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 wonder how many Arch haters have actually used Arch and ever ran into a breaking issue.
A lot… they install it, screw up because they didn’t bother to read the instructions, then did the usual… a new install.
Those who pass the first basic barrier to just chroot into the system and fix a simple mistake or roll back a package for the few hours it takes to get fixed instead of starting fresh usually stay for a long time…
In fact with the people I know there is a correlation between either “oh, I don’t bother to fix anything and just do a fresh install (that idea is especially persistent in Windows users)” or “there’s a big distro upgrade that had issues” and distro hopping. Once you settled on a rolling release and learned the basics in terms of fixing stuff the urge to hop yet another time vanishes for many.
“oh, I don’t bother to fix anything and just do a fresh install (that idea is especially persistent in Windows users)”
In fairness, not everyone who did that was just trying to avoid looking into things and learning the correct way. I can’t be the only one who had Arch on a system before getting a smartphone, so early days, that was my sole means of accessing the internet, so if it went down hard and I didn’t immediately understand enough of the error message to at least have an idea of man pages to give a read, I didn’t really have a whole heck of a lot else available to continue trouble shooting. These days, worst case, I can turn on my laptop or grab my phone and search things until I understand the issue and find a solution.
That said, nearly all of my system breaking issues were self-inflicted by trying to do things I didn’t fully understand, just because I thought the end result sounded cool, or not checking the news and unwittingly doing the exact thing the latest post was warning people to be aware of and not do with some sort of major upgrade/change in the base system.
I can’t be the only one who had Arch on a system before getting a smartphone
But that issue is solved for many years now. Although it makes a certain kind of sense: a lot of the Arch hate and memes causes we to question if that person has actually used Arch in years. So a lot of those ideas may be indeed ancient experiences surviving purely in memes and stories.
Oh, I wasn’t trying to excuse it now, just saying there was a time where it was a reasonable approach if you found yourself out of your depth and really just needed to have your machine up and running again, rather than stemming from someone having no desire to learn a better way.
Debian decays? Can’t relate, I’ve often been running Debian releases until they almost fell out of support (happens on servers) and they were always rock solid after I set them up. It’s only ever an issue if you want to run new software versions without some kind of virtual environment, and generally I just don’t care about that.
I think you can get problems once you are a full release cycle behind the last supported one.
Funnily enough it’s mostly an issue with mirrors and signing keys, so basically the same fix Arch users need if they are behind for many months: update the packages for keys and mirrors first, everyting else afterwards.
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.
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
This mirrors my experience. I -Syu on a weekly basis, spend about 3 minutes doing pacnews, and then I’m done.
Interesting, my two friends with Arch keep breaking their system 😅 They say its not their fault though!
A lot… they install it, screw up because they didn’t bother to read the instructions, then did the usual… a new install.
Those who pass the first basic barrier to just chroot into the system and fix a simple mistake or roll back a package for the few hours it takes to get fixed instead of starting fresh usually stay for a long time…
In fact with the people I know there is a correlation between either “oh, I don’t bother to fix anything and just do a fresh install (that idea is especially persistent in Windows users)” or “there’s a big distro upgrade that had issues” and distro hopping. Once you settled on a rolling release and learned the basics in terms of fixing stuff the urge to hop yet another time vanishes for many.
In fairness, not everyone who did that was just trying to avoid looking into things and learning the correct way. I can’t be the only one who had Arch on a system before getting a smartphone, so early days, that was my sole means of accessing the internet, so if it went down hard and I didn’t immediately understand enough of the error message to at least have an idea of man pages to give a read, I didn’t really have a whole heck of a lot else available to continue trouble shooting. These days, worst case, I can turn on my laptop or grab my phone and search things until I understand the issue and find a solution.
That said, nearly all of my system breaking issues were self-inflicted by trying to do things I didn’t fully understand, just because I thought the end result sounded cool, or not checking the news and unwittingly doing the exact thing the latest post was warning people to be aware of and not do with some sort of major upgrade/change in the base system.
But that issue is solved for many years now. Although it makes a certain kind of sense: a lot of the Arch hate and memes causes we to question if that person has actually used Arch in years. So a lot of those ideas may be indeed ancient experiences surviving purely in memes and stories.
Oh, I wasn’t trying to excuse it now, just saying there was a time where it was a reasonable approach if you found yourself out of your depth and really just needed to have your machine up and running again, rather than stemming from someone having no desire to learn a better way.
Debian decays? Can’t relate, I’ve often been running Debian releases until they almost fell out of support (happens on servers) and they were always rock solid after I set them up. It’s only ever an issue if you want to run new software versions without some kind of virtual environment, and generally I just don’t care about that.
I think you can get problems once you are a full release cycle behind the last supported one.
Funnily enough it’s mostly an issue with mirrors and signing keys, so basically the same fix Arch users need if they are behind for many months: update the packages for keys and mirrors first, everyting else afterwards.
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.