Hacker News Reader

Comment by coding4all | Hacker News Reader

This is great! Hopefully I can ditch Arch soon.

Would you mind sharing your reasons for switching? I'm currently using Arch as well and only stumbled upon NixOS thanks to this post.

If you don't pay extra care to updating Arch, it's possible that an update will brick your OS install requiring a fresh install. Granted, they usually tell you on their websites when this happens along with how to not brick your OS, but you have to be diligent to check every time.

From my experience, at most that can go wrong is the update fails or similar non-fatal issue may arise. I haven't been using Arch for very long (not more than a year), but I never had any issues that would break the system. As you already mentioned, they post the the necessary info on the website and even now after the pacman database format upgrade when pacman fails it specifically tells you to run a command to fix this. Oh and don't forget the massive wiki, that one's a killer.

Plus I really like this whole rolling release philosophy with up-to-date packages :)

You can have up to date packages with NixOS too. Just have to change the default channel.

I've never had an arch update brick my system. It's really pretty hard to brick a 'nix.

When I ran arch (and I ran it for quite a while) I had the occasional breakage, but I don't recall ever having a break that I needed to boot into a live environment to fix, let alone require a re-install.

Granted, it might be quicker to re-install if you haven't fermented in linux-land for long enough to know how to figure out what's borked and what you need to do to fix it, particularly if you would need to boot a live usb or something, but I'm struggling to think of things that would actually brick a linux system these days that aren't either hardware failures, some really crazy filesystem corruption, literally rm -rf / for way too long, or being installed on a machine with no alt-boot method.

On the bright side, reinstalling isn't too bad unless you don't use separate partitions.

All that said, there is a pretty hefty active maintenance cost to running Arch. At least they're explicit about it.

You should check pacmatic[1], which checks the official website for you and informs you about breaking updates. Along with this, it informs you of any config files (*.pacnew) you have to manually update.

Which brings me to my second problem with Arch: every other update I have to manually inspect the changes on various config files and merge with my personal changes.

[1] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Enhance_system_stabilit...

The only update from Arch that has bricked my system was when they reconfigured the whole file system, to unify things (as opposed to it being split up between {/usr{/local,},}/bin) -- that was a nasty shock. In all my years of using Arch (I switched from Gentoo in 2010), I've really had very few problems. It's a very friendly yet powerful and customizable distribution, in my estimation.

Pacman doesn't do transactional upgrades and rollbacks. Nix does.

1) My system breaks once every year. Literally just once.

2) NixOS package management is similar to the Arch system because binary installs come first, and AUR installs (source builds) come second.

3) NixOS has an easier/simpler rollback and configuration system than Arch.

4) Manjaro, a more stable Arch distro, doesn't fit me without having to build a custom Linux image. It's been a while, so this might have changed since I've last checked it out.

5) FreeBSD is enticing, but if I have to go BSD, it's OpenBSD or DragonFly. I've been thinking *BSD ever since the switch to systemd...

I quite like Arch. Definitely has the package manager with the coolest command name, although the usage and flags are bit archaic, they should probably steal some more ideas from FreeBSD. It allows me to build relatively minimal systems without having to compile everything from source. (yes, I'm a recovering Gentoo user)

I recently installed the latest Ubuntu just to see where that has gone since I last used it years ago. I had to wipe it after less than one hour.

I really should play around again with NixOS, looks like it has progressed quite a lot since I last encountered it.

"they should probably steal some more ideas from FreeBSD"

Which ideas would you think are worth stealing from there?

I think you mean stole, past tense. If you read much about the rationale of Arch, it was meant to imitate FreeBSD quite closely. This was especially true before the systemd migration, when there were only 1 or a few files in /etc you had to touch to configure almost everything in the system. It is clear they dervied the AUR concept from the ports system of FreeBSD fame.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/arch_compared_to_other_...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com