucy :3@feddit.org
    0·
    8 days ago

    The only component actually fucking up boot has been the NVidia driver. Otherwise, Arch with testing repos has never failed me for years on many devices.

  • Shanmugha@lemmy.world
    0·
    8 days ago

    Me personally has never been failed by arch in a couple of years. But I’ve recently argued with someone who went “I wanna auto-updates and also no problems ever”, so guess things are wildly different for different folks

    • Digit@lemmy.todayOPEnglish
      0·
      8 days ago

      Hrmm… that gets me pondering about cron’ing up a cascade of strata fetching (and whatever configuration copying required if any), such that there’d always be fallback… then, conceivably, could have “auto-updates and no problems ever”, and not even need worry about having adequate detection of problems to know when safe to proceed, as it would all just work, with something that just works still present, as bedrock strata. … May seem a mite heavy handed, and very wasteful for hd space though. … And no guarantees all that complexity on the back end (to confer simplicity on the front end) will stay "just work"ing, and not need problems mended. [edit… oh, and almost seems inevitable that some mirror layout change would break fetches too… so I guess it’s not so near to full proof.]

      • Shanmugha@lemmy.world
        0·
        8 days ago

        To my best knowledge, it has been solved with filesystems-with-backup (like btrfs) and/or immutable distributions, but I never bothered to use them

  • esc@piefed.socialEnglish
    0·
    8 days ago

    Not much has changed (also Arch always had an installer one way or another 🙃). I’ve managed to keep it going till the machine wasn’t needed. Rescue boot was needed like 5-6 times over 15 years, I think. Most problems with Arch come from being hasty or not being able to read. One of the harder and more involved processes and problems to solve was updating 6 years old abandoned install, took a few hours, because arch archive is pretty slow sometimes.

    • Digit@lemmy.todayOPEnglish
      0·
      8 days ago

      This is true. (always had installer, problems from haste & not reading).

      It’s like I was fine reading to do the installation, but it was like then I was done reading, for the ongoing management. This does indeed make the pebkac errors inevitable sooner. … :/ I think, I see, why I read in gentoo, but didnt bother so much in arch… it’s not just the colours… it’s the pace. [Too easy to succumb to how, once past the installation, under use] Arch gets you accustomed to “now!” (/impatience). At least compared to old pre-binhost gentoo on older hardware.

      Oh, and…

      One of the harder and more involved processes and problems to solve was updating 6 years old abandoned install, took a few hours, because arch archive is pretty slow sometimes.

      Restoring old gentoos to new is one of my fave geeky (~ and typically pointless) projects to undertake. … Not sure I’ve done one as old as 6 years yet… but I do have one that’s something like 16 years old. LOL. … When I amass the spoons for such an undertaking, I may attempt.

      • esc@piefed.socialEnglish
        0·
        7 days ago

        I’ve really disliked gentoo because there always were so much unknowns and moving parts which no umount of reading and ‘intuition’ can predict. Gave up when package manager killed itself during update with no (obvious) way to make it run again fast. It was combination of python version upgrade and pm upgrade and it shit itself in a spectacular way where you can’t run it with ‘current’ version of python, can’t use older version due to it being managed by python scripts somehow dependent on pm (details aren’t all there it was like ten years ago). All of that when I really needed to install and run some package. Built everything from source and disliked gentoo ever since.

  • Switorik@sh.itjust.works
    0·
    8 days ago

    I removed windows after their EOL announcement for windows 10. I chose mint at first and then migrated to endeavor. Endeavor was as easy to install as mint and it better suits my needs.

  • hamsda@feddit.org
    0·
    8 days ago

    I have been using Arch Linux on my Desktop PC at home since somewhere in the last quarter of 2020. I didn’t have to rescue-boot or anything like that in all those years. I did reinstall Arch once because I got a new PC.

    I do have an all AMD setup, as I heard NVIDIA isn’t all too nice to linux in general and the drivers were a hassle to get right, never tried it though.

    Maybe it depends on what you’re doing on your PC. I’m mostly gaming, surfing the web, youtube and a little docker on the side.

    • Fushuan [he/him]@lemmy.blahaj.zone
      0·
      7 days ago

      I have NVIDIA and I’ve had no issues with arch. There were the Wayland issues with how NVIDIA syncced frames and that being an issue but that’s not distro specific and arch had a fix faster than others via AUR sooo… 0 distro related issues in the 3 years already of using it.

  • rozodru@piefed.worldEnglish
    0·
    8 days ago

    I’ve had Fedora break way more on me than Arch ever did. Arch is easy to recover from. It’s fine. And it’s always the same song and dance from people who have clearly never used it. “how do you keep it going? how do you prevent it from breaking? how hard was it to install?” none of the above. Arch isn’t some beast of a distro that you constantly need to feed to keep happy. you can literally update the thing once a month if you so choose. I’m on NixOS now and those updates are more likely to break than anything on Arch. which NixOS it’s pretty much a monthly thing where you’ll update your flake and some random dependency for Krita or like Steam just won’t work anymore therefore those programs won’t work (but that’s easy to circumvent thanks to flake locks) I never had that issue on Arch. I HAD many issues with Fedora just straight up breaking the entire system if I happened to uninstall the the wrong thing.

    With the Archinstall it’s even easier than ever to install it. I think the hardest thing is if you’re installing via wifi just remembering the commands for that. now Archinstall walks you through everything, even lets you select a DE/WM and installs sane defaults with it. Arch is fine, it’s easier than ever. Dare I say it’s easier than something like Void or OpenSUSE tumbleweed (dreadful installer)

    • LordTraubensaft@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      0·
      8 days ago

      Agreed. Fedora killed itself with the very first update I did after installation. Arch never had any issues in the 4 years I’ve had it. And Archinstall has gotten really good recently.

  • Feyd@programming.dev
    0·
    8 days ago

    Arch is the most stable Linux I’ve used. The only problem I’ve ever had is not using one for long enough that the keyring and mirrors were stale, and that wasn’t difficult to fix.

  • bisby@lemmy.world
    0·
    8 days ago

    The first line of my pacman.log file is from 2015. I’ve not had a need to change or reinstall

    • Digit@lemmy.todayOPEnglish
      0·
      8 days ago

      I hit upon a lot of pebkac errors.

      … Though, in hindsight, maybe some of the determinations of “pebkac error” may have been a bit gaslighty darvo to hide bugs anywhere in the stack including up to ux. “you didn’t read the <obscure thing>, so it’s your fault” type of events. … reminds of the post-it note that’s there to save the world, then eventually it gets ignored, then eventually falls away, gets crumpled, dumped, forgotten…