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Comment by elipsey | Hacker News Reader

When I was an intern there was this old dude who had an ancient computer with the same Debian on it for like 7 years. He never got excited about new stuff, and just didn't want to break anything. I thought that was kind of funny and un-hip, back then, but now I'm like that. It's like Dad OS. :)

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I feel fortunate to have learned this lesson right before grad school… I used to run Gentoo with all kinds of optimization flags. The day of a conference deadline, I mucked up my /etc/ pretty bad. Switched to Debian and never looked back - sometimes you just need something that works.

I have the same story. I ran Gentoo on all my machines for 5 years (2002-2007) and after the umpteenth update which broke printing, I switched to Debian stable and never looked back.

You should use btrfs with snapshots. You won't be in that situation ever again. Just a suggestion.

That's solving the problem by adding complexity. Switching to Debian is solving the problem by taking away complexity. I know which one I'd prefer

I disagree, using a filesystem with snapshot support is hardly adding complexity (to the problem, sure the kernel code for btrfs might be more complex, but It's mainline since years and won't eat your data). I interpret your comment to suggest unwise practices for data management. Being able to do snapshots and send them off to wherever is important. This fills the void on your system that git fills for your source-code.

Same. And I loved Gentoo so much. Made me feel like a car mechanic, upgrading his machine with all the custom parts.

I would go back to running Gentoo if I had the time to mess around, it was a ton of fun and it really did give you a system that was truly yours. But it also needed a lot of love to keep running smoothly. And I don't miss those compile times.

For servers, Debian makes a lot of sense. For desktop Linux, I can't imagine living with outdated package, kernels and applications and trying to hack my way around with ppa's or other systems like Flatpaks or Appimages. Rolling distro all the way.

Same opinion, I would say "it depends".

Personally I like Gentoo on the desktop especially in relation to when I code (e.g. very handy to be able to easily switch SW-versions of some packages while always using the same repository). I use it as well on some servers as root OS (I mean the one that runs mainly just the hypervisor), if they have special needs (e.g. if for some reason I want/have to use a recent version of some SW, e.g. ZFS, Kernel, firewall, QEMU, etc...).

On the other hand for VMs I usually just use Debian or Mint, as maintenance/upgrade effort is a lot lower & quicker. In some cases I still have to use PPAs but they're usually exceptions (e.g. Postgres 13 & kernel 5.10 & Clickhouse for Debian 10).

I'm a Dad and I use Arch. I can't stand non-rolling release Linux distros. They are constantly getting in my way because they don't track upstream.

I have multiple machines running Arch (some over a decade) with no problems. In constrast, doing dist upgrades on Ubuntu has put me into states that I could not figure out how to get out of, and thus had to do a clean install. (Granted, it's been a long time since this has happened, but mostly because I very specifically avoid non-rolling release distros.)

Ubuntu upgrades are extremely messy compared to Debian. If you want a rolling-like experience, the testing channel of Debian is pretty good for that - though it does get frozen when approaching a stable release.

The dist upgrade is more of an example meant to dispel the myth that non-rolling release distros break less frequently than rolling release. Or at least, an anecdote anyway.

Jumping down from the meta level of rolling vs non-rolling, I personally find Archlinux style of packaging much much simpler than Debian's. I've writte numerous PKGBUILD files over the years and it's been dead simple. But my eyes gloss over whenever I look at Debian packages.

I'm sure the complexity in Debian is warranted for one reason or another. But it ain't for me.

Note that, Ubuntu had some rough times, and did some odd things (I distinctly remember changing gid of system groups, for example) - but it has gotten a lot better. I don't think I can remember Debian ever having any serious issues on dist upgrade. Well, there was a bit of hairpulling with the change from lilo to grub - but I think that was because I tried it early, before grub became the new standard..).

But of course, there are no perfect tradeoffs. I'm inclined to believe GNU guix (or nixos) might be the next best thing(tm) - but I've yet to put that to the test..

But what about Pop!_OS?

I've been using debian full-time for decades, but recently ended up switching to a spare Arch laptop I'd installed Arch on long ago just for poking at.

As something to make it easier to install latest-and-greatest junk it's certainly better than rolling your own like an LFS, and feels a bit less annoying than gentoo so far.

But it's nowhere near as comfortable to use as-is as debian, and definitely requires more time-wasting to figure out why things aren't configured correctly after simply installing a package w/`pacman -Su $foo` or some dependency is wrong or missing.

Hell, just the other day I thought to try building something with clang instead of gcc, after not using clang in a while, and this is what (still) happens:

  $ clang
  clang: error while loading shared libraries: libffi.so.6: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
  $

This kind of garbage just doesn't happen on debian. At this moment I have the impression that the average Arch install is always at least partially broken in some way.

Furthermore, the tooling in Arch isn't particularly great either.

On my first week using this Arch laptop full-time, I tripped over a `pacman -Sc` bug where it was opening every single file in /var/cache/pacman/pkg via libarchive, even .part files which hadn't been completely downloaded (which means their signatures weren't yet verified) and spitting out liblzma library errors like "no progress is possible" because it's attempting to open an .xz.part file. This is arguably a security risk (in a root process no less) in addition to a stupid bug producing a confusing error message. And I haven't even started going deep into this distro yet, frankly it's already left me with bad enough taste to not be interested in wasting more time on it.

Edit: just wanted to give props for the Arch Wiki, that has been a great resource for ages.

^ This is perfect statement why Arch will never replace workstations or server machines. Lot of people feel it's cool to fiddle around with file system/configuration to make it work (and they think thats cool Linux), it's not! You don't want to fiddle around with OS to make things work or just works out of the box. Debian is 100% suited for dev centric/work station centric environment once you configure, you can use it for years without worrying what might break tomorrow.

> once you configure, you can use it for years without worrying what might break tomorrow.

That has been exactly the case with me and Arch.

And your comment is not just wrong, but it's condescending too.

> Debian is 100% suited for dev centric/work station centric environment

You're way too overconfident. I use a Debian derivative at $work (because I don't have a choice), and we are constantly having to work around the fact that the software in its repos is ancient.

Or you can use NixOS where you define your entire system in a config file that'll enable you to have the same system configuration everywhere.

Once Nix flakes lands in stable it'll be interesting to see if NixOS can steal shares from the mainstream distros in any significant manner.

I love NixOS but the way Flakes are written, it's not stealing mindshare from the mainstream distros anytime soon. Flakes could have been a chance to write Nix comprehensibly but it reads like a layer of complication on top an already complicated language model.

Your clang error can probably be fixed by a pacman -Syu. Usually that sort of error is related to some libraries on your system being old and other programs being new (and compiled against new libraries), so the packages can't load the libraries properly when you execute them on your system. Doing a full update brings the libraries up to date so the programs can load them and run properly.

Oh I'm aware of this, and I'll get around to doing just that as soon as I'm in the mood to waste more of my life chasing other breakages after pacman turns my entire world upside down just so clang can run again.

If you're not willing to do full system upgrades on the regular, why are you running a rolling-release distro? That's literally the whole point.

I plan on abandoning this experiment as soon as I have the time and interest.

In my comment above I mentioned this was a spare laptop, my primary laptop which ran debian abruptly failed pressing this thing into regular daily use, so I used the Arch install I originally put on it for an egpu experiment.

Honestly, running pacman -Syu on an Arch machine that sat untouched for four years was a much better experience than any of the Ubuntu and Debian dist-upgrades I’ve had to suffer through. I did have to go and merge the .pacnews, but that’s it. (Granted, for Ubuntu the last one was something like 9.10 to 10.04, things might have improved since then.) So having an infrequently-updated machine is entirely feasible, as long as you don’t try partial upgrades. (Except that one time when the StrongSwan upstream decided it was a good idea to rename their units in such a way that an old configuration with ended up running the wrong IPsec daemon after an upgrade. That was a frustrating couple of hours.)

The thing is, it’s not that this problem can be fixed by running pacman -Syu, it is that, in half a dozen years of running Arch on several machines, the only way I could get into this particular failure state was when I ignored every bit of documentation in the name of laziness and did pacman -S thing instead of pacman -Su thing. (Or when I built things from outside the official repos and failed to keep them up to date, but I’m going to guess you’re not running a custom build of Clang, because that is the kind of pain you don’t forget.) Theoretically you might have caught a short window of inconsistent state on a package mirror, but again, from my experience, it’s always just a partial upgrade I did with my own hands. (Compared to apt, pacman is awesome, but its willingness to let you do stupid things could use some adjustment.)

On to more constructive advice—if your latest update was in the last couple of weeks, just

  pacman -Su

may work to pull your machine forward to a consistent state corresponding to the most recent installed package. If not, you can use the <https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Arch_Linux_Archive>: get the last update date by an incantation such as

  pacman -Qi | sed -n 's/Install Date *: //p' | xargs -d '\n' -n 1 date -I -d | sort -nu | tail -1

(which I just cooked up, so there are surely better ones, or just look at the tail of /var/log/pacman.log), temporarily replace your /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist with

  Server=https://archive.archlinux.org/repos/YYYY/MM/DD/$repo/os/$arch

and run

  pacman -Syu # sic!

Either way, you may see a little bit of breakage (though, in my experience, it’s unlikely), but nothing you wouldn’t have had to deal with when you properly installed your current set of packages in the first place.

I had been a Debian based distro user for ever (ubuntu, sidux, Debian unstable/testing... ) things were breaking all the time. Sure if you stick to stable things only break once every couple of years when you upgrade to the next version. However stable is really not suitable for desktop work, I'd have to install almost all my usual software through other means, that's not what I use a distro for.
I switched to tumbleweed 2 years back and really liked it, but zypper/rpm is awfully slow and I was missing some packages (although OBS is awesome). So I tried endeavorOS 6 month ago (arch with graphical installer) and I have to say I really like it. Not one break so far.

actually the breakage is often in configuration updates. Libreoffice is particularly bad, often it doesn't start without any message after an upgrade, which is fixed by whiping it ~/.config/libreoffice

> At this moment I have the impression that the average Arch install is always at least partially broken in some way.

Mine aren't.

I've never seen that kind of "garbage" either on Arch.

I'm trying to push back against dumb crap about how Dad's don't have time for shenanigans by pointing out that, hey, maybe rolling release doesn't have as many shenanigans as you think. And of course, folks come out of the woodwork with every little anecdote about how something didn't work. No distro is perfect and there are trade offs. The existence of your experience does not negate mine. In particular, here I am, more than a decade later and I never have any major issues. I always get the latest software and I don't have to bother with dist upgrades.

Getting the latest software is super important to me. It is the number 1 frustration I have with non-rolling release. This is a fundamental trade off. My point is that people over exaggerate the downsides typically associated with rolling release: that getting the latest software means more instability. That just isn't my experience.

> I have multiple machines running Arch (some over a decade) with no problems.

This sounds extremely unlikely. Rolling vs versioned release both have breakage, but with rolling its in constant tiny ways so it's less memorable. It's also a point Arch evangelists consistently fail to bring up.

I'm not evangelizing Arch. I'm pushing back on the bullshit that "dads don't have time for rolling release shenanigans."

Either you're calling me a liar or you're saying my memory is bad. Great talk. Thanks.

OpenSuSE Tumbleweed is also rolling release and stuff works out if the box. It is rpm based, but it's the most tolerable rpm distribution imho.

I have a non-ancient computer with the same Debian (testing with a bit of unstable mixed in) on it for over 16 years now. I still get excited about new stuff, I just don't want that new stuff to break anything. :-)

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