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Comment by Levitating | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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> 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.

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