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.]

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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 , 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...

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.

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

To provide an example from the debian world: I tried running Debian testing on a desktop system around 15 years ago. Lasted maybe a couple of months before it broke into a state I couldn't rescue it from. Now, I didn't have much Linux experience back then, but I also think that Debian isn't as user-friendly as Arch when it comes to update instructions for its rolling releases (testing and sid/unstable). Maybe there's a mailing list somewhere, but mailing lists are generally also pretty arcane. Plus there's lots of outdated info and dead links on the Debian wiki.

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)

From the outside, freedom always looks like chaos.

You forgot --noconfirm

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.

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.

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.

The first line of my pacman.log file is from 2015. I've not had a need to change or reinstall

I upgraded yesterday and now I get games lock up on my PC.

No, I don't have an Nvidia GPU

EDIT: False information. The crashes are caused by my GPU overheating. A heat wave started in here roughly the same time I did a system update

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.

Do you get excessive RAM usage?

I've had three hard system crashes because something spawned an endless amount of winedbg and conhost.exe processes until the memory is full and I can't figure out why.

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.

I had one Raspberry Pi that needed to be hooked up to a monitor after it failed to reboot after an Arch kernel upgrade. The device name for the Ethernet card changed, and the netctl setup I was using to set up some route or other no longer worked.

In my years of using Arch that was literally the only problem.

I've had pain with several Debian upgrades, mostly due to exim4 becoming more strict and me actually having to learn something about my email setup. Also an issue with a Debian upgrade changing Dovecot version. Neither really avoidable by Debian, but it was not less painful somehow than Arch.

Actually this reminds me of why I moved to Arch on Raspberry Pi. I had a SD card go bad, and ext4 just happily used corrupted data. I wanted to switch to btrfs, which I could do with Debian, but any time Debian updated the kernel it wiped my setup and I had to do work to get it booting again. Arch supports btrfs out of the box and has worked smoothly and easily.

As someone who uses Debian everywhere - it's just the opposite end of the spectrum from Arch for (non security) updates. Getting any OS into a bad state is trivial if your not paying attention. I still don't understand why they make a rolling release version.

Oh yeah, all my installs are Debian or Debian-derivatives and they're all rock solid as long as you keep to stable/LTS releases.

Debian rolling release versions seem to be for Debian development, not really intended for end users (which is probably why it's called "testing"). Maybe the communication around that needs to be clearer, though Debian can't really do much about all the people who aren't Debian members/maintainers who claim that running testing/sid is fine.

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.

My arch install is usually stable, the last issue I ran into was pretty recently, where it decided to build the initramfs without usb drivers, because I have a usb drive as my primary drive it then proceeded to be unable to boot due to that drive not being accessible.
Before that it was running without issues and semi-frequent updates for 1.5 years tho

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 don't think so, I have a daemon which kills processes when I'm running out of RAM and swap, but since I upgraded to 32 GB I never had it get triggered.

I'd have to find some time to troubleshoot this, however I assume it's a recent system update I did which causes those lock ups

it's fun just typing yay into the terminal :)

yay -Syu, it sure is.

Or was. I stopped using artix when the AUR troubles upticked.

Yeah, that is (or was) part of the gentoo fun. :3 Lots of that kind of fun around the python versioning. Figuring out what emerge's output means is sometimes 90% of the challenge, and other times if feels like that, but then it turns out to be only 10% of the challenge. But as for python versioning specifically, that may have very recently had a big uptick in getting slipstreamed through with fewer bumps in the road for users to deal with. Fingers crossed in hope, ~ remains to be seen through many future versions yet.

And there are official binhosts now, so it generally only compiles what you've changed the useflags for. Gentoo package management's as snappy as other distros now. Though still as involved as ever for configuring the system how you want (albeit with few more ways to make it bother you a little less often now).

That sounds about typical for what I imagined.

Thanks for the reply,

right in the middle of my imagined bell curve of answers.

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

At least Ubuntu are kind enough to offer a faceplant every 6 months like clockwork, to help get accustomed to it. ;3

As much as I have a side fetish for the likes of CRUX, KISS/Carbs [and suckless'ness, like sta.li, etc], out beyond my love of the likes of VoidLinux, Arch/Artix/etc, for their hands-on simplicity that keeps one in reach of manually installing software and building packages, but I really love gentoo's accoutrements for "building packages with your hands", not just marvelling at ebuild clarity, but also the likes of how it caters for patches and saved configs, and portage just carries on with it, as you want it, like a cool summer breeze... :) [/gentoo-fanboi mouth-froth. ... Started getting carried away again there].

I'd say, "inconclusive. it cuts off...", but, seems reasonable, at least plausible, given the faceplant.

... I might try that hence, should I return to something Arch based. :D

You don't need the -Syu flag. It's implicit when you just type yay.

im curious, why are you using a usb drive as primary?

only issue that isn't (mostly) my fault is my screens sometimes just turn off and i have to restart the pc. probably an issue with my gpu and not arch tho

an update only ever bricked my pc when plasma 6.6 launched. i was on cachyos and it worked perfectly again when i went back to arch

I bet you do, that's not hard to believe. Do not install Arch

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.

That sounds like asking for trouble

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.

Cause stupidly, it's faster

I got a nice nvme drive back when they were pretty cheap, but my mainboard only has a Sata m.2 slot, which I neglected to check cause I just thought m.2 is m.2 at the time, so I got an external case and put it on a 10G usb c Port instead

I like to do a fresh install once a year. So even though im not currently on Arch btw, my longest install was about 1 year.

It's been years since I actually used Arch.

Yeah, as is everyone that makes memes about it. I wonder why no one that actively uses it memes about it hmm...

Maybe because shit don't break anymore.