• AVincentInSpace@pawb.socialEnglish
    2·
    2 days ago

    I don’t think this post was written by ChatGPT. I do think the human who wrote it uses ChatGPT so much they’re adopting its mannerisms.

    • fartsparkles@lemmy.world
      671·
      6 days ago

      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.

        • metallic_z3r0@infosec.pub
          3·
          4 days ago

          Especially when customizing the kernel is the default experience with Gentoo, reducing the theoretical attack surface even more if you know what you’re doing.

      • Ooops@feddit.org
        10·
        6 days ago

        I was too lazy for scripting the update to check the news and just get a mail when the update has issues… or should get one.

        In reality I check if the email process still works once every blue moon because I didn’t get one from a failed update in years.

      • Lucy :3@feddit.org
        31·
        6 days ago

        If you want to have at least some thrill, use testing repos. I had to fix GitLab two (2) times due to the main package not being linked against testing libraries (it took 10 seconds to ln -s the new to the old version), and had one breakage due to dovecot revamping their whole config system, but publishing no example/useful docs.

  • GaumBeist@lemmy.ml
    25·
    5 days ago

    What about you? When did you choose stability over the rolling release?

    This is such sloppy engagement baiting. If it was just a hot take shitting all over one of the larger linux communities, that would be one thing, but to follow it up with a “let me know in the comments” just makes it all feel disingenuous and like somebody is being sponsored by NordVPN or Incogni to post their ragebait

  • mazzilius_marsti@lemmy.world
    10·
    4 days ago

    ex arch user for 5 yrs

    current fedora user since 2024

    i’ve been getting a lot of “recommended” youtube videos on gentoo and nixos

    send help plezz

  • sanpo@sopuli.xyz
    881·
    6 days ago

    Ironically, it’s the rolling release that’s much more stable for me.

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

    Meanwhile, my Arch install has been pretty damn stable for over 10 years and went through several different PCs.

    • DefederateLemmyMl@feddit.nl
      1·
      11 hours ago

      “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.

    • eleijeep@piefed.socialEnglish
      173·
      6 days ago

      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.

    • jatone@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      101·
      6 days ago

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

    • ranzispa@mander.xyz
      6·
      6 days ago

      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.

      • Ooops@feddit.org
        3·
        6 days ago

        I’m always scared to upgrade to a new Debian release and the process is always painful.

        At least in my personal experience this is one of the big triggers for distro hopping. Most of the people I know that stuck to one distro for years and years are on a rolling release.

        • ranzispa@mander.xyz
          3·
          6 days ago

          I mostly run Debian on servers. I do not want a rolling release on a server, at all. I don’t care how well they check their packages, I just want the thing to work. I do not care about new features, I just want it to work.

          • Ooops@feddit.org
            1·
            5 days ago

            That’s my point. A version upgrade having issues would have forced you to do it by now.

  • KindaABigDyl@programming.dev
    59·
    6 days ago

    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

    • Badabinski@kbin.earth
      17·
      6 days ago

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

    • NekuSoul@lemmy.nekusoul.de
      14·
      6 days ago

      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.

      • Ooops@feddit.org
        7·
        6 days ago

        Well… because of longer testing periods and a lot of stuff never even considered until stale the stable distros indeed have less bugs. The ones that still slip through however will basically not get fixes for years.

        On the other hand I have seen a lot of bugs on Arch… but I usually don’t care and just assume (rightfully so in 99% of the cases) that they get fixed within hours.

      • Voytrekk@sopuli.xyz
        2·
        6 days ago

        Stable distros are great as targets for development, such as for containers. It also works great for end user environments because developers aren’t trying to hit a moving target in terms of core libraries.

        For a home user, having something more stable isn’t very beneficial. If you want to have things stay the same for the next 2 years or so, then go for it.

        It’s one of the reasons why fedora works well, it has just a 6 month release cycle, so nothing gets too stale. More modern packaging formats like flatpak and appimage are changing things a bit since they don’t rely on the system packages and can use something newer.

    • Baleine@jlai.lu
      8·
      6 days ago

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

    • Ooops@feddit.org
      6·
      6 days ago

      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.

      • hraegsvelmir@ani.social
        6·
        6 days ago

        “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.

        • Ooops@feddit.org
          2·
          6 days ago

          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.

          • hraegsvelmir@ani.social
            2·
            6 days ago

            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.

    • insomniac_lemon@lemmy.cafeEnglish
      2·
      5 days ago

      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

    • rumschlumpel@feddit.org
      4·
      6 days ago

      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.

      • Ooops@feddit.org
        5·
        6 days ago

        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.

    • BurgerBaron@quokk.auEnglish
      1·
      6 days ago

      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.

  • sunglocto@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    191·
    5 days ago

    I’ve made ~6 Arch systems at this point. None of them have randomly broken on me, none of them have broken after an update and to be honest have been solid. I have no idea where the narrative of Arch being able to destroy itself at any point came from, but I don’t think it’s true at all.

    • dragonlover@lemmy.zip
      3·
      5 days ago

      Its because people grab it randomly and then blindly install off the AUR

      I was nervous to switch to arch at first because of all the jokes, but it’s honestly been pretty slick. My servers are all on Debian but I put arch on my daily driver and the most “tomogachi tinkering” I’ve done has been Bluetooth nonsense, which is a general problem on most distros.

    • diaphragmwp@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      151·
      6 days ago

      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”).

  • mrmanager@lemmy.today
    23·
    6 days ago

    My arch system is so stable it’s boring. Year after year, just runs. Doesn’t slow down, doesn’t install crapware.

    So I dont know. I’m happy with it.

  • floquant@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    38·
    6 days ago

    My machines got borked every time I tried to do a Debian or Fedora dist-upgrade following the official guide, like 4 times total. Rolling updates on Arch require manual intervention once in a blue moon and haven’t broken my system since I got rid of Nvidia

    • sudo@programming.dev
      11·
      6 days ago

      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.

    • Random Dent@lemmy.mlEnglish
      4·
      6 days ago

      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.

    • airgapped@piefed.socialEnglish
      2·
      6 days ago

      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.

    • HCSOThrowaway@lemmy.worldEnglish
      26·
      6 days ago

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

      • pmk@piefed.caEnglish
        6·
        6 days ago

        No, you may be thinking about combining repos from different releases aka frankendebian? That isn’t supported. Upgrades are definitely supported.

        • HCSOThrowaway@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          5 days ago

          All I know is I was ready to go through the process to go from 12 to 13 and their documentation was full of disclaimers saying that it’s not officially supported.

          I did my best, and it broke.

            • HCSOThrowaway@lemmy.worldEnglish
              1·
              5 days ago

              I’m 99% sure I was going with their official documentation, which you linked just there.

              I can’t speak for what I read or how I interpreted it ~6 months ago, other than to say I understood upgrading was not supported and I was SOL that mine broke.

              No, I’ve never used “sloppy backports” (as the only warning of lack of support I can currently find lists as a problem) and I knew that back then too, so that wasn’t the issue.

        • HCSOThrowaway@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2·
          5 days ago

          All I know is I was ready to go through the process to go from 12 to 13 and their documentation was full of disclaimers saying that it’s not officially supported.

          I did my best, and it broke.

  • No Thanks@lemmy.4d2.org
    5·
    4 days ago

    The first time debian oldstable broke a package after an incremental update, i reconsidered my long running hard stance against arch

    Updated my endeavour install last night from 6.18 to 7.1 without issue: daily -Syu is for the birds