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Comment by shmel | Hacker News Reader

ArchLinux is very decent distro. If you need something that you can tweak to be the continuation of your mind, environment designed exactly for you, it is Arch. If you have some time in the beginning to read archwiki, you will avoid a lot of problems in the future. After you understand how it works, it is easy to fix whatever breaks.

For me Arch breaks extremely rarely. I use it for 7 years and remember no more than a couple of times it made me confused after an update. Most issues are covered in the wiki or newsfeed (like breaking changes).

If you need something Windows-like, you can try Ubuntu, sure. But once you need fresh drivers or recent libraries for development, you add third-party PPAs and the shitshow begins. The very idea of keeping old stable versions with just a few new ones that you really need leads to problems surprisingly hard to fix.

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Yup. I switched from Ubuntu to Arch after I realised I was trying to make Ubuntu work like a rolling release distro. This lead to frequent breakage. Arch definitely has a learning curve, but it also helps you realise that some things really are as simple as they appear (if that makes sense).

That said, if you're like me and prone to fits of 'mad science', you will find yourself breaking your OS from time to time. But I've yet to get myself into a situation I couldn't recover from, largely thanks the the excellent Arch wiki. The 'big jumps' (i.e. staged distro) leading to 'big breaks' can happen to Arch, mind you. It's not a distro you want to 'leave alone' for too long.

So I guess if you're going to use the machine daily, Arch should be fine. If we were talking about a server or something, or maybe a work laptop that would go unused for a few weeks from time to time, I'd probably suggest sticking with Ubuntu or the like. Trust me, I've attempted running Arch on my NAS and it was not very fun. Ubuntu/Debian is much better suited there.

I guess the other downside of Arch is that there's less official packaging for it (whereas there's an rpm and deb for everything, it seems). But I think the AUR more than makes up for that, and simplifies quite a lot of things that are complex to do on Ubuntu (e.g. compile FFmpeg with HW accel support, and with all the other fancy encoder dependencies etc.).

The nice thing about Debian is that they have all your cases covered. Long-term release for my server (Stable), rolling release for my laptop (Unstable). And the latter serves as a learning stage for the former, especially during transition times (e.g. introduction of systemd).

You forgot the porridge that is just right, "testing".

I actually found Testing to have the drawbacks of both: it's neither well tested and rock-solid, nor up to date with bugfixes. I used Testing on my laptop for a year, and it was the only time I had serious bugs that lasted for more than a day.

Maybe you were unlucky. I haven't had that problem.

This is a really good summary. I use and love Arch as my desktop. I've also used it as a server and for non-techie family members and in those situations you end up creating a bit of a rod for your own back.

For those cases I use Kubuntu for destops and Ubuntu for servers, pick the current LTS release and install unattended-upgrades to ensure security updates get maintained.

Yeah, as a development distro Arch is fantastic. Nobody's mentioned the fact you get bleeding edge compilers, etc. as well.

But I could not imagine running Arch on a server. Each week I forget to update Arch it's like 1GB of updates a few of which are kernel related and need a reboot.

If you want an Arch-based system with less worry about updates, have a look at Manjaro. The team do a pretty decent job of making sure each batch of updates work together - though if you use the 'stable' branch you'll be a week or two behind Arch stable (but not for security updates). If you want it more frequently, Manjaro's 'unstable' is synced to Arch stable.

Yes, Manjaro has a small team and occasionally mess up the website, but don't let that stop you from trying the distro.

(Retired Core team member)

Another nice thing about Manjaro is that there's a OpenRC spin if you don't want systemd. Although it's possible to replace systemd with OpenRC in Arch, it's not super straightforward and can be a bit risky if you don't know what you're doing.

Antergos is another option, I like it a lot better than Manjaro personally.

I am running ArchLinux right now on a my machine (webapp dev and network technician) and I don't recomment it. I don't blame ArchLinux per se, but rolling updates are no good for someone like me.

Updates break things. Often. Almost every time. And you don't notice until you need to use that broken thing. To install new things you may need to update whole system. And you break something completely different.

-PHP7 just released? Yes, we will replace your PHP5 and leave you in agony (compile from source, or wait for AUR and compile it too).

-Networkmanager GUI works with VLANS? Pfff, who uses VLANS, some bug will remove them for you. Use nmcli. Or roll back to older version. Oops, that depends on old library that can not be installed anymore, beacause everything now depends on newer version of that library.

-Wine drag&drop support works flawlessly in one version? Guess what won't work in next? And in next it's the clippoard.

-Prepare for the new world order, Chromium will now train you reading right to left by writing to input boxes backwards randomly.

Your experience mirrors mine: Arch just breaks way too many things all the time. I feel like I'm a sysadmin. Yesterday, Python 3.6 broke so many things (including my DE). I fixed few things I needed but who knows what else is broken on my system... it's hard to tell since I don't test every single thing that depends on a specific package.

I still use Arch daily because I've set it up the way I like it and don't want to waste more time trying to setup Debian/Fedora/Ubuntu...

I just wish there's some more testing before something so critical, like Python, is unleashed.

Switch to Manjaro. Its to Arch Linux what Ubuntu is to Debian. Puts stability and ease-of-use before ideology.

The problem is- you cant test against that- i mean, how should they detect ahead of update that they break things. Add a unittest function to every program on every system out there, and do a test-update with a opt-out?

Seconded. Arch has some nice properties from the developer's POV. For example, every library package comes with its headers by default, so source code often compiles without having to install additional -devel packages.

Also, you can try out the hot new stuff (e.g. Vulkan, or the recent stable Rust) without having to enable backports repos.

Edit: And you don't have to sacrifice stability. Arch is surprisingly stable. I run three servers on Arch without any issues.

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