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Comment by yogo | Hacker News Reader

I don't think it's so much on the bleeding edge in Arch as most people think and packages are usually upgraded in such a way so that dependencies don't cause problems in other packages (at least from my experience). The key has always been to always do a system upgrade and not upgrade individual packages, i.e. always run pacman -Syu or pacman -Syu <packagename>. In four years I've never seen anything break (knock on wood) aside from a minor issue with a pcre upgrade sometime ago. That has just been my experience though, I run Arch on my desktop, laptop and about 10 vps servers.

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My experience with Arch has frequently been:

1. Run pacman -Syu

2. Pacman failed.

3. Go to Arch website

4. Learn that I shouldn't have run pacman just then, and now I have to follow these steps to un-break my system

The most notable instance was when Arch decided that /usr/lib should be a symlink to /lib. Yeah, barely recovered from that... it was also a reinforcement of my position that basic utilities should be statically linked.

I finally gave up on Arch when a GRUB update broke my system and locked me out of my encrypted root.

Yeah I got caught by forcing the /usr/lib update too. Went away for a month, came back and did a full upgrade, failed. Checked the website, the news had dropped of the front page, forced update, broke it horribly.

Despite the problems, I still find rolling release vastly preferable. If Ubuntu can bring some of the commercial support quality to a rolling release, they'd alleviate a lot of the difficulties that I have with Arch.

> forcing the /usr/lib update

That's the number one thing to remember with pacman, _never_ force an update. That is how 90% [citation needed] of problems arise.

Arch is very good if you run it as your main system and keep it updated very frequently. Forget it for six months (because it's an unused multiboot, or whatever) and try to do an upgrade, and it might be more painful.

I got burnt by the glibc mess last summer, where you had to run a specific set of --force things in a given order to get through and if you didn't, well, you lost your /lib (at which point it's game over, since freaking pacman isn't statically linked).

Response in forums or irc (I don't remember) was "It's rolling release, you had three whole months to update, too bad for you".

Atomic releases avoid the problem because everyone will do this kind of breaking changes at the same point, whereas with rolling releases, you can't force people to update all at the same time, so you'll always end up losing people, once your migration path inevitably becomes invalid because of the way everything goes forward.

Couldn't you solve that problem with some type of repository snapshoting/versioning. So if you try to update more than, say, 1 month, the system installs the updates incrementally.

That is precisely what the Ubuntu proposal describes.

Arch has been overall very good for me, but there have been breakages (and I experienced a whole lot more with Gentoo, though that was a while ago). Arch's systemd migration in particular was somewhat painful and the documentation wasn't great for the process (it has improved somewhat since). I seriously doubt that Ubuntu would expect their users to do what I had to do to apply that update (since Arch and Ubuntu serve very different target audiences). This is no knock on Arch, their approach is appropriate for their audience.

Because Ubuntu serves such a different target audience, I expect the whole update process will be more hands-free and possibly a little more smooth. Their mission is "Linux for Human Beings" instead of "Linux for hackers and enthusiasts", so this is a necessity.

> I expect the whole update process will be more hands-free and possibly a little more smooth.

I've been using my current Arch install as my main desktop since the great systemd switch late last year, and I just have it do an apper autoupdate on Sundays. I don't even do pacman -Syu, I just check the logs after an update before a restart to make sure it went smoothly.

It kind of won me over, that and yaourt at least. I have Ubuntu on my grandparents machine and sshing into it and using apt starts to feel last century after getting used to pacman.

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