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.]
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been on arch 7y now. I only needed a rescue disk once, and that was totally my fault
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…
I bet you do, that’s not hard to believe. Do not install Arch
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)
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.
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.
The first line of my pacman.log file is from 2015. I’ve not had a need to change or reinstall
No recues in two years since I booted it the first time. Shit’s smooth on different hardware without any fiddling. Windows taught me good to be a bit more cautious and curious, so with a system that doesn’t explicitly fight me or wants to do thing behind my back, I feel way safer than before. Like, I started to regularly seek new updates via yay, it’s something you don’t hear from a windows boy. Minus one year on Mint that borked itself on update a couple of times, I had no previous Linux expirience.
Windows taught me good to be a bit more cautious and curious
Doesn’t it normally do the opposite for most people?
feel way safer than before. Like, I started to regularly seek new updates via yay, it’s something you don’t hear from a windows boy.
Yep, eager to upgrade, when it’s not stuffed down your throat when you don’t want.
Could be telling us all something important about freedom… ;D
Windows taught me good to be a bit more cautious and curious
Doesn’t it normally do the opposite for most people?
Almost guaranteed it does, especially if you can throw money at the problem, but a combination of general annoyance && subpar hardware && wish to play heavier games and launch heavier apps has a diceroll chance of pushing a person into inspecting what’s going on under the hood. With w11 being itself and hardware prices skyrocketing, I hope many would get as angry as I am to get into that. Upgrading to a new laptop for the same price as the old one was never a worse decision that it is now.
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.
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
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.]
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
Running an update in a background tab, forgetting about it, and closing my laptop lid mid-initramfs generation has caught me out a couple of times. Recoverable with a boot disk. Apart from that, Arch has been rock-solid on multiple machines for years for me. Recommend it to anyone.
From the outside, freedom always looks like chaos.
As an interesting aside, try upgrading from Ubuntu 24.04 to 26.04.
They replaced coreutils with a metapackage that uninstalls GNU coreutils and installs one rewritten in Rust.
Or it would install one rewritten in Rust, if it still had any of the coreutils binaries required to, you know, install something.A lot of recent Ubuntu release upgrades have blown up leaving entirely broken machines. My machines. My home server has some how not been one but several laptops and work servers had to be rebuilt from scratch or deep package hackery from recovery kernels.
I use converted a laptop to arch BTW and haven’t run into this meme irl yet.
I’ve been using arch for maybe 5 years now, maybe longer. It’s broken 4 times i think. 3 of those were windows updates that fucked with the bootloader. 1 time arch broke on an update, and checking the website had the fix right up top and it took 1 minute to fix. There were a couple other times where things didn’t seem quite right but still working, and again the fix was right on the homepage and easy to do.
Once the last 2 or 3 years I’ve had to manually fix something to keep the updates coming.
It’s less than other distros I’ve tried. But that may say more about the other distros than arch.
Still running since 2020. No face plant, yet. It’s the most vanilla Arch + KDE install though so I don’t know what should be breaking.
Been on arch on multiple computers for at least 15 years. Personal and work computers. It just works. Although it’s for competent users and that might be the issue most people have with it.
I’ve destroyed whole system by accidentally deleting the var folder and still recovered it without backups.
I’ve also had a computer without updates turned off for more than a year and it also still worked just fine when updating and reading some quick things on the news page.
I’ve used many ubuntus on work laptops and other distros before arch and they just would eventually break or get into a Frankstein state that there was no way out without a full clean reinstall. Never again.
The “Frankenstein state” is why nowadays I avoid traditional distros, Arch included. Traditional distros use something that programmers call the “imperative model”. Basically, it means that you define tasks as a sequence of steps. But these steps have to account for infinitely many scenarios.
Every new version of a package adds some files, deletes some files, and runs some commands. Imagine you left your PC off for a month and now you need to upgrade a package from version 1 to version 10. The system has to figure out which files from version 1 can be kept, which files need to be installed from version 2, which files from version 3, etc, and then how to combine the commands from each version. Maybe it messes up and forgets to clean up a file or two. This might not be an issue now but over time these inconsistencies accumulate and the system diverges so far from mainstream that it breaks.
The modern atomic distros like Bazzite, use a model called the “declarative model”. Instead of defining sequences of steps, you define the end goal. The system ensures that the final state matches the goal. Every update, is equivalent to re-installing the system from scratch (with clever optimizations so you don’t actually need to re-download the whole system). Everything is consistent with the mainstream, and stays consistent, all the time. You can just turn on automatic updates and forget about it. No need to read news or release notes or PKGBUILD files. It is extremely robust and reliable.
This declarative model is what major cloud infrastructure has been moving towards in the past 20 years. Docker, Terraform, Gitops, IaC, etc. This is why the modern distros like Bazzite like to call themselves “cloud native” distros. These distros follow the same update model as major cloud infra.
Don’t forget CoreOS and MicroOS.
it’s fun just typing
yayinto the terminal :)yay -Syu, it sure is.
Or was. I stopped using artix when the AUR troubles upticked.
You don’t need the
-Syuflag. It’s implicit when you just typeyay.Woah
