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Comment by osn9363739 | Hacker News Reader

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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