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Comment by W3zzy | Hacker News Reader

''By the way, I use Arch''

The meme was “I use Arch, BTW,” but I think it has mostly died as enough people have pointed out that Arch isn’t really hard-mode Linux or something. It is a barebones start but

1) very stable due to rolling-release producing small changes

2) the skill barrier to getting a full system is “basic literacy, to read the wiki”

Eventually I switched to Ubuntu for some reason, it has given me more headaches than Arch.

I've started my Linux journey a decent year ago. It's been fun but I'm happy that they're such a great community to troubleshoot along with me. Never tried Arch but I do love a barebones no fuzz system.

>the skill barrier to getting a full system is “basic literacy, to read the wiki”

if GenZ knew how to read they would be very disappointed right now

in the age of tablets and tiktok, basic literacy is quite a big ask

That's what they said about GenX, Millennials, and probably every other generation before them. Something something, "OK boomer."

they absolutely did not say that tiktok and tablets are destroying basic literacy about GenX or Millenials

if anything, they said the kids were good with technology

Yeah cause that's what he was talking about

I know. I was emphasising that this time is not like before. That there are major differences, and things look similar only on a very superficial level.

It really is nothing new. People quickly close windows with errors, they go out of they way to avoid reading actual message.

> very stable due to rolling-release producing small changes

Can you elaborate on the chain of thought here? The small changes at high frequency means that something is nearly constantly in a <CHANGED> state, quite opposite from stable. Rolling release typically means that updates are not really snapshotted, therefore unless one does pull updates constantly they risk pulling a set of incompatible updates. Again, quite different from stable.

I think op meant the subjective feeling of having a system that runs in a stable manner. I don't quite follow their reasoning either (maybe the smaller changesets expose compatibility bugs before affecting general ux?), but I agree that arch was a joy for me to use and felt "stable".

It's the same train of thought as the modern cloud software notion that deploying small changes more often is safer than bundling "releases"; if you upgrade 3 packages 3x a week (or deploy 50 lines of code 3x a week), you catch small issues quickly and resolve them immediately, rather than upgrading 400 packages 1x a year (or deploying 50,000 lines of code 2x a year), where when things break you have a rather tall order just to triage what failed.

I think there are advantages to both, but I will say that I've found modern Arch to be quite good. The other huge benefit of Arch is the general skill level present in the user base and openness of the forums; when something breaks it's usually easy to google "arch + package name broken" and immediately find a forum thread with a real fix.

I don't think I'd use Arch for a corporate production server for change management reasons alone, but for a home desktop and my home server, it's actually the distribution that's required me to do the _least_ "Linux crap" to keep it going.

It’s stable in the way that a person taking small predictable steps at a time is stable compared to somebody who making large random lurching steps. Sure, the system is often changed, but if only a few packages have changed, should there be a problem it is easy to identify the culprit.

Although it is hard to say. Ubuntu also has, I guess, intentional behavior that is hard to distinguish from a bug, like packages switching from apt to snap. So it might just be that my subjective experience feels more buggy.

> 1) very stable due to rolling-release producing small changes

Having very frequent updates to bleeding edge software versions, often requiring manual intervention is not "stable". An arch upgrade may, without warning, replace your config files and update software to versions incompatible with the previous.

That's fine if you're continuously maintaining the system, maybe even fun. But it's not stable. Other distributions are perfectly capable of updating themselves without ever requiring human intervention.

> 2) the skill barrier to getting a full system is “basic literacy, to read the wiki”

As well as requiring you to be comfortable with the the linux command line as well as have plenty of time. My mom has basic literacy, she can't install ArchLinux.

ArchLinux is great but it's not a beginner-friendly operating system in the same way that Fedora/LinuxMint/OpenSUSE/Pop!_OS/Ubuntu/ElementOS are.

> Having very frequent updates to bleeding edge software versions, often requiring manual intervention is not "stable". An arch upgrade may, without warning, replace your config files and update software to versions incompatible with the previous.

12 in the last year if you used all the software (I don’t many people are running dovecot and zabbix), so probably actually like 3 for most users: https://archlinux.org/

That’s not too dissimilar from what you’d get running stable releases of Ubuntu or Windows. And of course plenty of windows software will auto upgrade itself in potentially undesired ways, windows users just don’t blame the OS for that

I don't just mean the types of manual intervention mentioned in the news. ArchLinux ships bleeding edge software to users with very little downstream changes. ArchLinux also replaces config files when upgrading. This is inherently different behavior from stable release distributions like Ubuntu.

ArchLinux is not an operating system where you can do an unattended upgrade and forget about it. That's not "bad" or "good", that's just a design choice.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Frequently_asked_questions#...?

Arch replaces _unmodified_ config files when changing. It’s not an uncommon behaviour in software to update defaults to the new defaults.

If you have a modified config file, it puts the new default one in a .pacnew file for you to compare, which seems strictly better to just deleting the new default one.

Huh you're right, I must've confused myself by removing/installing instead of upgrading recently.

Anyway I think the discussion boils down to semantics. ArchLinux is not "unstable" in the sense that it is prone to breaking. But it also delivers none of the stability promises that stable release distros or rolling release distros with snapshotting and testing like OpenSUSE Tumbleweed deliver. To call ArchLinux stable would make every distribution stable, and the word would lose all meaning.

Most distributions promise that an upgrade always results in a working system. Instead moving the manual maintenance to major release upgrades.

> Having very frequent updates to bleeding edge software versions, often requiring manual intervention is not "stable".

I dunno. I have an arch installation that is maybe 4 years old, I might update every few weeks, and have only had one issue.

Any issues are usually on the front page of archlinux.org what the issue is, and how to fix it.

> without warning, replace your config files and update software to versions incompatible with the previous.

This is just nonsense, pacman doesn't do this. If you'd modified a config file, it will create a .pacnew version instead of replacing it. Otherwise you'll get the default config synced with the version of the software you've installed, which is desirable.

It's pretty rare to modify any config files outside of ~/.config these days anyway. What few modifications I have at the system level are for things like mkinitcpio, locale, etc and they never change.

If ubuntu had stuck with APT for software installs instead of snap and whatever else, it would be a lock less headachey

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