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Comment by jorvi | Hacker News Reader

Not only is Arch also a rolling distro (despite them saying "not Arch!"), Arch is one of the most horrible rolling distros in terms of stability. Their general principle for package breakage is "you should have checked it on our (site) release log". They don't throw an error or a warning, if something is a breaking change and you pull it into your system, you basically get a "hehe should have checked the release log", and you're hosed.

If you want a good, actually professional rolling release, use SUSE Tumbleweed. They test packages more thoroughly, and they actually hold back breaking or buggy changes instead of the "lol read log and get fucked" policy.

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This is a misunderstanding from users POV. Something that a lot of people have.

Arch is a DO IT YOURSELF distro. They write that thing everywhere they can. The stability of the installation is literally ON YOU! Your responsibility as a DO IT YOURSELF distro user. They didn't trick you into it or something.

Expecting Arch linux to spoon feed is like expecting IKEA to give you assembled furniture.

You should use openSUSE or other "managed" rolling release distros. Arch IS NOT A "managed" rolling release distro.

https://www.unsungnovelty.org/posts/01/2024/a-linux-distro-r...

Then they probably shouldn't ship it with a package manager.

That doesn't follow; DIY is a spectrum. It can be perfectly reasonable for a DIY distro to ship a package manager, just as it can be reasonable for it to run on existing hardware instead of expecting you to break out the soldering iron.

My installation is now 6 years old. Never had any point release distros that long. Stability is subjective to hardware for starters. And secondly, Arch is a DIY. Do not use it if you can't get it to work for your use cases. We have 300+ distros to choose from. I am just politely telling you that your expectation of you wanting Arch to take care of your installation was never a promise from the project.

It's software. It will work the way it is written. As simple as that.

Anecdote: 12 years with Arch, including a laptop with 9 years on one install. Zero issues. But yeah, there’s a low volume mailing list. Get on it. Read it, it’s very short and to the point, and it’s only a few times per year.

Are you talking about Arch-announce? (https://lists.archlinux.org/archives/list/arch-announce@list...)

I am new to Arch and would like the notifications that you are talking about.

Yes, and also https://archlinux.org/feeds/news/

Very uncharitable perspective on people that do the work for free. I can understand not wanting to use a distribution where breakages can happen, but being a dick about it less so.

To be fair to Arch, you can always subscribe to their RSS or mailing list if you want to be notified about breaking changes

> SUSE Tumbleweed > They test packages more thoroughly, and they actually hold back breaking or buggy changes instead of the "lol read log and get fucked" policy.

I am currently on Arch specifically because Tumbleweed shipped a broken Firefox build and refused to ship the fixed version for a month.

As a workaround I uninstalled the bundled firefox and replaced it with flatpak. And on next system update the bundled Firefox was back because for some strange reason packages on suse are bundled.

> Arch is one of the most horrible rolling distros

We've had different experiences. I've been using Arch for about 8 years and have had to scour the forums no more than thrice to find the magic incantations to fix a broken package manager. In all cases, the system was saved without a reinstall. However, it is certainly painful when pacman breaks.

    $ cat /etc/issue
    Antergos Linux \r (\l)

;-)

That’s three times too many. I have been running an Ubuntu server at home for 10 years and went through probably 4 LTS releases and the number of times apt flaked out on me - exactly zero.

I'm running Ubuntu 24.10 and they broke the upgrade to 25.04 if you're using ZFS on the boot drive. Their solution was to prevent the upgrade from running, and basically leave behind anyone stuck on 24.10 to figure it out for themselves.

TBF, they can't be expected to support every potential configuration users may think of.

If they weren't going to support the feature why did they provide it as an option on the installer without any warnings or disclaimers? This isn't some bespoke feature that I hacked together, it's part of the official installer. If I had known it wasn't fully supported then I wouldn't have used it.

So not rolling? I too have never had to open Windows Task Manager on macOS.

YMMV. Manjaro's broken on me multiple times. I leave a machine alone for two years and it's next upgrade is almost guaranteed to break something.

Manjaro is not Arch, and its maintainers have repeatedly shown that they aren't very good at maintaining a distro: https://github.com/arindas/manjarno

This is revisionist at best. Manjaro has always been portrayed as Arch with a GUI by both sets of maintainers.

Maybe by Manjaro's maintainers, but certainly not by Arch's. I've been using Arch for a little over a decade. The position that I've always seen in the official IRC channel is that forks such as Manjaro are explicitly not Arch.

Here's one of the oldest versions of the "Arch-based distributions" page on the wiki. It has a notice at the top that says that forks are not supported by the community or developers: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php?title=Arch-based_distri...

Two years with no uptes on rolling release is not a good idea. Two years with no updates for anything not connected to the internet is not a good idea.

I didn't say anything about the machine being on the internet persistently. It's a laptop sitting in storage mostly. The updates are for when it comes out of hiding.

Arch doesn't support more than 6(?) months between upgrades, maybe Manjaro is the same.

I guess my only option is to switch to a more stable distro such as Debian or SUSE. Manjaro has always been touted as a very light distro, good for old machines, but its instability makes it a no-go.

The choice of distro makes almost no difference w.r.t. performance on old hardware, as long as it's still supported.

The only (real but small) difference is between desktop environments and their choice of default apps (eg. file manager).

Actual Arch on two machines, no issues. The older one I've been using for 15 years now.

I don't want to manually have to scroll through all the release logs on every single upgrade, in case their might be a landmine in there this time. Nor does any rational person that values their time or their system stability.

It is a million times more sane to have a package manager throw a warning or an error when a breaking change is about to be applied, rather than just YOLO the breaking change and pray people read the release log.

It is one of the most stupid policies ever, and the main reason why I will steer everyone away from Arch forever. Once bitten, twice shy.

I've been using Arch Linux for over a decade and have literally never once consulted release logs, and never got into any serious trouble.

I do subscribe to the arch-announce mailing list which warns of breaking changes, but that receives around 10 messages per year, and the vast majority aren't actually all that important.

I've also gone multiple months between updates and didn't have any problems there either.

The idea that Arch Linux breaks all the time is just complete nonsense.

His point is that Arch will break the system without any warning during package upgrade.

A warning will dissuade users from upgrading their system instead of doing the manual intervention.

By way of example, Gentoo's `eselect news` is pretty good https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Eselect#News

Thats a very different experience from me. I've had quite a few broken packages easily over 10 in the last year and a half. It was easy enough to find them and roll them back but I dont know how people can say arch is stable. Do you update regularly?

> Do you update regularly?

Sometimes once a month, sometimes once a week, sometimes more if there's a critical CVE.

Gentoo is very stable in my experience and you get to choose exactly which packages you want to be unstable vs stable (the default).

You know you don't have to update it daily?

I swore off arch when an update surprised me by switching to systemd (years ago obviously) and trashing my system in the process

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