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Comment by agumonkey | Hacker News Reader

Arch is becoming more and more a foundation distro.

Yes and this is great. I have felt Ubuntu to be way too bloated ( last time I checked it had many python scripts running by default on startup ) and Debian is hard to use on the desktop ( "stable" is too slow, "testing" is too unstable ).

Arch will make a better foundation distro IMO.

There's always Fedora which has gotten better and better the last couple releases.

But I like Arch too. I just switched away from it because I got tired of things breaking if I wasn't religiously upgrading.

That doesn't make sense to me. Wouldn't more things break if you only updated them every six months and had to retest the whole system rather than the parts that changed as you went along.

I found that upgrading Ubuntu/Debian to the next release always screwed everything up as basically all the packages changed. Heck fedora couldn't even update to the next release until fed up came out.

I wonder how people feel about nix. Broken updates are by design a minor issue since it's transactional/rollbackable.

How is NixOS as a workstation/desktop/laptop OS? Does it have any major issues with hardware I'd run into?

2015 release used kernel 3.18, some drivers were lagging[1] so I went back to arch. But the latest 2016.03 release is now on 4.4, I'm about to try. I saw many people saying they were happy using nixos on twitter. It's a paradigm shift that require a good deal of RTFM. Felt like the first time I used linux somehow.

[1] my wifi chip took minutes to initialize due to proprietary blob issues.

Awesome, thanks for the info!

Fedora is the only real alternative if you want more stability.

I've found debian and ubuntu to be the best QA'd distros available. Followed by Fedora.

After trying Arch and running into too many irritating bugs that I didn't have the patience to fix I gave up on it.

Plus this didn't give me a good impression of the community's professionalism either: http://news.softpedia.com/news/Manjaro-Devs-Fix-Embarrassing...

They did blow it bad on this one, but apparently they manned-up since.

The Manjaro community is separate from the Arch one. Typically, Arch has looked down on spin offs, and in particular on Manjaro because of the way they manage updates.

That said, I don't feel the idea of the Arch community revolves around professionalism; it is really an amateur thing, in the positive sense.

Things like these are why #archlinux on Freenode hates Antergos; they're not responsible for how badly other communities handle their OS. The amount of troubleshooting that comes down to "Oh, that means Antergos/whoever are completely fucking up" is surprisingly high.

And people love Antergos when compared to Manjaro.

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