100%. I’ve got servers running arch for the past 5 years or so and they’re the most stable systems I’ve got. I got so tired of the painful upgrade paths on “stable” distros so decided to switch a server to a rolling release.

After I found arch got security patches into the repos faster than the stable distros could backport, I decided to switch them all over.

I’m even a mad man and have them self update with a script that checks informant (or something, can’t actually remember) for installed packages against news. If no installed packages are found in news, it continues with the scheduled update.

It’s glorious.

But it says this screenshot post happened 4h ago.

Did the internet lie to me?

I am, and you’re right, but my server’s still running Debian

I have questions now, about myself

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.

Same, and next year when bcachefs has nailed down the kinks it’ll be basically bullet proof with snapshotting prior to its daily updates.

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.

“Stable” distros often had a long and risky process of upgrading to the next major release.

But you only do that once every 3-4 years, and you have months to carefully plan ahead.

Meanwhile, pacman -Syu could just provide you a major breaking multi-package upgrade of, say, your desktop environment on any random Tuesday. And then your only options are to either roll the dice and accept that update right then, and deal with all the breaking changes it may introduce, or not receive any updates at all, including security fixes, until you do.

I use Arch myself, and it’s been pretty troublefree the past 2 years or so, but it was pretty rough around the Plasma 6 release, and there have been other rough periods as well, like when there were bluetooth/wifi and amdgpu regressions in the kernel.

You upgrade?

This mirrors my experience. I -Syu on a weekly basis, spend about 3 minutes doing pacnews, and then I’m done.

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.

Interesting, my two friends with Arch keep breaking their system 😅 They say its not their fault though!

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:

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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

Once I learned to make separate partitions for root, home, EFI, and then make routine backup of my package list, the update fears evaporate. Though with how CachyOS sets up btrfs snapshots by default now, it’d be pretty hard to deep fry an install beyond repair.

Ubuntu will actively break itself via snapd at like 2am on a Sunday.

Fedora could not do a fully system update on a 1GB VPS because dnf would 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.

I had nothing but trouble with Suse, Fedora and Debían on my nightmare of a machine (laptop with AMD/nvidia GPUs) and honestly thought that was my lot until I hit upon Arch, which I have been more than happy with for over 3 years now.

Isn’t Debian pretty clear that they don’t support upgrades and it’s likely to break if you try?

This implies an Arch install can ever legitimately be considered finished.

I love EndeavourOS. It’s easily the most stable Linux experience I’ve had.

I use EndeavourOS as my main as well and never have issues as long as I stay away from the AUR.

Endeavouros is great! Just use Flatpack before the AUR. AUR is basically the Wild West and should only be used as a last resort.

It’s meant to be an attempt at humor/sarcasm/engagement bait I think.

nixCraft (at cyberciti <dot> biz) is a site that has been slop publishing tutorials for everything ever possible with common unixy commands. And also shit like “30 Cool Open Source Software I Discovered in 2013”. It often calls Unix “Linux”, other times it uses both “Unix/Linux” for some reason, and sometimes it even says “on BSD, MacOS” for flags that only function on GNU coreutils. It started pre-AI, so it’s like clickhole but for “installed Fedora yesterday” people (although I would imagine most traffic being “I’ve been using this for 24 years and forgot some flag”).

Lmde best stable and normie.