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Comment by hanlec | Hacker News Reader

What are the advantages of PapyrOS versus say elementary OS?

It's based on Arch, not Ubuntu (well not sure that's an advange for the most basic users) so it's a rolling distro release (means you do not have to update every 6 months). Arch builds package from source while Ubuntu's package system is simply offer repositories of binaries. Arch gives you more "power" in that sense.

What about unstable upstream packages? Is there a way to stop an update from potentially breaking your system?

I'm not using Arch at the moment, so I'm not sure, but I believe you do not have to update all packages at the same time (unless some are required for other packages updates) and usually such changes are tested by the community before being released widely... but if someone else knows better, please correct me.

You can stop certain packages from being updated [0] but the wiki explicity says it's "unsupported" [1] so probably best to update everything and hope nothing breaks.

New packages for the "core" repo, for example the Linux kernel, are first introduced to the "testing" repo, which isn't enabled by default. You would have to manually change your pacman.conf to use it.

From the wiki [2]:

"After a kernel in core broke many user systems, the "core signoff policy" was introduced. Since then, all package updates for core need to go through a testing repository first, and only after multiple signoffs from other developers are they allowed to move. Over time, it was noticed that various core packages had low usage, and user signoffs or even lack of bug reports became informally accepted as criteria to accept such packages."

[0]: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Pacman#Skip_package_fro... [1]: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Pacman#Partial_upgrades... [2]: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Official_repositories#H...

It's usually no problem to keep a package or two from upgrading via the --ignore argument to pacman. Arch calling it "unsupported" doesn't mean it's inherently risky, it mainly comes from the fact that you can shoot yourself in the foot with it if you do it to something like glibc. Keeping a userland program like Chrome or Gimp downgraded will not screw up your system.

Packages go through the 'testing' repository. Archlinux breaks much more seldom on updates than Windows.

Really? When I was using archlinux, it broke nearly every month. My wife uses Windows with auto update turn on and she never has a problem with it.

In the 5 Years I have used Arch (Generally with testing repo enabled) I've only had one breakage (where as I couldn't boot) I can think of that wasn't my fault. (Issue with radeon power management)

As long as you use pacman properly [1][2] and go through your .pacnew files to make sure there's no breaking configuration changes you should be well off, but of course your millage may vary. Any major changes will usually have a news post on the homepage.

[1] One of the major sources of breakages related to improper pacman usage is using -Sy (Update package lists) without updating your system -Su (Combined into -Syu to do both at the same time) before installing something else which make break dependencies.

Basically what happens is you install something that wants a newer version of a library (which other packages which haven't yet been updated to the current versions which are compiled against the newer library) and your new install pulls the new library in with it without updating everything else that depends on said library. Generally -Syu (Update package list and upgrade system) is recommended to be done in all cases where you want to update your package lists.

[2] https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=89328

pacman (Arch's package manager) does not build from source, it downloads binary packages from the repos just like Ubuntu. Differently from Ubuntu packages are usually as vanilla and up to date as possible.

You build packages from source when you install something from the AUR[0] or you can build from the Arch Build System [1].

[0] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Arch_User_Repository

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

You are correct, I forgot about pacman - and yeah I was referring to AUR in my previous comment.

Every binary package was built using ABS though, and a PKGBUILD is just a bash script so you do have the flexibility to build every package from source a la Gentoo.

arch is binary rolling release distribution with optional source based packages.

Why have this be a separate distro instead of just be an installable desktop environment in Arch itself? (Or hell any other distro)

Same thing as for elementaryOS: integration is done for you with the rest of the distro packages, instead of letting the user do it by themselves.

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