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Comment by simula67 | Hacker News Reader

I think with Pacman finally supporting parallel downloads the last major technical advantage that Debian based distros had over Arch is now gone. I think it is time that Arch is considered as a serious base for more projects.

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One thing Arch is never going to have is smooth unattended upgrades. I host a web server on a Debian-based VPS and, aside from updates between releases every couple years, I don’t need to ever bother myself with keeping it up-to-date. It’s done automatically. On Arch you’re expected to read Arch news before updating and apply manual steps when needed.

The opposite has been my experience. I think the rolling nature of Arch has really ironed out the kinks in their release systems.

Just this year:

https://archlinux.org/news/grub-bootloader-upgrade-and-confi...

https://archlinux.org/news/wxwidgets-32-update-may-need-manu...

https://archlinux.org/news/keycloak-1701-2-update-requires-m...

I’ve been running Debian with unattended updates enabled for 5+ years now and never needed to manually intervene after an update. You wouldn’t put pacman -Syu in cron.

And which of these announcements really required manual intervention on a VPS running a webserver? A webserver clearly doesn't use a GUI library like wxwidgets, probably won't run keycloak, and the GRUB change depends on your environment, with good chances that it will still work without re-writing the bootloader.

In any case, just subscribe to the arch announcements mailing list and you'll get an email notification in these cases. Not sure if I would put pacman -Syu into cron though.

Strictly a web server doesn't appear to would have required manual intervention in the course of those exact updates. But the point is that manual intervention is required from time to time. Also, Keycloak is very much on my TODO list to host.

> In any case, just subscribe to the arch announcements mailing list and you'll get an email notification in these cases. Not sure if I would put pacman -Syu into cron though.

That's exactly my point. With Arch you're expected to watch out for mailing list updates and running updates automatically with no human supervision is not a supported usecase. With Debian it very much is a supported usecase.

It doesn't mean that Arch is a bad distro. It just means it's not suitable for some scenarios that Debian is suitable for.

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