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Comment by theodric | Hacker News Reader

Install Arch, get everything working, and DO NOT install updates. I've never had another distro that would randomly render itself unbootable or break core functionality with such frequency with the simple weekly application of updates. Really distressing.

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lolwut. My current Arch install has been going strong for over 12 years, and it has very rarely broken, and when it has, very often it's because I went a long time without updating, and/or the issue and fix are mentioned right on the front page of archlinux.org. Gentoo, on the other hand, is (or was when I used it) as you describe, where every other update would randomly break the system and they would tell you on IRC "don't use it if you don't like it, it's free," which was solid advice that I adopted.

>Gentoo, on the other hand, is (or was when I used it) as you describe, where every other update would randomly break the system and they would tell you on IRC "don't use it if you don't like it, it's free," which was solid advice that I adopted.

Gentoo would break a lot when I used it, and I also learned a lot by getting it to work when it broke.

But I do not blame Gentoo for it. It was mostly my fault, for using ~x86 ("testing" keyword) instead of x86.

Wow.

I have used Arch as my main system for 6 years now (was Gentoo before) and never had anything of the sort.

How does this even happen?

It happened to me on Arch during the switch from init to systemd.

Update was documented, but I didn’t look. Did my `pacman -syua` as I normally did on a daily, and rebooted to a totally borked system. This is when I was a grad student and really needed that laptop that week.

I still love Arch, but I can’t trust it anymore as a daily driver.

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