celticmusic

> Not to mention with regular backups(that should be done either way) and delaying updates in critical time periods you can easily minimize the risk.

That's the minimum that you should be doing regardless of the OS. And thus, that's not where the risk is at.

It's probably more difficult to understand if you get paid regardless of whether you can get meaningful work done.

But for those of us who live on the other side, losing an unplanned half a day due to an OS issue that actively causes us to lose money, it matters.

Arch is bleeding edge, this means software bugs are far more likely on it.

absolutely, but the problem is that when I pointed out that arch is less stable than these other distro's, I had people trying to defend that claim.

There is no defending it, it's a fact of life. You get bleeding edge at the cost of stability.

> on Arch you're supposed to be able to handle basic sysadmin tasks yourself

And the reason for this is because you realize the latest update killed virtualbox and you require it for your work so you need to be able to downgrade and pin the vbox application to a specific version.

Meanwhile, Ubuntu catches the problem and refuses to update the package until it's fixed. Therefore I never even realize there was a breaking update to vbox somewhere.

The difference being that Arch tells me when to tinker because it blew up again, Ubuntu allows me to choose when to tinker because it doesn't.

I ran Gentoo until shortly after Daniel Robbins left the project. It just started to have problems. A good example is that installing KDE would break to the point of needing to throw everything away unless you installed a few other packages in a very specific order.

That never seemed acceptable to me and I ended up moving over to Arch Linux for a good 10+ years before the instability of it finally got to me and I moved to Ubuntu.

Having said all of that, I'm glad to hear that Gentoo is stable for you. I really enjoyed my time with Gentoo and I got the feeling that after he left there were mistakes made in terms of everything working reasonably.

Your description of Arch reminds me of an experience I had with linode and arch years back. Due to an internal hardware issue, they basically lost my server. When I went to recreate, I discovered that you couldn't just update the world because it would immediately result in a broken system. You instead had to reconfigure a few things before updating the world.

I no longer use Linode.

At some point the vendor has to take responsibility. That's a large part of why I like Ubuntu, they do. It works every day without me having to worry about it.

this reply 100% mirrors my thoughts on the matter, all the way down to preferring re-installs over dist-upgrade's.

I like Linux, I don't dislike dealing with the OS. But I want to deal with it on my time. Expecting to get work done and then realizing something is broken and being forced to deal with it is a completely different proposition from picking out a weekend to reinstall your work PC with the newest LTS version.

This is the proper response, imo.

Arch is rolling release and you take the good with the bad. The ones who try to defend arch as some paragon of stability miss the point that Arch's model is inherently unstable, but it comes with other benefits.

I'm the one who kicked off this entire conversation pointing out that arch is unstable, and it cracks me up watching silly people scramble to try and defend Arch as being some paragon of stability.

No, it's not. That's baked into its identity.

no one else in this conversation has the same "misunderstanding" that you do. Go ask them for clarification.

I specifically state it was a contract and you're talking about a job.

this reminds me of Steve Yegge. He did a post on the difference between employed developers and entrepreneurs, and how they're completely different creatures.

You've allowed yourself to become a pet and you've given up the ability to care about your work for food and you think it's a moral failing in others who have not.

You're to be pitied.

and I'm sure there's an idiot somewhere out there that would agree with you.

meanwhile, the rest of humanity understands why we're ok with being labelled intolerant due to "intolerance of intolerance is itself intolerance".

Your supposition is that caring about the quality of your work is a problem.

We should simply not continue this conversation because we fundamentally disagree. I don't get out of bed for "I don't care".

This other developer has put this new business at risk of closing. Maybe you don't care, but someone somewhere does.

this does not make someone a pedophile. It probably makes them morally corrupt, but not a pedophile.

if that were true their FAQ wouldn't tell you that broken packages weren't their responsibility.

> and your view is clearly against the majority of Arch Linux users.

I just gave a link from their FAQ that clearly states the system will break when packages break and they aren't responsible for it. As another user pointed out, you can go do a search for 'manual intervention' and find years of results on their front page.

Arch Linux users are ok with having their system randomly stop working. I used to be ok with it, until the umpteenth day that I lost half my working day getting the system back up and running.

thankfully I said Ubuntu and not Debian.

Why respond in this dishonest manner? When I left Arch I had been using it for over 10 years. I probably still understand it better than you do.

Is your supposition that a "misconfiguration" just "happened" randomly over night?

No, it's a rolling release distribution, software on it will break randomly on updates. You need to read their FAQ, even their official document will tell you this happens and it's not their responsibility due to the rolling release nature of the distribution.

yep, this is why I'm a huge fan of the 80% solution. You'll never get it right, put a system in that flags problematic accounts. If it gets flagged, ask the user "are you SURE?", and if they say yes, put it up for human review, whether that be internal or social in some manner.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Frequently_asked_questi...?

> It is the user who is ultimately responsible for the stability of their own rolling release system. The user decides when to upgrade, and merges necessary changes when required. If the user reaches out to the community for help, it is often provided in a timely manner. The difference between Arch and other distributions in this regard is that Arch is truly a 'do-it-yourself' distribution; __complaints of breakage are misguided and unproductive, since upstream changes are not the responsibility of Arch devs__.

Even their wiki is very clear to inform you that you're at the whims of the package upgrades.

But I also want to point out that "it hasn't broke in a year" is cute, but I ran arch for probably 10+ years until I finally got tired of it and moved to Ubuntu. The last straw was me sitting down to get paying work done and spending half my day trying to recover my work environment. In the 2-3 years since I moved to Ubuntu I've never once sat down at my PC and had something stop working that was working before.

This defense of your favorite distro is especially silly when you think about it logically. Of course a rolling release system is going to have more breakages. The sensible response isn't "it never breaks!", but is instead "that's the nature of rolling release, you opt into it when you choose Arch".

That's a semantic point.

If I sit down in front of my PC and can't do work, it's broken. That I can spend an hour or two fixing it rather than reinstalling is irrelevant.

So relevant.

I had an experience this year where I was working with another developer. This guy would legit walk behind me rewriting everything I did. To put this into perspective, I've been doing this work for over 20 years this guy came out of a bootcamp last year.

But it wasn't even that this guy was rewriting things, it's that he was constantly breaking things as a result. Imagine every fucking day you come in and something's broken that was working last week and you're like "wut?!? that was working, what happened?!".

This was a contract with a guy I'd been doing work with for years. The other developer was from another country and was one of his first employees. The straw for me was when he rewrote my small testing framework. I spent about a day trying to standup a unit testing library in the framework they were using and finally decided it would be quicker to just write a simple testing mechanism + runner, which took me a few hours to do. I come in the next week, and this guy had taken that idea, and then just rewrote the entire thing.

I called the owner up and just straight up told him he's paid me to do nothing. Literally every single line of code I've written has been rewritten by this guy, only in a shitty, buggy manner. That was 2 months in, and at that point I had tried talking to the guy about it and I was done.

Fast forward to today and that system STILL isn't working. It would've taken me 4 weeks at MOST to build and stabilize. We're coming up close to a year now. I'm still good friends with the owner so I ran cloc over the codebase. It went from 3k LoC to 21k LoC. The owner finally admitted to me that he's going to be paying for employing that developer for a very long time.

So while I understand the sentiment about not 'owning' code and would have agreed with it before this experience, the trust issue with respect to rewriting is waaaaay bigger than that.

I told the owner that this developer should never have been let near a code base with any ability to make decisions on their own. They needed years of mentorship. I literally disagree with every single decision they make. It's mystifying. It's almost like the guy always asks me my opinion and then does the complete opposite, only that's not the case.

and breaks constantly, which is why I stopped using it.

I left arch linux because I got tired of all the breakages, so not a great example.

I really don't know how you live your life acting like that.

Is it your belief that response somehow changed the point? Or maybe you think that response changed human nature? That somehow reacting in that manner changes mankind such that no one would ever be flattered that a rich and powerful person thinks they're interesting enough to have lunch with.

What about their wives? Are the wives pedophiles too? They sometimes went to the island with whomever. How many degrees of separation is necessary before you become just a person who wasn't aware of this rich and powerful persons predilections?

Lets call it Pedophile Bacon. Everyone is at most 6 degrees of separation from Epstein, therefore it has to be a number between 1 and 6, otherwise everyone is a pedophile due to Epstein.

I think what kills me the most is the implication through all of this that Epstein was so important that everyone should have been aware. I certainly wasn't. Until all this shit came out, I had _no idea_ who he was, or that he had been convicted. I don't spend my time tracking pedophile, and I would consider it a bit strange for anyone who does.

Imagine if someone like me is asked to go to lunch by their employer. And then this shit hits the fan, and suddenly you're being accused of being a pedophile because the Pedophile Bacon is 3 or less and you're at 2.

Maybe the guy is a pedophile. But him having lunch with Epstein says nothing about his status of being a pedophile. Because having lunch with a pedophile is not, by definition, what makes a pedophile a pedophile.

But you come in here with this snide ass comment as if it changes any of that. I don't personally understand. Help me understand why you would muddy the waters surrounding pedophiles. How many Pedophile Bacon's does it take before someone once again is presumed innocent until proven otherwise?

keepin' it real!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfz0tDQZhqs

The poster you're responding to pointed out that on average, after children, men spend more time at their jobs than women.

It would seem to go without saying that implies all the top performers are going to be men, and if the system is performance based, that means the promotions will tend towards the men.

For the same reason you would show up at Bill Gates house for lunch if you were invited.

seriously.

When I was young I used to wonder how in the hell the Salem Witch Trials ever happened. It boggled my mind.

I don't wonder about how it happened anymore, I've seen it so many times it's old hat now.

I mean what next, anyone who takes a jet with Bill Clinton is having sex with an intern?

In addition, many men don't consider a lot of behaviors as sexual harassment, and so think nothing of it.

We've had many presidents who were not great people, it turns out that's never been a requirement for the job.

I love how you defended not trying to make the world better because HN has a ToS.

this was my experience as well. I eventually bought an NVidia card to replace it so I could stop having problems. It's been smooth ever since.