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Comment by markstos | Hacker News Reader

After using Ubuntu for over a decade, I switched to Arch Linux.

If you exclude the duplicated architecture packages in the Ubuntu repos and include the community-maintained packages, Arch has more packages new packages seem to commonly available within 24 hours of an upstream release.

For example, I use some utilities based on "rofi". A search for Ubuntu packages containing "rofi-" contains just no results, but a search for Arch packages returns about 50 results.

https://packages.ubuntu.com/search?suite=groovy&section=all&...

https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/?O=0&SeB=n&K=rofi-&outdat...

AUR packages look easier to maintain than PPAs, so I'm more likely to get get involved with packaging something on Arch then I was on Ubuntu.

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Yes. However, Arch Linux means you need to spend time, probably several times per year, to fix stuff that worked yesterday but doesn't work anymore.

Arch Linux is just an entirely different thing compared to Ubuntu. I'd like someone who isn't me to make sure stuff works. Only very rarely will I be bothered to do actual work to upgrade to a new breaking version on my daily driver. Randomly breaking my shit on a Tuesday will make me install something more stable. On the rare occasion that I'd like to try something unstable, I can usually find a PPA or something. I don't like edges that make me bleed on my base OS.

There’s a continuum between something like Arch or Gentoo and CentOS on the other side - the amount of “pain” is roughly similar but when you encounter it changes - it’s usually easy to figure out WHAT broke on Gentoo as it was probably the last thing you installed - whereas a move from CentOS six to seven can be a huge undertaking (even more of you jump straight to 8).

But there definitely is something nice about general stability (until you have to install something on an old OS that requires a new package and you enter a whole new hell).

> Yes. However, Arch Linux means you need to spend time, probably several times per year, to fix stuff that worked yesterday but doesn't work anymore.

Largely a myth and config-dependent. I used to have this issue 10 years ago but now most of my troubles are self-inflicted. Things are as stable as they come when using software from the official repos.

I feel like a fairly competent Linux user and within 2 months had my Arch install broken to a point where I didn't want to invest the time to go down that "why is right click broken along with all these dependencies" rabbit hole. I went back to my mint/debian/Ubuntu safe space.

I installed Arch Linux on a ThinkPad in 2011 and it's literally running the same OS today, nearly 10 years later. I won't say I've never had anything break, but never anything major like audio or video or wifi.

In my experience, Arch is one of the most stable OS's I've seen. But I suspect a lot of it has to do with what you're doing with it. First, ThinkPads are generally well supported in Linux. Also, I've never seen any reason to use GNOME as a desktop. I used to run XFCE on Compiz, then i3 as Compiz stopped being updated. More recently, I've switched to sway, and I've finally started using PulseAudio because it's required for Zoom. Obviously, i3 and sway aren't for everyone. YMMV.

I've been thinking about leaving Fedora and your comment intrigues me. Does Zoom work well with i3? Can you share your screen? Regarding PulseAudio, I didn't realize Linux users had a choice about whether to use it - is there an alternate audio subsystem available?

Alsa and JACK are major forces aside from PulseAudio.

> Does Zoom work well with i3? Can you share your screen?

Yes and yes. Source: I run Zoom with i3.

Do you happen to know if Zoom is available on FreeBSD?

You've already been told about ALSA (which Pulse uses and organizes, for its the low-level audio subsystem the kernel offers) and Jack, which specializes in low-latency audio. There's also sndio ported from OpenBSD.

But the one you might want to consider instead is called PipeWire. It implements the ALSA, Pulse and Jack APIs with a single implementation and it's pretty much the future of audio (and video casting) on Linux.

If you're using Wayland, you're already using PipeWire, but likely not for audio. On Fedora you can follow the instructions here https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/DefaultPipeWire which basically boil down as "uninstall pulse and install these packages" and you'll be using PipeWire for your audio.

I had tried several times to switch to it and it was not ready, but about a week ago I've been able to make the move with no loss in functionality and even got a fix to an old bug that affected my sound card, so at least with version 0.3.22 I can recommend giving it a go. Switching back to Pulse if bugs arise is trivial anyway.

I never had any problem with Zoom on i3, but I never tried to share my screen.

Zoom on sway works, but since sway runs on top of Wayland and Zoom doesn't have the bindings to communicate with Wayland, I'm fairly positive screen sharing would not work. At least, not out of the box ... it might be possible to connect it to some other screen capture process if you're adventurous.

PulseAudio runs on top of ALSA. Traditionally, Linux desktop applications connect with ALSA and you can still manage ALSA directly. More recent applications, such as Zoom, expect to connect with Pulse and don't support connecting directly to ALSA.

From a user perspective, Pulse offers some advantages like being able to manage audio levels for different applications independently. In early releases, Pulse was unstable and difficult to troubleshoot, so it was easier just to use ALSA directly. Pulse has gotten a lot better in recent versions.

I used to believe that a properly configured Arch Linux setup is super stable, until one day when I upgraded the Linux kernel and there was multiple GPU hangs and graphics glitches. It's fixed upstream now, but it does make me think again about running close to the bleeding edge.

On the same line, I don't realize that my Bluetooth driver was broken until I checked dmesg. This one wasn't fixed upstream yet, but I don't need Bluetooth on my laptop anyway.

Upgrading Arch Linux can be a mess... But Ubuntu is no picnic, either. I've seen plenty of glitches during Ubuntu 20.04 "LTS" upgrades. The most recent is it dropping the network in the middle of the 20.04.2 upgrade. Before that, it lost the default route (there was a bug with multiple interfaces.) There have been others.

If we're going anecdotal, Ubuntu has been nothing but great for me. I have left laptops off for months and then turned them on and update/upgrade them no problem, as well as computers that I use daily. I think the crux of the update issue is really how well package managers handle interdependencies between packages vs how many/what packages you have on your system.

These are servers with multiple Ethernet and bridge interfaces, primarily used for VM hosting. This requires no third party packages and is not anything non-standard or terribly exotic. I often wonder if Ubuntu tests configurations with anything beyond a single NIC.

Debian is more reliable than Ubuntu about upgrades between and within major versions and in configurations that aren't the most typical.

Still consult the release notes before upgrading between major versions in case there are relevant release-specific gotchas before/after/during, and for generally helpful precautionary advice, but quite often there aren't.

I think arch is better for desktop sorts of things. remember:

- desktop users want the latest thing, immediately.

- server users want nothing to change, ever.

As a desktop user, not so much, no.

I want things to work. I don’t want to spend my time arguing with my tools, just for the sake of having the latest and greatest. I might go through and upgrade everything every couple of years, at most.

Beyond that, I just want security upgrades to happen without me having to think about them.

> After using Ubuntu for over a decade, I switched to Arch Linux.

Hah! Very similar experience; see my sibling reply :)

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