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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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.
From the outside, freedom always looks like chaos.
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
Not much has changed (also Arch always had an installer one way or another 🙃). I’ve managed to keep it going till the machine wasn’t needed. Rescue boot was needed like 5-6 times over 15 years, I think. Most problems with Arch come from being hasty or not being able to read. One of the harder and more involved processes and problems to solve was updating 6 years old abandoned install, took a few hours, because arch archive is pretty slow sometimes.
This is true. (always had installer, problems from haste & not reading).
It’s like I was fine reading to do the installation, but it was like then I was done reading, for the ongoing management. This does indeed make the pebkac errors inevitable sooner. … :/ I think, I see, why I read in gentoo, but didnt bother so much in arch… it’s not just the colours… it’s the pace. [Too easy to succumb to how, once past the installation, under use] Arch gets you accustomed to “now!” (/impatience). At least compared to old pre-binhost gentoo on older hardware.
Oh, and…
One of the harder and more involved processes and problems to solve was updating 6 years old abandoned install, took a few hours, because arch archive is pretty slow sometimes.
Restoring old gentoos to new is one of my fave geeky (~ and typically pointless) projects to undertake. … Not sure I’ve done one as old as 6 years yet… but I do have one that’s something like 16 years old. LOL. … When I amass the spoons for such an undertaking, I may attempt.
I’ve really disliked gentoo because there always were so much unknowns and moving parts which no umount of reading and ‘intuition’ can predict. Gave up when package manager killed itself during update with no (obvious) way to make it run again fast. It was combination of python version upgrade and pm upgrade and it shit itself in a spectacular way where you can’t run it with ‘current’ version of python, can’t use older version due to it being managed by python scripts somehow dependent on pm (details aren’t all there it was like ten years ago). All of that when I really needed to install and run some package. Built everything from source and disliked gentoo ever since.
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.
Can’t say I’ve used Arch as my primary for very long periods but whenever I have used it as my primary there hasn’t been a lot of issues for me.
Never had to roll back kernels, never really had any major issues that I know I didn’t cause or could be traced back me doing something, things were pretty smooth. There was some hurdles but they’ve gotten easier over time with the distro itself becoming a bit easier too.
But I guess I’ve gotten that Linux intuition over the years.
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.
The only component actually fucking up boot has been the NVidia driver. Otherwise, Arch with testing repos has never failed me for years on many devices.
Last time I had it not boot after an update has been years ago, it just works these days.
I have been using Arch Linux on my Desktop PC at home since somewhere in the last quarter of 2020. I didn’t have to rescue-boot or anything like that in all those years. I did reinstall Arch once because I got a new PC.
I do have an all AMD setup, as I heard NVIDIA isn’t all too nice to linux in general and the drivers were a hassle to get right, never tried it though.
Maybe it depends on what you’re doing on your PC. I’m mostly gaming, surfing the web, youtube and a little docker on the side.
I have NVIDIA and I’ve had no issues with arch. There were the Wayland issues with how NVIDIA syncced frames and that being an issue but that’s not distro specific and arch had a fix faster than others via AUR sooo… 0 distro related issues in the 3 years already of using it.
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
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.
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.
The first line of my pacman.log file is from 2015. I’ve not had a need to change or reinstall
I’ve been running all my servers and my work computer on Arch since around 2018, ever since Ubuntu started shoving snaps everywhere. Even the instance I’m writing this from is running Arch. Overall, everything is great. The instance has 98-99% uptime. No issues with the work PC either.
UPD: While rereading the post, I remembered that rabbitmq was recently broken in the repositories. But everything was solved with a two-minute rollback and blocking of the version in pacman.
UPD2: I build packages with my hands periodically. It’s not like I haven’t done the same thing on Ubuntu or CentOS. On Arch make PKGBUILD really more easy then spec file for CentOS or deb structure for ubuntu. On Ubuntu this is really awful.
