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Comment by kfk | Hacker News Reader

From the article: if I want to use Arch Linux without banging my head with the terminal, I should be able to do that

Look, I got burned by Arch a couple of times and I finally dropped it after 2 years after some crazy nuts updates that broke my system even following the news section.

HOWEVER, everybody does what they want, that's the point of linux and linux distros. You can't think like that, you simply can't. If a distro wants you to do crazy updates, you either do it or you go find another distro. The only thing I can say in your favor is that if somebody makes a derivative for simple folks like us, say Chakra, then it's mother distro community should not ditch on them, it's linux after all.

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Knowing little about Arch Linux, I dismissed it entirely, even though a good sysadmin friend uses it exclusively on his laptop.

In my personal life, I first installed Slackware in 1995 but had converted to Debian by 1997 and I've used that almost exclusively until the last two years or so (I have one RHEL6 and one FreeBSD server). I have, of course, used RHEL and Ubuntu previously in my professional life.

About six months ago, I installed Arch Linux on a new Thinkpad W530. I didn't intend to really use it, I just wanted to see what the fuss was about. It's stuck around and I'm still running it and I haven't had the first problem with it.

I'm not gonna be converting everything over to it, obviously, but it works for me on this laptop (which I do almost 100% of my work on).

YMMV but IWFM.

Well, I hope you're subscribed to the announce mailing list then. Because breaking changes that require manual intervention do occur, and if you don't deal with them in a timely manner you'll be SOL.

Waiting until the last minute to port all my init scripts to systemd was definitely not a good idea.

Yeah, Arch is a great distro for some specific use cases. I loved it when I was in college and had 3+ hours every other week to get my packages un-borked after some update, but nowadays I just don't have the time... Great distro for bleeding edge stuff, though!

They do occur but they're rare. I remember the move from sysvinit to systemd taking about 10 minutes, and I have a 3 year old Arch install that has never outright broken on me after an update.

Frankly I remember going through more pain every 6 months from in early Ubuntu days (although that's a lot better now also).

Filesystem snapshots should make any upgrades almost painless. If it failed, roll back to a pre-update snapshot and in the meanwhile inspect changes from a post-upgrade version (branch) of the filesystem. Maybe even run this version in a VM.

Sad things are: 1) almost no FS supports writeable snapshots and LVM snapshotting is far from being convenient; 2) you have to setup everything by hand.

Do you know of any installer-time options for linux other than btrfs? I don't know of any fs choices, but openSUSE supports btrfs out of the box and even integrates it with the package manager to allow rollbacks. It's pretty convenient and as far as I know you can simply mount an old snapshot (writeable!) and use standard Unix tools to compare them. I'm not sure if that's everything you want, though - a tool that could actually tell you what's changed using the internal snapshot information would probably be much faster and superior to a diff or rsync dry run listing. It's still closer than anything I've ever seen and the ability to simply switch which subvolume (snapshots are just subvolumes) is the default or mount it within an extant fs tree is a win for me.

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