nixCraft on Mastodon

I boot my arch laptop once in a blue moon and update it. Its not 2002 anymore.

Why should my pc be stable if I'm not stable

wanda.jpg

I use EndeavourOS for my primary gaming setup and will sometimes go a month or more before I remember to update again. Even with a relatively modern nVidia card, it seems to keep up just fine.

That being said, every vanilla Arch experience has been a disaster by the end and while it’s not the same situation as the meme, you very much have to have a ton of prior knowledge to get a system that actually feels personal and by the point it’s personal enough, getting support for your setup is nigh impossible because it’s so bespoke.

Never had a system breaking update. Idk what arch people be using.

Sadly that tells you something about the linux knowledge of the nixcraft guy.

If he would've stopped at making fun with pacman -Syu, it would've been ok. You forgot a y and arch is not less usable than debian ..

I'm on opensuse aeon btw, I don't interact with the OS anymore. It's just there and works, like atomic fedora, I don't care.

Tell that to Valve.

Every time I do a point release upgrade on Debian the whole system breaks. It's so smooth until that point, but if I have to reinstall the OS anyway then I'm going back to EndeavourOS (which is what I'm using now)

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

I have my arch install on my home server running for over 10 years and update maybe once a month. It’s very stable.

Linux Mint user here, I have no idea if Arc is that complicated, I don't care really. All I need is a rock stable system where I can do things like developing, or just use it as "a computer".

I reboot every month or three, and feel extra happy after any interaction with m$ windows.

Life's good 😊

I've done 'real work' on computer with arch my whole professional career. I need a working computer with reasonably up to date programs not 3 to 10 years out of date because debian maintainers can't be bothered. On servers it's another story and there i would prefer rhel any day i would use debian.

And then there's Fedora in the corner, quietly getting the best of both worlds.

Lmde best stable and normie.

My job is doing sales engineering for an open source DB company and just last week I encountered a prospect running on Arch.

They also did backups to an external drive they kept in a safe.

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.

I used to break my install quite often but it's been a while since I've done that

If I need to spin up a VM on FreeBSD or on a Linux Distro I'll use Debian. it's a quick install and I know it'll work. that's it. that's all I use it for. I would never daily drive it.

I don't use Arch anymore but when I did I would maybe run -Syu every 2 to 3 weeks or so when I got bored.

Doesn’t SteamOS have a stable release model like Manjaro?

OpenSUSE Tumbleweed..... my first love

This was my experience with Linux Mint.
I love stable distros n all but these OS updates are scary.

Why bcachefs over btrfs?

manjaro is rolling release. ive had the same install on my desktop for 6 years.

Fedora Immutable Desktop users when Arch and Debian users fight about whose system is more stable. (I use Fedora Kinoite btw)

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

How is it?

I like it, its been my main system for the last 2 years. For my use case (software development & some gaming) it works very well.

You upgrade?

I mean, if you're worried about rolling release...

pacman -S linux-lts linux-lts-headers

This is a bit like saying "Honda Civics are Tamagotchis for car people" because there's a community of people who enjoy modifying them. The rest of us just drive, and they run perfectly fine if you're not doing a lot of invasive customization.

Arch is great for tweaking and customization, but it's also fine for a simpler use case.

Started with Tumbleweed. Got a little tired with the daily GBs of updates and slow zypper downloading everything piece meal. Settled to Fedora but if I had to switch again and Slowroll came out of beta I'd give it a good look.

Only normie in Linux world :-)

I have questions now, about myself

Sure bcachefs sounds like a pretty good idea, especially since the author thinks his AI coding assistant is sentient and a "her". What is it with file system maintainers and mental illness....

Sincerely, a Gentoo user.

fedora on main and debian on home server

it just works

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

Arch isn't just an operating system but a way of life.

I've been on ZFS since CachyOS made it easy to use.

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

I use Debian on my homelab servers (Ubuntu when I have to for some reason) and Ubuntu LTS on desktop. And more or less ignore everything else outside of as a curiosity.

From what I know, the AI Assistant is the least of Kent Overstreet's problems. If anything it's a blessing he's fixanting on a random number generator instead of risking becoming Hans Raiser 2.0.

I don't know where my Linux journey takes me next yet, but I only half way agree with this post. Arch is not quite as bad as this post makes it out to be, but there's definitely always a bit of russian roulette involved in whether your system boots tomorrow or not (most of the time it does).
I just had my EndeavourOS (which is just a thin layer on top of Arch) kill itself and some weird-ass hyperspecific flags in the initrd build process brought it back to life.
Tho in the ~10 years of using arch now I'd say it was still preferable to the extremely stable experience, and I don't think recommending Debian Stable is such a good idea either.
Yeah I could unfuck my EOS system with a bit of trickery, but once you get a good franken debian going, when that thing breaks there's no rescue.
I've had some stuff on Arch break after an upgrade too because some config variable names changed. I rember when I had KDE with i3 going and one day the desktop was gone. Was just because the variable names in KDE had changed and a quick i3 config change was all that was needed.
Having to selectively install packages from other sources because the main repo will keep you on a too outdated version for 6 months is just not a viable idea in today's world.

There are luckily more than just these 2 options.

Has nix in their profile name and doesn't use NixOS 🤔 /s

In the past 3 years of using arch daily I've had to remove some renamed packages after an update once, thats about it

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.

My main workhorse VM is Ubuntu LTS because when I set it up I just picked it instead of spending another week researching and trying different distros. I could look into swapping it out but nothing has annoyed me about it once I figured out to disable snaps.

It feels like every time I finally have something set up and running I find some article telling me that what I chose is dumb for reason xyz and I really should be using something different, but refactoring at this point is a pita so why mess with something that isn’t broken?

It's been proved to me before that this guy (people?) Really have no idea what their talking about.

They installed ubuntu one day and decided to make it their whole personality.