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Comment by BiteCode_dev | Hacker News Reader

Every time my friends show me arch, they always boast about how great their setup is (it's so stable, everything works out of the box !) then proceed to demo great features.

But then this little thing doesnt work yet because, they say, they haven't configure it correctly. And this little one, it's nothing mind you, it never worked. And this one, just a small detail, but it broke yesterday. We have a different definition of the box.

And so I go back to my Ubuntu LTS. I really want to try arch but I'm not 20 anymore, fiddling with my workstation is not as fun as it used to be. I just want to use it.

Maybe with the steam deck it will become so battle tested it will turn into the most stable distro ever.

I think their decision makes sense though, they don't want to have to craft every update and spend too much time on it. It's a good strat for them.

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This is a decent comment, and I get it. I also don't want to fool with my setup too much anymore. I use Manjaro for my primary system, and it's great though. I don't want to manage the software that I use everyday through SNAPs or however you do it on Ubuntu nowadays.

I just want the very latest of a short(ish) list of things, lets say arbitrarily within about 2 weeks of release, which is what Manjaro basically gives me.

    pamac upgrade -a

Done. Or even better, most of the time:

    pacman -Syu

This could be great for a games platform, because you'll get the latest CPU bytecode, and eg. Vulkan, and graphics drivers as well as the latest compatibility tools. Usually it's best to have the latest.

Anyway for Steam deck my first reaction is that they will need to:

1. Do like Manjaro and hold updates for a period of time before distributing them.

2. Provide some sort of one-click revert for when an update randomly prevents your device from booting. These are basically the only big problems that I encounter anymore - it usually takes 20 minutes to an hour to figure out which package is the problem and fix it, but you don't want to be doing that on your $600 steam deck.

Edit: As far as updates that brick your system go, my first experience with Arch was that if you don't keep up with the rolling releases, you will brick your system guaranteed when you update. So we'll see how that goes. That was 10+ years ago, and maybe it's not as bad now.

The last 2 or 3 years I've had 2 or 3 high friction updates on Arch.

More than 0, but not a lot.

I've had maybe three or four high-friction upgrades on Ubuntu over the past 15 years, where it wouldn't boot properly until I fixed the problem. So yeah it's /better/, but it's far from flawless.

Note I don't stick to LTS releases. If I only upgraded to the X.1 LTS releases I expect it would have been smoother.

I've had one in 10 years. The only reason was because I didn't stay with LTS releases.

This aligns with my experience.

I mean on ubuntu it's literally just apt update && apt upgrade. Snaps serve a purpose, but they aren't something you use for every program.

Two big differences with Arch and derivatives though:

1. AUR - almost anything you could need.

2. rolling releases - I admit I haven't used Ubuntu in a long time, but I use Debian for a variety of things, and it can be painful to need a release upgrade in order to get the next version of some piece of software. With Arch and derivatives, as long as you do updates regularly, everything stays new.

I have a 6 years old arch installation, and an Ubuntu installation that has been going and was regularly updated to a recent release for about as long.

I spend more time just trying to have up-to-date software on that Ubuntu installation than I spend time configuring anything about the arch installation. Granted, sometimes you need to edit some files after an update (oh device names changed again in pulseaudio so your volume hotkeys need to be fixed!), but that's usually a matter of seconds because I already know how everything fits together. When a package is totally broken for some reason, I just downgrade it.

Meanwhile on Ubuntu your only option for getting up to date versions of Jameica/Hibiscus, pretty much any mapping software that OSM contributors/users would want to use, and a bucket list of other productivity software that tends to be useless if outdated, is to compile from source (don't forget to fix incompatibilities with Ubuntu's libraries!) or manual downloads. Oh I forgot to mention Subsurface and TurtleSport. Don't get me started about those. Bonus points for Ubuntu not having disabled the built-in version checks in a lot of software (it's usually just a compile time options or command line argument!), so it nags users that they're running outdated software when there's no way to upgrade!

At this point I'm convinced the only noteworthy software that Ubuntu manages to have acceptably recent versions of is Firefox. If all you want to do is browse web, Ubuntu might be less work.

I'm not surprised Ubuntu is trying to move to snap packages. That's their last ditch attempt at getting their house in order.

Arch will always at least have an automatically installing AUR package for you with a version that isn't from 2018.

For me I find PPAs typically make getting the latest versions of software where I want the bleeding edge painless. And I don't need to also have everything bleeding edge the way Arch forces me to.

PPAs work great until they don't, because it's just some random guy building the packages half of the time.

The last time I seriously tried to use Ubuntu was probably 8-10 years ago and I ran into a lot of trouble trying to get up to date graphics drivers via PPAs. I also remember being tired of having to go find a random PPA for every piece of software I wanted. Most of the time I would just find some random blog that provided a "PPA for up-to-date package X" and ultimately felt like what I was doing wasn't really any better than downloading random MSIs like you would on Windows.

With Arch though you get the AUR which quite literally has every piece of software you could ever want and is at least managed and maintained in a central place so you're not just adding random PPAs for everything.

eh? The AUR is just as vulnerable as PPAs which are also hosted in a centralized place on ubuntu servers. The two serve the exact same purpose.

The PPA landscape certainly has changed and things weren't nearly as centralized as they are now.

I don't think the AUR is necessarily more secure but in general the nature of how the AUR works does perhaps give some slight advantage. The suggested approach to the AUR is to download and inspect the PKGBUILD so you know how/what the package is doing opposed to a PPA typically being a precompiled binary. AUR helpers will also typically show recent comments, etc. so if a package was compromised or had issues you'd probably know as you're pulling it down.

Really though the AUR just tends to be more convenient and complete than finding random PPAs in my experience.

LTS is after all only a euphemism for outdated software ;)

Distros like Ubuntu don't aim to always keep up to date. The value in them is that they're sufficiently recent but updated infrequently enough that they don't regularly break after an update, and support can be provided.

You're supposed to separately manage the software you care about. e.g. there's a nodejs for people who don't exploit it in their daily use except as dependencies to other software, but if you use it regularly you should manage your own nodejs binaries.

I moved to Fedora and it's solved that problem with Ubuntu. Sometimes it goes too far with the update (ruby to 3.0 breaks a lot of things for development)

This was pretty much my experience with Arch and long long ago, Gentoo (where I really started with Linux).

Then I adopted Fedora and never looked back for several years. Even more recently I have been using WSL inside of Windows... and it actually covers most of my use cases well enough.

I dont have the time or patience anymore to keep up with distro's like Arch, but I also get that some people love tinkering and figuring out how to make their system work like its some kind of puzzle.

Edit: One thing about Arch, its possible to dig yourself a real bad hole if you don't keep updating regularly and I get that's sort of the point, but it can cause a lot of issues if for example, you go on vacation for a few weeks.

Yeah, that could be a problem with the deck, consoles players are not great at keepong their stuff up to date. My switched stay offline for months. Besides, I wanna play, not update, so If I see an update prompt I delay, and if I can't I hate the product.

Yeah, I was wondering about the Arch updates too. I had a machine that wasn't updated for a long time and had to go through the process of updating small bits at a time with archived packages: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Arch_Linux_Archive

> One thing about Arch, its possible to dig yourself a real bad hole if you don't keep updating regularly and I get that's sort of the point, but it can cause a lot of issues if for example, you go on vacation for a few weeks.

Any changes that could be problematic are announced on the site and the arch-announce mailing list. It's really not a matter of weeks. I've gone many months without updating, without any problems.

If I have to read doc or something online so that my OS stays usable, it's already game over

If you don't update, it'll stay usable indefinitely. If you do, you can skim arch-announce in less time than it takes to keep up with the release cycle of any other OS.

In return you'll never need to update a Debian release name in sources.list, click away a nagging update prompt, wait for a double-reboot cycle for some registry changes, or anything of the sort.

Yes, you will need to understand what's on your system to know what news is relevant for you. You automatically will because you set it up yourself.

> Any changes that could be problematic are announced on the site and the arch-announce mailing list

Yeah.. once I did a normal upgrade and it fucked my whole system. I asked for help and I was told that exact sentence "read the mailing list, it was announced". Thanks, but no thanks.

> announced on the site and the arch-announce mailing list

Perhaps there exists some subculture of folks that delight in having to read a set of articles published in the time between the last update and today before they do so again, but I have never encountered it.

You really don't have to. If you're subscribed to the mailing you just get an email every month or two. Most of the time it either won't apply to you, or it'll just be a nice-to-know. Every once in a long time (last time for me was 18 months ago) you'll actually have to remember for the next time you upgrade. Otherwise you can just upgrade and you'll be fine.

It's honestly incredibly low-maintenance. You just have to spend a relatively long time setting things up first.

I really liked Fedora. The only reason I switched to ubuntu was to keep the graphics card drivers up to date and supported.

My experience with Arch is that I just install everything and it works straight out of the box because as nothing is patched the integration work done by each projects doesn't break.

Meanwhile Debian and Ubuntu both are a hodgepot of random patches thrown together by more or less (but rather less) knowledgeable maintainers for reasons which are clear only to themselves and involve goals I don't share such as allowing things to run over weird kernels and maintaining some imaginary philosophical open source purity. I wouldn't touch that with a ten feet pole.

I still personnaly believe that the Linux distribution system is the main reason Linux wasn't more successful. I like Arch because amongst all the successful distribution they seem to be the one doing the less.

What problems have you faced from Debian's approach?

I feel that way about Linux generally. I didn't realize how much stuff I wasn't doing just because it rarely worked and often broke things (drag and drop as a general interaction, for instance), how much time I was spending keeping things sorta working, and how many little broken things I was just not even noticing because I was so used to them, until I finally (mostly) abandoned it as a desktop OS after ~10 years as a desktop Linux user.

That’s a bummer. Have you tried pop!_os? Really stable and usable in my experience on any recent gen Lenovo CX1.

Very much not a fan of recent Gnome last time I tried it (some months ago). Performance is so very bad. Dropped frames everywhere (maybe blame Linux for generally having fine-grained performance that isn't exactly bad but is more variable and unpredictable than other platforms) and generally sluggish. Used to like Gnome, but back then it was much lighter than KDE, but now the tables have (much to my surprise) entirely turned.

I like the idea of pop!_os but part of the flagship experience is a big ol' Javascript extension on top of Gnome. I can't imagine I'd find that enjoyable.

Last time I had a Linux working and I didn't hate the experience was a "so small I could drown it in a tub" install/config of Void with mostly Suckless tools/programs. I find Linux to be most tolerable in those kinds of configs, these days. Doesn't do much, but what it does do actually works and behaves fairly consistently. Start trying to get fancy, and the machine begins to feel haunted in a hurry.

Funnily I just did. My machine has now one entry in grub that doesn't work because pop didn't bother to sign the kernel or prompt me for it and I'm using secure boot.

Oh man, I’ve used Pop exclusively for 2 years now. I run it on a Thinkpad X1 Extreme, and I love it. I switched from using Macs (for the better part of 20 years) after the whole 2018 keyboard debacle. I can’t imagine going back. Only downside is the terrible battery life on the X1 Extreme.

Even as an ubuntu fan I can see I have to tweak a little my machine, at least more so than a mac or windows user.

It's stable enough for me, and I see that as the price to pay for more freedom and flexibility, but I can understand one wanting to get down to close to zero fiddling and pay premium for OSX to be done with it.

This comment is kinda true of anything. Even with WSL there are a bunch of things that "just work" better on Linux than Windows. Even with Steam there are a bunch of things that "just work" better on Windows than Mac.

I think in general finding the right tool is more about finding the thing whose inadequacies are least inconvenient to you personally rather than looking for some mythical tool that works well for everyone, in every case.

Windows for games, macOS for anything that might qualify as work. Linux for single-application multimedia appliances, probably on an RPi so the install is just a dd command and the platform's got enough eyes on it that it'll almost certainly Just Work with minimal tinkering. Linux on servers, but eyeing FreeBSD pretty hard.

> macOS for anything that might qualify as work

FWIW, a lot of "work" areas are still deep into Microsoft Word, which works a lot better on Windows.

Yeah, that one's heavily dependent on what one does. Software availability rules all, for that choice, and one only really has a choice if some certain minimum level of that is met by more than one OS. If I were developing deep server-side VM tools, or drivings, or what have you, I might find using a Linux or BSD workstation well worth the hassle. Embedded dev, macOS probably isn't a realistic choice, and maybe not even anything other than Windows, depending on hardware vendor support.

But when I write or compose documents, I don't need MS Office interop, and it'd probably be my 3rd or 4th choice of "suite" for that kind of thing, behind the Apple's versions (mostly because they have great default templates, are very stable, are fairly easy to use, and are very light on system resources), Abiword/Gnumeric and other pieced-together open source options, and maybe LibreOffice in 3rd place. But, if I had to pass around Office documents, that'd be another story.

Probably my main pain-point on Mac, as far as work-stuff goes, are under-developed virtualization tools. They have a hypervisor, but it's a pain to use and there's almost no community around it. No simple way to pick an earlier version of macOS and virtualize it, even. VirtualBox is... OK. Barely. 3rd party commercial options improve the situation a ton, but you get much better tools out-of-the-box on basically every other at-least-semi-viable workstation OS.

CentOS is good about a year after first release. But all the packages are ancient.

That's kind of the point of CentOS (or was). Sacrificing newer packages for stability.

I had a similar experience, used Arch for awhile got tired of random things breaking, then I overcorrected and switched to Debian, thinking that infrequent changes would mean less breakage. That came with its own problems with things not working, especially if you let Debian fall out of date and it becomes un-upgradable. I also landed on Ubuntu LTS for my Linux needs, reasonably up-to-date, longer support cycles (a decade for security) than Debian versions, allowing me to be lazier than I could otherwise get away with managing other Linux distros.

However, the Steam Deck only has three main hardware configurations and Valve presumably has a team dedicated to making sure it runs correctly. So Arch may be a really good value proposition for them.

They will only have the required software dependencies and configuration they need to support those combined hardware/software configurations. So it should be easier for them to regression test and ensure stability even with Arch as a base.

Looks like they want to have the ability to be fairly agile and not getting locked into a platform for 2+ years

What are these things that do not work? Asking as someone who's been using Arch consistently on my laptop and on a long-lived VPS since 2007 ... Original VPS install was maintained just through regular updates (including the transition from 32-bit to 64-bit). I did reinstall on the laptop for that.

Meanwhile, $work server images have been Ubuntu LTS, CentOS, and AL2 with updates introducing breakage several times a year.

Some friends had significant issues with screen sharing on Wayland on Arch. Pipewire wouldn't work correctly, or only allow sharing one screen, but not another.

As far as I can tell, they have resolved these issues now, but it was a pain point.

Pipewire itself has had some issues as it’s still relatively new. But I’ve found the last few releases have ironed them out. bleeding edge is more the issue than Arch

I agree it's related to maturity, but on the other hand Pipewire was working just fine for me on Fedora without further setup.

I understand they're different distros with different philosophies, but in the end I do need my screen sharing to work no questions asked.

Fedora do seem [1] to make the same versions available. So there doesn't seem to be any' holding back' of unstable versions unless they decide to backport fixes from higher versions?

Fedora do work on six-month releases so there will be some version jumps between versions of Fedora but IIRC they will update little and often just like Arch whilst on a given release.

https://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/packageinfo?packageID=24...

I'm personally guessing it's not as much that the releases themselves were inherently buggy as much as some configuration was required to get it working correctly.

And Fedora shipped some configuration that worked for the standard environment you'd have when you just installed Fedora and didn't change things around too much. Since Arch encourages you to build your own setup and roll your own configs to a much larger degree, the defaults probably weren't quite right or quite enough for their specific setups.

I don't mean this in an "Arch bad, other distro good" sense, I just wanted to say I've seen the same thing where some detail in an Arch setup was broken. It's simply different strokes for different folks.

i mean.... pipewire issues are the end users fault, it is opt in. if you're using pipewire you chose to use unstable beta software.

I think people are making too much of Arch in this case. They aren't going to put Arch on Steam Deck and call it a day. It'll be more like putting Manjaro on it. Except it isn't Manjaro, it's their own distro based on Arch that they'll be managing and distributing. And honestly, Manjaro is one of the most stable, easy to use Linux distros I've used and it's based on Arch (in the same way that SteamOS will be based on Arch). So people need to calm their tits.

The endless criticism of everything needs to stop.

Fedora is a decent compromise, always very solid and I've actually come to like the default Gnome nowadays so I don't really need to tweak anything.

With flatpaks/snaps being so ubiquitous it doesn't really matter much at this point anyway.

It's based on Arch, it's not purely Arch. Valve takes Arch and distributes their own configured version. I don't see how that would make SteamOS unstable unless Valve makes a mistake in testing.

I've used Arch and Ubuntu both for years, so here's my take. Basically, anything you get working in Arch stays working. On Ubuntu, every single major upgrade has been broken so badly that I eventually gave up and reinstalled from scratch. Annoyingly, some super sensible defaults just never make it back up to the original maintainers (or are rejected, I dunno), so the polished Ubuntu experience is because a lot of engineers at Canonical put a lot of time into enabling things which should absolutely be enabled by default in any modern distro. This includes big things like encrypted storage being a single click option in the installer (compared to several hours of research and false starts with GRUB on Arch Linux) and small things like having a reasonably big set of fonts installed by default. Maybe I just haven't discovered the right metapackages yet :)

All that said, I can thoroughly recommend NixOS (my setup[1]) as an alternative, and I personally predict SteamOS will show up there eventually. Initial setup is a fair bit easier, and being able to seamlessly boot into any of the previous configurations is a big deal. The main issues so far have been with dev env setups (Nix isn't terrible, but it's another language to add on top of my existing setups) and running out of disk space because each upgrade takes multiple GB. Don't install unless you have ~100GB to spare for the root partition and a decently fast Internet connection.

[1] https://gitlab.com/victor-engmark/root/

You're describing exactly the Arch Philosophy though, not constantly broken mind you, but as vanilla (close to upstream) as possible. It's not supposed to be an "out of the box" distro at all, as in everything works out of the box.

When you sign up to Arch, yeah I think you sign up for a lot of tweaking that would be done for you already. Luckily there is the excellent Arch Wiki to hold your hand through much of it.

OpenSuse is much better option for rolling distro. It has automated testing before packages are merged, more stable.

I second that. Automatic snapshots are priceless

Debian has a big CI system to do end-to-end integration test https://ci.debian.net/ and https://wiki.debian.org/ReproducibleBuilds

It also provides continuous snapshots: https://snapshot.debian.org/

This is what I came to say. Arch is fine but you are expected to babysit your PC and perform maintenance every week. And do that for each and every build in the house.

Things break often and I am not interested in fixing them. And that's not taking into account wife and kids builds. It took me a while to realize the Arch crowd largely doesn't get that not everyone is exciting to thinker with their OS all the time. I get it. I really do. But I am old

As you say, hopefully Valve's efforts are going to help with that. In fact, there's hardly a chance they won't because they business depends on it, at least long term.

Fiddling with the workstation is not fun anymore. I dont think it was a useful activity even when I was younger. That time could have been spent doing things that are useful - development, writing my thesis etc.

I switched to macOS several years ago for my personal desktop. I use Ubuntu (or any Linux) only at work where someone else (IT) manages the machine and ensures things work.

>Maybe with the steam deck it will become so battle tested it will turn into the most stable distro ever.

Being a rolling release goes directly against that. It might be the most stable rolling release together with openSUSE Tumbleweed. When you combine it with a modern filesystem and features like snapshots it really feels solid.

In the context of the Steam Deck they can just test and hold/fix bugs so that's a very different scenario.

There are just too many changes everywhere and different hardware, software combinations, to expect a bug free experience. Not even Apple with a different release model can manage that and they control everything and have most of the hardware combinations to test. Many DEs and bigger applications need a few point releases to be better but maybe you're talking only about the base distro if it's even possible to make that distinction.

I don't think it will make arch more stable. It would require a good amount of change on the way the whole package repositories are tested. I'm quite sure that Steam Deck will have its own repositories so that they can validate upstream changes before pushing those to the Steam Deck users.

It's stability vs reliability. I know Arch is reliable enough that I can depend upon the community to take the right decisions, Find what I need in their unparalleled documentation, Find bleeding edge binary packages of open-source tools in the community repo etc.

Yes I occasionally don't know what's causing a problem and I have to reinstall some packages. It's definitely not stable.

But if I needed stability I would have gone for Cent OS or what ever stands for stability nowadays. And that's the beauty of Linux, There's something for everyone.

That is one of the reasons I'm running Manjaro, like many replies here.

I get new hardware support and access to the many only-arch-pre-packaged software, in a more stable base.

If you're not into fiddling but you still want a nice rolling release, you can try an Arch based distro.

I use Manjaro and it's been nothing but smooth sailing for a few years now. I have it on 4 machines - a home desktop, a work desktop, a laptop and an old Mac Pro from 2012.

I wonder to what extent they were showing you the new features that they'd mostly added, because they were proud of them. Most of the stuff I actually use on my install is fully set up, but I wouldn't show it to a friend, because it is boring work stuff.

In arch, everything works straight out of the box. However the box is very small, and you need a lot of other boxes, to get a «normal» working system that can write code and play music and tile windows and…

You are referring to great features, but Arch just uses the same upstream packages as everyone else and in a more vanilla form, so it seems like it's about user customization.

If so, why is this the distribution's fault? The installation is a bit cumbersome but other than that you do not need to do much.

I personally keep my configuration small and tidy, following a "bang for the buck" approach and have not faced any issues. Perhaps my usage patterns are just simpler, but even Steam works fine.

Personally I find the lack of debug symbols to be a turnoff from arch.

To me arch tries to be fast moving without checking if anything breaks

Perhaps it’s easier because it’s a static set of hardware.

That's not my experience, but Manjaro is even more tweak-free.

I suspect they will do like those Arch derivatives do: holding back updates for testing, which is easy when you target known hardware.

I'm not wrong. The known hardware is the deciding factor, no matter how much you people hate Arch.

There's also going the opposite direction and throwing out everything that requires any non trivial amount of configuration. I've been pretty happy doing this.

Yeah, I don't even change my wallpaper anymore

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