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Comment by m463 | Hacker News Reader

To me arch linux is the middle ground between a too-much-complexity "fat" distribution like ubuntu or debian and a-minimal-but-eclectic-freebsd.

the arch wiki is VERY comprehensive, linux has a huge community, and arch forced you to understand much just by stepping through the installation process.

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FreeBSD and ArchLinux do not need to be compared in this context.

FreeBSD is an extremely simple and stable system. All packages/ports for which are tailored to integrate well with the networking stack, logging etc of FreeBSD. FreeBSD has daily/weekly/monthly cronjobs per default that runs a number of cleanup tasks and security updates and emails the result. It also has email setup correctly per default.

And FreeBSD only gets a few patch updates a year and a new major release every two years. The security patches it will download for you and then inform you over email.

ArchLinux needs constant maintenance to be updated, often requiring manual intervention. The packages are unchanged from upstream and thus do not integrate that well will the system at all, often requiring much more configuration. ArchLinux can be run as a server, and I have an do for years now, but it isn't made for it and it does require attention. ArchLinux is about getting bleeding edge software packaged as-is from upstream, and it's about allowing the user to tinker and customize. In that sense FreeBSD and ArchLinux can be considered opposites.

I understand what you mean re: Arch wiki (I'm a fan of it even though not an arch user) but I genuinely suggest you go over and read some of the FreeBSD Handbook. Just look through the ToC (itself a nice thing) and pick something.

It is a cohesive whole which can be read from start to finish (it is an actual book). This is also how the whole system feels as well (as others have commented). Things are integrated and coherent. Example: freebsd has its own libc[0], and the kernel and libc do feel (from old experience) like a consistent unit, so to speak.

So IMO in terms of system cohesiveness (and its documentation which is a marvel unto itself but also represents the thing it covers), it's on a whole other level.

[not even using FreeBSD for any servers right now[1], but I have deep respect and admiration for the project and its team]

https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/

[0] that's the thing, as others have commented, Linux is really two parts (GNU+Linux) whereas e.g. FreeBSD is for most intents and purposes "one" internally cohesive part.

[1] though about to get a large old refurbished Dell server with 2xXeon for personal tinkering (you can find them cheap; beware of power usage tho...) and will likely set up FreeBSD as host, with ZFS, etc...

Debian is fat?? I always thought it was a nice, minimalist server distro.

It's definitely fatter than Arch because packages tend to be more coupled.

This is entirely false and the opposite is true. Debian has much more granular package splitting and less hard dependencies.

You should try either reading through the installation instruction, or better yet try an install:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Installation_guide

arch (or any rolling release) on a home server doesn't sound like a good idea?

if you actually run updates regularly (which you should anyways) it's fine. I did it for years until I switched to NixOS.

yeah, this was my main annoyance with it, i don't log into my server for months at a time so i wanted something without constant updates but other than that it was fine.

I update one of my servers once a year or even longer, and it’s still doing fine with Arch.

I know at least one other person who runs Arch on all their servers, they do an update monthly unless there's some critical CVE that needs to be addressed ASAP. The sibling comment says 1 year, but I can't honestly suggest going that long for any distro. I've had Ubuntu LTS break very, very badly because of a missed patch in GRUB when updating over too long of a timescale (somewhere around a year, maybe a bit less)

Pacman has always been kind to me. Portage, on the other hand, crippled my beloved X60 after a full system upgrade even though I was only a few weeks behind. I don't recall the precise issue but if memory serves it was some sort of circular version dependency that I was unable to resolve. I was a 19-year-old l00nix nublet so I'm sure it was my fault but I've never had so much trouble with a distro package manager as I did with Gentoo's.

Once you try a rolling-release distro you realize it's actually a very good idea

It's not though, few server usecases allow/require your environment to change every day.

OpenSUSE Tumbleweed is a lot more stable than ArchLinux for that kind of stuff though. It stages updates in tested snapshots. ArchLinux updates just error if you time them right.

Anecdotal, but I never had an Arch install fail after updating (maybe the one time my EFI partition was full, but not specific to Arch). While I have a laptop running OpenSUSE Tumbleweed that failed to start after the third update I did on it.

> While I have a laptop running OpenSUSE Tumbleweed that failed to start after the third update

Very possible, Tumbleweed has had some embarrassing failures.

But when it comes to rolling release on servers I'd still prefer OpenSUSE.

OpenSUSE has whole distributions (MicroOS & Aeon) dedicated to performing automatic updates. ArchLinux is not really made with automatic updates in mind.

Big part of that is possible because OpenSUSE releases Tumbleweed in "snapshots". This means that updated packages are basically staged and tested together before release. This happens a few times a week. If you then experience a failure you can always use an older tumbleweed snapshot. In theory that should provide more stability, but there has recently been a lot of instability especially with SELinux being enabled by default.

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