IMHO the actual problem here is the Arch moderator being an ass.

This happens in all operating systems from time to time. An update kills an app. Usually, the app is wildly out of date and hanging on to the last vestiges of a deprecated call that finally gets removed. I recently experienced this with V4L (for OBS virtual camera) and a kernel update in NixOS. Had one hell of a time tracking it down. It was one of the twice-yearly OS upgrades. Luckily, I had only updated one of my devices, and it still worked on the old one. After tearing apart the changes, I was finally able to specify V4L and a Linux kernel version. Immediately, the problem popped right out. The new kernel now needs a specific value passed for the expected video stream, where it used to use a default if it wasn’t specified.

Apple breaks apps all the time. Windows does, but less so. The difference is usually before an update happens, Windows and Apple have had TONs of people testing on their own teams and their insiders people.

In the end, I just needed to roll back the kernel one revision until the V4L guys make the change, or I needed to recompile V4L myself with the option defaulted to something useful.

I don’t think you can safely get away from this kind of issue. (app incompatibility on upgrade, not mods being an ass)

Debian or Mint seem to be pretty welcoming and easy going to get rid of the asshole issues, but chances are, you’re going to break something eventually, and it’s going to be super hard to figure out why and how to get around it.

Ah yes, the issue with modern Linux, the community.

I feel the shift to the current “git gud” style of blaming the user in any support has done more damage to Linux then any part of the software.

I switched from Manjaro to Bazzite on my gaming PC. I don’t have time to read changelogs.

Things went fantastically so I put Kinoite on my laptop. I do a lot more random shit on the laptop so it’s a bit more complicated but so far so good. Atomic distros take getting used to but it still feels less stressful than coming back to my computer after a few days and digging through like 100+ package updates and eventually saying “Fuck it” and just updating blindly.

It didn’t break my system. I refused the update, installed qt6-phonon-backend-mpv, updated the system, and uninstalled everything VLC related. Even though I don’t use the backend there are no VLC packages that I don’t need

I left Arch for the same reason but in relation to my system’s graphics. If you are an end user, an operating system should work for you, not you for the system. I installed Tumbleweed 5 years ago and its snapper tool gives great peace of mind when using a rolling system. My advice, try Tumbleweed, its package manager (zypper) already supports parallel downloads and although it is slower than pacman, it is more complete in package and repository management (an example is what has happened in Arch recently with firmware packages and that requires manual user intervention because pacman cannot make those changes automatically).

If that happened to me I’d not want to deal with that again either.

What has made arch work for me is BTRFS filesystem with the grub module grub-btrfs. It gives you BTRFS snapshots you can load into at grub and with snapper and auto snap it will automatically create a restore point before updating.

It’s worked flawlessly and thanks to BTRFS black magic the snapshots don’t take up much storage space. I also recommend BTRFS assistant in the aur if you don’t mind using a gui.

If you want an easy arch setup + friendly community forums + easy BTRFS setup I can’t recommended EndevourOS enough.

Cachy OS has been treating me very well. Perfect all around. Very helpful people and very nice. I am not going anywhere

I’ve only once had a broken firmware update in years and it was an easy fix.

I’m not sure how people can recommend other distributions when they all have issues of one sort or another and you just have to do the bare minimum sometimes to fix them.

Judging from how hasty you are to dismiss a distribution based on a singular event, I would say it will be hard to find other distributions that can be what you wish them to be.

Not gate keeping here, but even in Windows/Mac there are issues which require some research to fix, sometimes even harder than linux ones.

I use Fedora its a good reliable in between distro if you like fast updates but want tested updates.

NIXOS never worry about this every again

I’m running EndeavourOS and waiting for something like this to happen.

I got burned by something like this on Manjaro when a rolling update completely borked my graphics card. The devs reacted in a similar way and it made me realise that my priority is stability over bleeding edge and tinkering.

On that day I moved to Fedora. Stable as hell, no fuss. My main OS should just work and not kill itself.

I still love it but jumped over to Bazzite Gnome recently, which is like Fedora with a few bells on top, coupled with having a read-only root-filesystem (stability, man!). It also comes with distrobox, which will let you run arch natively in a container if you need the AUR.

Use Gentoo, as it is way more stable and can do anything that Arch can.

I’ve tried Endeavour (after failing miserably to do stuff in Arch) and ended up breaking it really bad.

I just went back to Fedora, and haven’t looked back (in 3 months, until the distro-hop urge kicks in again 😁)

yeah i had that happen to me too, didn’t look in the update screen because updates before went with a breeze but i took another look after VLC wouldn’t play anything, it was something with the VLC plugins and i needed to reinstall those, just had to do sudo pacamn -S vlc-plugins-all to get VLC to play video files back, but man, that should have been in the news imo.