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Comment by voidfunc | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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