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Comment by apexalpha | Hacker News Reader

In my job we have 100+ people who run Linux as their main OS.

Most run Ubuntu or Debian, and a few run Arch. And every few weeks someone mentions again how something broke, and they need to spend some time fixing it. I think the last one was VMWare not working on a kernel yet.

Arch requires more time to maintain, and more manual maintenance. So in order to justify that extra spent time a lot of times they will bring up minor stuff that happens in Debian/Ubuntu, like this bug from 12 years ago, in order to justify running Arch, which is more of a "learn Linux" hobby.

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I was bitten by the rolling release arch many times on Arch Linux ARM. The last straw was when they decided to move the configuration directory for openVPN, which meant it just failed to start up, meaning I could not SSH into it. I had to retrieve it to debug it, costing me hours of lifetime I would rather have done something else with.

I learned my lesson. From now on it is boring LTS distros only, and guix for things in userland where I want up to date things.

In my experience, the "learn Linux"-part of using Arch is the installing/setup process. Over the past three years, I have had things break perhaps three times. All of them were either my own fault (outdatet package) or warned about through Arch News (which I didn't bother to check because it is only necessary a couple of times a year)

That being said, running Arch on a computer that you need to be working at all time, might not be a good idea for professional reasons. However, I think you are essensially making a similiar argument for Arch, as they are making for the Debian bug.

> Arch requires more time to maintain, and more manual maintenance. So in order to justify that extra spent time a lot of times they will bring up minor stuff that happens in Debian/Ubuntu, like this bug from 12 years ago, in order to justify running Arch, which is more of a "learn Linux" hobby.

This is the feeling I get, and it's why I never bothered with Arch, or Gentoo before that. I started on Slackware, and while it was a great learning experience, I feel that's not a lesson I need to repeat.

Same reason for my move from RedHat (after an RPM dependency breakage) to Debian: Debian just works. It GTFO of my way and let's me focus on my code and my projects. Yes, there have been issues, no, Debian isn't "perfect", but like my preferred MUA "it sucks less than all the alternatives."

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