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Comment by imdoor | Hacker News Reader

Doesn't match my experience at all. I love that packages are always up to date. Also, in my experience, having a rolling release cycle leads to significantly fewer issues than having to upgrade everything at once. Using Arch has been a net time saver for me compared to something like Ubuntu where I've wasted a lot of time fighting package upgrade issues and trying to get newer package versions than the distro provides.

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In my limited experience, how Arch works out depends on how you're using Linux. If it's your daily driver and you stay on top of updates it's probably going to be fine, but on the other hand if it's a secondary OS on a multiboot system or a VM or something that only gets updated occasionally, chances of things breaking are much higher and something like Fedora might make more sense.

There would definitely be issues with the keyring being outdated which you have to know/search how to work around. And from time to time Arch also requires some manual interventions in the package update process (that are posted on archlinux.org) – you'd have to deal with those all at once if Arch wouldn't have been updated for a very long time. But, other than that, I can't think of other reasons why having a less often used Arch installation would give you trouble.

Then again, I haven't used Arch in such a manner, so you might as well be right.

I use arch and update sporadically and this hasn't really failed me:

    sudo pacman -Sy archlinux-keyring && sudo pacman -Syu

There were two times something went wrong:

- when Arch moved plymouth to their main repos

- when switching from a 1070 to a 4070 I needed to recompile my nvidia drivers

I dug some old computers out of the attic recently. The one that had not been updated since 2021 only took around half an hour to get up to speed, and that was with a metric ton of packages installed.

The other one seemed to have been updated last time in 2015. It didn't even have updated certificates for https, so it couldn't sync the keyring. After trying for a while I just gave up and reinstalled Arch from a USB stick.

> old computers

> not updated since 2021

The computer itself was from 2011, and it was last used in 2021.

These two are not the only two options: the nix model is clearly superior and is not as error prone as each.

I use Nix on an ARM single-board computer to host a personal Matrix homeserver (and a bunch of bridges), and I absolutely love it. It's invaluable to have a reproducible specification of the whole system, including custom software to build, in a single place.

That being said, for day to day stuff Arch (and Nix standalone) works well enough for me, to be weary of switching my daily driver PC to Nix, out of the fear of dealing with unforeseen issues and maybe encountering less well maintained packages (there's always something broken on Nix unstable, but maybe it's not an issue for more popular stuff). So I'm sticking to Arch for non-servers for now.

nix is so clearly superior and yet nobody uses it. curious!

I think that the learning curve for the nix ecosystem is a lot steeper compared to other distros.

Well, arch is no ubuntu either.

Sometimes the better solution takes time to reach the masses.

Here we talk about a tiny percent of the tiny 3% of desktop users.

> nix is so clearly superior and yet nobody uses it. curious!

If you're going to be snide, you should at least be correct - or are the 6300 users in the main matrix chat room just hanging out for fun?

(sent from my nixos daily driver)

It's not like 6300 is anything but statistical noise compared to the number of Linux users out there.

The number of Arch Linux users is nothing but statistical noise compared to the number of Windows users; would you say that nobody uses Arch?

In that context, if, that is, the comparison involved Windows user share, then yes.

Hell, even in a Linux-only context too. I mean, an exchange like:

- We're shipping this enterprise software in packages compatible with RHEL and Ubuntu, would it be worth our while to also devote resources to specifically support Arch too?

- Nah, nobody uses Arch

While not accurate to the maximum possible precision (something like say 5% of Linux users is not the same as 0%), it would still be quite understandable...

Fedora is better at keeping packages up to date than Arch. In particular, Fedora is much quicker to adopt the latest compiler toolchain releases.

> something like Ubuntu where I've wasted a lot of time fighting package upgrade issues

The irony. You’re aware Arch its policy is to release packages in a broken state and just put it in the release log? They even very publicly state that.

If you want an actually stable rolling release, stick with OpenSUSE.

> You’re aware Arch its policy is to release packages in a broken state and just put it in the release log? They even very publicly state that.

Can you please provide some sources/examples?

I’ve done a lot of distro hopping in the last couple of years, and I always seemed to spend a lot longer managing the environment rather than doing the work (which was an issue when I was freelancing…). Indeed Arch is the only one that ended up with a massive folder in a notion notebook for guides and how tos.

good on you (or anyone) having a clean and efficient process on Arch - but really, this is not the same YMMV for everyone with all software stacks. can someone whose entire worklife came to a halt gradually over weeks on Arch, please add here?

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