Comment by apatters | Hacker News Reader

Comment by apatters | Hacker News Reader

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I've had a lot of fun playing around with Arch, and it's taught me a lot about Linux, but it seems to me like the "rolling release, mostly unmodified sources from many third parties" update model is a no-go for anyone other than a very seasoned Linux user or someone with a lot of time on their hands.

Things just break or otherwise don't work far too often.

So, kudos to the guy who put this distro together but without addressing this issue I don't think we're going to see an "easy to use" Arch-based distro any time soon.

I'm definitely speaking just as an onlooker and a novice here as I'm not involved in any open source development, but it feels like the whole Linux community would benefit from more rigorous API versioning and better documentation of interfaces between components. Even with distros that presumably do a lot of QA on their core packages like Fedora or Ubuntu, it feels like stuff breaks a LOT in Linux because of dependencies on the wrong versions of components. It must be a really tough problem.

Interestingly I've had far, far less issues in Arch over a year or so of using it, than I did trying to use Debian stable ~10 years ago.

It could be that I'm just more of a unix beast now and so do it automatically without thinking. I remember having to edit Xorg configuration files, having tons of unsupported hardware, etc.

Arch has basically just worked for me on all my machines with the exception of some esoteric features (e.g. zfs requires a bit of fiddling).

What problems have you had in particular?

I can't speak to problems with Arch either -- I've installed it on a number of machines and never had a serious issue. Every now and then something minor will break. For 15 minutes once I couldn't use VTE-based terminal emulators because of a configuration bug. This was easily fixed with googling. And that's literally the worst thing that's ever happened to any of my Arch installs.

I think the key difference is "10 years ago"; Debian Stable today is a much more pleasant experience than Debian Stable a decade ago. I haven't used Arch so I can't comment there, but there's been a lot of improvement in hardware compatibility over the years.

Being any sort of early-adopter on the hardware front will, as always, get you punished with configuration file editing, though.

Or maybe hardware is now much better supported whatever the distribution you use ?

That is certainly true. All distributions work much better because the kernel and userspace are just more solid now.

the biggest issue i have ever had with it was back when they made the official change from `python` from 2.7->3. much breakage occurred at that time and it required a bit of fiddling with symlinks. it was resolved in about 30 minutes, 25 of which was isolating the problem.

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