Hacker News Reader

Comment by ddavis | Hacker News Reader

I've used Arch Linux (with Gnome 3, i3, dwm, Xfce, Cinnamon, Mate) for 6 years now and it has (or any of the DE's/WM's have) _never_ bugged out on me (many different laptops and desktops as well). I've only once had a destroyed installation and it was completely my fault. I would actually recommend Arch Linux as a great distribution for getting real work done. I know academic research groups that use it as OS for the boxes in their labs and they've never had problems with stability or things working out the box. Fedora is a great OS, but I just don't really see it having a big leg up on everybody else.

View on HN

I no longer use Arch Linux due to breakage. In the six years you didn't have a problem when they switched to systemd and bugged all the config files to null? There have been several times when I pacman -Syu and didn't read the front page and there goes 15 minute to 3 hours.

I had several HUGE reports due and I ended up having to go on a different machine and git pull to get them done it time. I never recommend Arch Linux for anything beside personal hobby work.

Yah, agreed. I've used arch for a long time as well, and gentoo before it. I've actually had less breakage with gentoo back in the day.

Their notification system for breaking changes is truly awful (or rather, does not exist). I've been bitten 3 times, each taking a few hours+ and a lot of reading to figure out. I find all of the things you're supposed to "just know" or check before running a `pacman -Syu` to be pretty silly. The official attitude towards these sorts of issues appear to be dismissive, which is what convinced me to finally drop it.

You could set up a nice backup and restore system in less than 3 hours to make sure that software upgrade issues never affect your professional work work. I have that for my personal hobby work even though 6 years Arch have made me appreciate the most stable and predictable system I ever used.

Ugh I remember using btrfs for this. It was never worth the effort and I would have a bunch of little paper cuts or a full drive very quickly.

Its all about the perception.

I've been running Arch on testing repos and with the linux-mainline kernel for years now and haven't experienced any major breakage at all.

I believe its down to the reputation of Arch Linux - people perceive it as a "bleeding-edge" and "breaking" OS and thus every even minor problem they experience is attributed to the OS and this perception is reinforced.

The same people might be scourging for hours on ubuntuforums because Ubuntu filled up their /boot partition with obsolete kernels and won't boot anymore. But its still perceived as "stable".

> The same people might be scourging for hours on ubuntuforums because Ubuntu filled up their /boot partition with obsolete kernels and won't boot anymore. But its still perceived as "stable".

This is totally unacceptable. I started using ubuntu in production thinking it was "stable". After 6 months, the server wouldn't boot because of this reason. I don't think I ever manually installed updates. It just updated itself and broke itself.

You might want to read what Dustin Kirkland wrote here on Hacker News about this about half a year ago.

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14026353

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14027489

> I know academic research groups that use it as OS for the boxes in their labs and they've never had problems with stability or things working out the box.

They're been lucky then, but with Arch never say never. I hope more research boxes would run NixOS to ensure reproducible results.

NixOS does not resolve the problem of updates breaking things unless you don't update your system (same with Arch). It does allow you to rollback in case of problems, however the same is true to Arch if you invest in the proper setup (btrfs snapshots for example).

That's fair. I know all these work for many systems and people. Maybe I have different tolerance threshold as to what constitutes "bugginess". Just happened yesterday again with latest suse and antergos on a ~3yo Thinkpad I wanted to freshen up. Just had to shout out my heartfelt props here =)

I think a lot of it is that leaky abstractions don't get noticed by folks with a firm understanding of what's happening under the hood, but present themselves as bugs to folks who haven't spent as much time on lower parts of the stack.

The result is what one person think of as a bug is another person's obvious limitation.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com