I use Arch BTW full-time for work and personal for about 3 years now and haven’t had any issues at all.
I worked with someone who uses arch on his work laptop
One day it just died and he had to spend a day or two setting it all up again
I mean, its not common, but it happens
Yeah, I ran arch through college, it broke 3 times over 4 years, basically each time because Nvidia updated. Now that I don’t have the time to fuss with spending a couple of hours chrooting in and fixing Nvidia stuff, I just swapped to endeavorOS sway community edition (and made sure none of my PCs have Nvidia anything in them) and haven’t had an issue yet.
Yep, the only time things have broken in Arch for me has been with Nvidia driver updates.
Yep. Funnily enough, never really had any issues with the drivers on a desktop, only on mobile, mostly switching between integrated and discrete. But after messing with them on my laptop for a few years, you better bet my laptop was only running Intel integrated and my desktop runs on amd.
I used to do much distro hopping coming from gentoo and settling down with endeavour. My tip for all of you: use lvm for everything outside boot, root and swap (vms, home, games). That way a complete reinstall just takes minutes.
That doesn’t happen. When it breaks, it’s always recoverable, and it very very very rarely breaks (>10 years Arch user here, never lost sleep about it)
I’d guess that keeping configs in Ansible would reduce that setup time to an hour or two.
I’ve been dailying the exact same arch installation since 2014 without reinstalling it a single time.
Now to be fair I did have it non-bootable at several points. Worst of which was a PAM update which broke it completely because the new config was in a
.pacnewfile and the old one was not compatible anymore. But since it was a edge-case there was no forum post about it. Still recovered it just fine after an hour or so of troubleshooting.It’s all open-source and usually decently documented. The only reason anyone should have to reinstall a Linux desktop is lack of experience, but I would always advise to persevere because troubleshooting my system is how I gained much of my expertise. If that’s not what you want, stick to Debian.
Around 10 years here. Some issues, but much less time wasted in total than if I had done “dist-upgrade”s the whole time.
One huge advantage of a rolling distro is that generally only one thing can break at a time :)
whats dist-upgrade? this is the first time ive heard of it
It’s what Debian and similar distributions use to switch from one stable release to the next. This happens every half year for Ubuntu and every blue moon for Debian, which makes it a significantly more error-prone process than updating Arch every week in my experience.
The LTS released every other year) is supported 5 years.
Oof, that’s probably almost a full reinstall when you upgrade, depending on how stable your stack is. A lot of services will will have breaking config changes in that time frame.
The only issue I ever had was Arch ARM changing the naming convention for network devices and making me have to plug the first Raspberry Pi that I upgraded into a monitor to debug what was going on.
This was annoying for sure, but less annoying than using a 6 year old Python version like the Red Hat Enterprise Linux at work…
I see your 6 year old python version and raise you RHEL5 running python 2.5 in 2022.
That thing didn’t even have a base Exception class.
I use Debian testing for… 20 years? I had serious problems with it. Twice. Nothing unrepairable, but still I needed another machine with internet to fix the problem. I suppose that is ok stability-wise for 20 years.
Sounds like the exact reason that official debian backports came into existence.
Obligatory reference to NixOS.
This but new Linux users. They get attracted to the worse newbies distros every time
What’s the best one, apart from Mint?
Pop was mine,
Yep I outgrew it and moved on to better and worse distros. But pop helped me kick windows to the kerb
Min- oh.
I don’t really know a bunch of distros, but I helped convert some normies so here’s a list of pain points I rather not have as a first experience
- No rolling distro. While some people may never see an issue in their life, some may see it right away. Bad first impression (Someone insisted on starting on fedora, then noticed the hard way that the current Nvidia drivers were incompatible with the shipped kernel)
- easy Nvidia driver install (only for gamers on Nvidia)
- Has a gui app store
- has a common package manager that is often shown in tutorials (like apt. You always see exemple apt commands)
- sudo is configured
- doesn’t have a DE that tries to revolutionize UX
New users are dumb, so it needs to be easy for them
Sudo is configured in the Debian installer, if you click the “root not allowed to log in” checkbox. So it literally checks all your boxes.
Oh? Didn’t know about that. Thanks
Just checked, and sadly it’s not as straightforward as that.
Sudo is configured if you leave the password field blank for the root user.
Which is of course documented in the installation guide, but hardly anyone ever reads that.RTFM I guess
the current Nvidia drivers were incompatible with the shipped kernel
A more common issue with Nvidia is older hardware no longer being supported by Nvidia’s current drivers and the kernel not supporting the old drivers. For older cards, you need to run kernel 6.8 or older for the binary drivers to work. The open source Nouveau driver is noticeably slower and getting hardware accelerated video to work can be difficult. So you can easily end up with mesa-llvm, meaning your CPU emulates OpenGL.
The easiest way to get this to work is to install Linux Mint 22.1.
Just use nyarch /s
I have this, but in Windows 11. I’m stuck.
TFW Windows drops everything you’re doing to automatically install unstable updates
Best feeling ever.
I had an update today knock out my wireless card. We’re living on the edge.
Ooh fun! I didn’t get that one!
Windows 11 will never touch my home machines, but I still need to use Windows for a couple things. I’m so happy there’s Windows 10 LTSC ioT.
If you want up-to-date rolling release packages without living dangerously, I recommend openSUSE Tumbleweed. It breaks way less than most other rolling distros such as Arch. I don’t know how they achieve it but they do.
I have many other things I’d rather do on my computer, than mess around with the OS. I just want one that works and stays out of my way. Oh, and doesn’t spy on me.
Best of both worlds:
- install boring stable distro
- use Homebrew to install bleeding edge stuff, separately from the base system.
Still feels like a hat on a hat. Unless you’re on bleeding edge hardware doing something truly novel with the OS, I’m not sure why a selective opt-in log of various bolt-ons and patches improves your experience.
Computers, at their heart, are still just a place you go to manage spreadsheets, email other people those spreadsheets, and pirate entertainment. So you’re always left asking the burning question “How will this patch improve my experience with spreadsheets?” And 99.5% of the time, the answer is “It won’t”.
I think you meant to say nix lol.
Is Homebrew any good on Linux tho?
Homebrew is supported on Ubuntu, Debian, and Fedora.
I use it on my recent Linux Mint install. Mint has pretty old packages or enormously bloated flatpacks, that come with limitations.
neovim only came in an ancient version, that doesn’t support lazyvim. Nicotine+ came as ancient from the Mint packages or as a 4 GB monster via flatpack.
I used Homebrew and everything installed quickly in current versions and worked like a breeze.
The great thing about Homebrew is that removing it is as easy as
rm -r /home/linuxbrewNix is great as well of course and very powerful. Can be a bit of a bitch to write all the config files though.
Use Guix/Nix, have your cake and eat it
Well, if you’re okay using 3+ years old versions of various software…
Gentoo
*/* ~amd64isn’t unstable. If I have to use 5 year old packages with bugs long fixed, then I am getting unstable“I’m on the bleeding edge of Linux! I get the most advanced features the distro allows! Yeah, it may periodically brick my home system from time to time, but its worth it when I can get…”
reorganizing the symlink layout of the NVIDIA firmware
“… which I literally cannot live without”.
I’ve been using Debian SID for for like 50 years now without any issues.
LTS is all fun and games and stability until someone releases an update with features that I really really want right now. This is why I keep coming back to KDE neon.
I like Fedora for my desktop. Close enough to upstream to get the latest features, but not so bleeding edge that it’s unstable.
And it’s Linus’s distro of choice.
Yeah, but he has stated that he really doesn’t have an opinion. He just happened to install Fedora on the family PC a long time ago and now he neither wants to deal with two separate distros, nor switch the whole household over.
