I realized my VLC was broke some point in the week after updating Arch. I spend time troubleshooting then find a forum post with replies from an Arch moderator saying they knew it would happen and it’s my fault for not wanting to read through pages of changelogs. Another mod post says they won’t announce that on the RSS feed either. I thought I was doing good by following the RSS but I guess that’s not enough.
I’ve been happily using Arch for 5 years but after reading those posts I’ve decided to look for a different distro. Does anyone have recommendations for the closest I can get to Arch but with a different attitude around updating?
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Based on what you describe, I would strongly recommend going with OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. It’s just as bleeding-edge as Arch, but all packages go through automatic testing to ensure they won’t break anything, and if some manual actions are required, it will offer options right before update. Moreover, snapper in enabled by default on btrfs partitions, and it makes snapshots automatically before updates, so even if something breaks somehow, reverting takes a few seconds.
One small footnote is that you’ll need to add separate VLC repo or Packman for VLC to have full functionality - proprietary codecs are one of the rare things official repos don’t feature for legal reasons.
On Arch rant: I’ve always been weirded out by this “Arch is actually stable, you just have to watch every news post for manual interventions before every update, oh, and you better update very often” attitude.
Like, no, this is not called stable or even usable for general audience. Updating your system and praying for it not to break while studying everything you need to know is antithetical to stability and makes for an awful daily driver.
I’m running Arch for a very long time. I agree this is not a distro for general audience. I disagree, however, that it is not stable. When I’m doing work I don’t update my system. I enjoy my stable configuration and when I have time, I do update, I curiously watch which amazing foss software had an update. And I try them. I check my new firefox. I check gimp’s new features. etc… or if I have to do something I easily fix it, like in no time because I know my OS. Then I enjoy my stable system again.
Do you want to know what’s unstable? When I had my new AMD GPU that I built my own kernel for, because the driver wasn’t in mainline. And it randomly crashed the system. That’s unstable.
Or when I installed my 3rd DE in ubuntu and apt couldn’t deal with it, it somehow removed X.org. And I couldn’t fix it. That’s also something I don’t want. Arch updates are much better than this.
Guess we simply apply different meaning to the word “stable”. (you do you, though, and if it’s alright with your workflow, yay!)
To me, stable means reliably working without any special maintenance. Arch requires you to update once in a while (otherwise your next update might get borked), and when you update, you may have to resolve conflicts and do manual interventions.
Right now, I run OpenSUSE Slowroll (beta, not released yet) on one of my machines and EndeavourOS on the other. The former recently had to update 1460 elements, and one intervention was required - package manager asked me if I want to hold one package for a while to avoid potential dependency issues. Later, it was fixed, and otherwise it went without a hitch. This is the worst behavior I’ve seen on this distribution, and so to me it renders “acceptably unstable” for general use (although I wouldn’t give that to my grandma).
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Nice to know!
OpenSUSE TUMBLEWEED, always updating, but they have an OpenQA tool that checks the builds for success, and if for some reason something did go bad you just reboot and pick the previous (automatic) snapshot. Lots of GUI tools to manage the system and packages via the various Yast2-GUI apps.
Plus, their equivalent of the AUR, the open build system, can actually be used to build packages for any system.
Thanks! This wasn’t a distro I knew much about but it’s looking like one I will try out. The way they test packages is exactly the kind of choices around updates I’m looking for.
I like how many options Yast exposes. I enjoyed learning how to do most of what I need in the terminal with Arch but being able to do everything I need through GUI helps when I’m not able to recall a lot in the moment but still need to do a thing.
The repos have a lot of stuff, but if you ever get stuck for q package you can install debs with alien command, or find community repoes here https://software.opensuse.org/ They typically offer 1 click installs, or direct rpm downloads
This is probably the best answer.
Arch is really for those who like to troubleshoot and actively maintain things when they break.
I’m pretty decent with linux and for the most part, I can fix arch when it breaks, but I don’t have the time for that. For that reason, I use Fedora and recommend mint.
I don’t understand this, I’ve been using arch for 3 years, I update every couple of days and I’ve never had anything break, is it an aur thing? I tend to stay away it
I did break my endevaourOS after I was unlucky enough to upgrade when grub got a huge non-bootable bug and probably there may have been some app bugs since which are minor tbh. Like currently I can’t run the bauh app, because it misses “bauh” in the python packages (lol).
Good for you that EOS now runs on systemd-boot, not grub lol. It grabs the EFI lines automatically from the boot partition and it just works. Personally, booting should be as simple as possible, as little personalisation as possible, make it just work.
I’ve been using arch for almost a decade, and haven’t had the system break.
I also don’t use aur helpers as I don’t like or trust them - I do tend to read PKGBUILDs before using them.
Still shocked that OP thought a new opt-depends was “lost in pages and pages of changelogs”.
I sometimes forget or delay updates because of life and have over 500 updates. Skim through them if they are patches, minors or majors, and just run. In any case, my disk’s are brtfs and I have timeshift for backups. If anything breaks horribly a live USB can restore it, if anything is weird I can restore it via UI. It autoruns every time I run Pacman and stores 5 copies of the “before” state. It also creates a daily copy for the last 5 days so 10 copies in total.
It’s more than enough that if something fails I’ll have something to go back to, and since it internally works with something akin to hardlinks snapshots don’t take that much space.
I’ve not had issues since setting it up, so, great.
I use Debian, for the stability.
https://endeavouros.com/ https://garudalinux.org/ both arch based maybe you will like the forum style better and they will probably also give you this information.
I like Garuda community.
I do too. Though to be fair to OP, Garuda didn’t advise about the vlc problem either. I had to go hunting on my own to figure it out. But anyway, still loving Garuda and it is much less painful than any other OS I’ve ever used.
I doubt the forum style is really the issue.
EndeacourOS, one of my favourite distros, uses the same packages (the real Arch ones). So everything he says here applies.
i mean the communication style on the forum.
i think almost all arch based distros use the arch repos plus there own. i think only manjaro does there own thing.
Very true though most have more in their own repos than EOS does.
Sorry for not answering your questions, I haven’t used arch before. But dang that sucks I’ve been wanting to try arch for a little while but I didn’t know they would happily push updates they know will break certain programs.
It’s more like they expect you to do more reading than I would like to do. If I had been reading more of what they would like, I would have known I was expected to make a decision before updating and install an additional package. So from that view, they didn’t push a breaking update.
Been that way since the beginning. It’s an experimental distro, not for production systems.
Gentoo, honestly.
The community is much more friendly, the system is probably more arch than arch. The downside is compiling, but big packages have binaries now, and small packages build and install just about as fast as a binary distro.
Good hunting!
This might be the answer really, Gentoo is my favorite distro in theory. In practice I’m a lazy ass that just ends up installing binary packages for everything and missing the AUR.
I’m lazy too!
Gentoo stable scratches that itch quite effectively.
Front loading though, that’ll take some work!
Thanks for the suggestion. I enjoyed how much I learned from picking out packages to get Arch working. I’m getting a similar excitement reading about Gentoo use flags. Giving it serious consideration.
The problem with Gentoo is that you can’t install anything in a hurry.
Run VMs on Arch:
- pacman -S virt-manager
- Done.
Run VMs on Gentoo?
- Read the Wiki
- Find out which USE-Flags you will want
- Fnd out the dependencies it’s based on (QEMU), read that Wiki entry too
- See what USE-Flags you want
- See what Kernel options are needed. Recompile Kernel if changes were necessary.
- emerge -av app-emulation/virt-manager
- See if you have read the Wikis of all dependencies.
- Install.
- Read the dependencies wikis for how to set things up.
- Done
Yes, this is an extreme example, but many large packages are a bit like this.
That’s why you will tripple-check if you really need sonething before installing it on Gentoo, or you are like me and install Boxes in a Flatpak instead.Personally i like Gentoo more than Arch because of all the buttons and knobs, and once it’s set up it does not need more time than Arch, but installing stuff is sometimes hard.
I loved Gentoo, it was the first distro I actually stuck with for more than a couple months, I used for 7 years or so.
I went to arch because something broke (probably my fault) and I needed to write a paper that was due soon, and compilation of the required software took too long, so I switched so it wouldn’t happen again. Arch was sold to me as “Gentoo with binaries”.
That being said I think you’re being unfair. I read the Arch’s wiki before installing unknown packages, mostly skimming, just like I did with Gentoo but Gentoo’s docs were somewhat superior. The docs were one of the things I missed.
Most of the time I didn’t read about the use-flags, except for big packages like Gnome. I only changed the use-flags if I knew for sure I wouldn’t use that functionality, so all the maybes and what-ifs still got compiled. TBH fiddling too much with use-flag feels like a newbie thing. On Arch there are actually more steps: I install the big multi-packages then uninstall the ones I don’t want, because those are less than the ones I want, and I don’t risk missing something.
On neither Gentoo or Arch I read the docs of the dependencies unless there’s a specific reason.
Same goes for the Kernel. Don’t disable things you don’t know about, enable all things you maybe will use and all the what-ifs. Once I knew what these were, setting this was quick and simple because they are actually just a couple options.
All that only has to do once, because once you know, even if you reinstall the OS you don’t have to investigate again unless something goes wrong because of changes.
The community of Gentoo is great! Arch’s community is okay.
With both Arch and Gentoo you have to learn about the system and make choices. With Gentoo you have to make more choices but making them and learning is easier than Arch. If OP used Gentoo this would have gone smoother.
I agree that the Gentoo wiki is almost always better than the Arch wiki (and would recommend it to any user), but i really doubt installing complicated packages is remotely as hard as on Gentoo.
While i have never used Arch before, i did use Manjaro, and there stuff was always just install the package and be done. I never had to alter the Kernel config, and all program features were just there. I also had VMs on Manjaro, and i do not remember any manual configuration (though that was many years ago, so maybe i misremember).
Recently i wanted to encode a video in ffmpeg, but it didn’t work. After a bit of searching i found that the codec requires a use-flag to be set. Classic Gentoo moment.
It’s not that i dislike Gentoo. In fact i do not consider returning to Arch (but i might switch to NixOS if my Gentoo install breaks). But i wouldn’t switch to any other distro.
It’s just that Gentoo is configured in a way that is so minimal by default that even basic use-cases require changes in the Kernel config: systemd? Kernel config. Bluetooth? Kernel config. LUKS? Kernel config. Amdgpu? Yes, exactly. BTRFS? Yes. Blender? Yeah OK, that goes without kernel config.
And the worst about the Kernel config: You don’t know which values are set by default. You might just end up in nconfig realizing that the values were already set.Then there is the instability in the distKernel (which i use). I think i started with Kernel 5.10LTS ish. Every upgrade went well until like 6.1 LTS, when Emerge complained about i think module ordering or something. It would not emerge a newer Kernel any more, which made me reset my Kernel config and redo it entirely because i thought Kernel 5 and 6 configs might be incompatible. That worked (somehow) until 6.6 LTS, which i wanted to install at version 6.6.6 LTS. But emerge complained it could not install it. I waited and ignored the update, and eventually got trough at version 6.6.20 or so. After that it refused to update again, which made me blacklist all non LTS kernels. I am now on 6.12 LTS, even though i am not a LTS guy, simply because i don’t want the hassle.
And still, after all of this effort for being minimal, it boots in like 20s, while Arch does it in like 3 or so. Gentoo hates me.
I’d recommend opensuse tumbleweed. It’s still a rolling distribution, it still has more bleeding edge software, but its package manager, zypper, does atomic updates, so if something doesn’t install right it rolls it back.
That’s the real thing for me: how painless is it to live with long term? After I’ve installed a couple of weird things, and configured some stuff custom - is this a distro that keeps rolling into the future, or is it one that makes me wish I had the time to re-install from scratch every 6 months?
I’ve run tumbleweed for quite a while with no issues. I’ve never had to reinstall it.
I prefer Debian-Testing. Basically, a rolling release, but not unstable. Arch is akin to Debian -Sid, which is unstable. The latest packages are brought in to -Sid after some rudimentary testing on -experimental. But only the stuff that make it and are solid on -sid, make it to -testing. Basically, Debian has 2 layers of siphoning bugs before they even make it to -testing. And that’s why the -stable branch is so solid, because whatever makes it there, has to go through the 3 branches.
So if you like rolling releases with much newer packages, consider -testing. The easiest way is to wait for the Trixie release, and then do the manual update to -testing by changing the repository names (there are online tutorials about it). The other way is to get a -testing iso, but these usually are broken because most people “upgrade” their installed distro to testing instead of just install it outright.
I’ve been using -testing for over a year now with 0 problems. Even Google is using -testing internally! I also have had Arch installed and endeavouros, and have had 3 problems that I had to fix in 5 months.
What do you do for security updates?
There are security updates on testing. Maybe not as fast as they’re on Sid, but they are.
You can mitigate this with Timeshift
I like having Timeshift in place for if I can’t figure out what went wrong.
In this case, I didn’t use VLC until days after I had updated so my mind didn’t go to an issue from updating right away. I make a high amount of accidental inputs while using laptops and I don’t always notice so a lot of my issues end up being unintentional configuration changes from weeks or months ago.
If that happened to me I’d not want to deal with that again either.
What has made arch work for me is BTRFS filesystem with the grub module grub-btrfs. It gives you BTRFS snapshots you can load into at grub and with snapper and auto snap it will automatically create a restore point before updating.
It’s worked flawlessly and thanks to BTRFS black magic the snapshots don’t take up much storage space. I also recommend BTRFS assistant in the aur if you don’t mind using a gui.
If you want an easy arch setup + friendly community forums + easy BTRFS setup I can’t recommended EndevourOS enough.
yeah i had that happen to me too, didn’t look in the update screen because updates before went with a breeze but i took another look after VLC wouldn’t play anything, it was something with the VLC plugins and i needed to reinstall those, just had to do
sudo pacamn -S vlc-plugins-allto get VLC to play video files back, but man, that should have been in the news imo.I had the same issue, hadn’t found the solution yet (also didn’t looked too hard) and while I sort of agree that it should have been in the news I also understand why it’s not (it only affects people with VLC, and not everyone uses VLC, if every time a package gets split it was in the news the news would be all about that). That being said I think that there were other solutions that would have been much better, namely split the package with a mandatory dependency on vlc-plugins-all and convert that to optional dependency in a month or two, that way everything keeps working as is for people during the transition, but after a short while it can be modularized.
Debians testing branch might be a good shout. Packages stay pretty up-to-date and usually stuff doesn’t break. Worst case you can pull a package from unstable when needed.
debian testing is for testing purposes only. you should never daily drive debian testing (unless you know what you’re doing)
also, we’re about to get a new debian release (trixie), this is literally the worst time you could choose to daily drive debian testing
This is what drove me to Debian. I like stability, I don’t need cutting edge, simple as.
Debian is my go to for setting up a new server because of the stability and project longevity.
The excitement of features from the cutting edge gives me free energy to start new projects that I don’t experience if I wait for the stable release.
The excitement of features from the cutting edge
I don’t understand how Debian limits that. You can use Debian for your distribution BUT for whatever you want to be cutting edge, use whatever alternative method you want. It can be alternative package managers, e.g.
ambut if you want the absolute bleeding edge, go on the repository of the project, get a specific branch, build, install, use. That’s absolutely no problem with even Debian stable.I’m genuinely confused at comments implying that have a stable distribution means having outdated software.
For me, at least, that feeling is because I just like knowing my software is up to date. Only rarely do I come across an issue that is solved by a newer version, but that’s just me I’m sure. I definitely see the appeal to not having to think about your desktop applications individually.
knowing my software is up to date
Wouldn’t that be solved with random notifications saying software X has been updated to version Y.Z even though it might not be true?
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I had the same problem, i did start with arch ,but man i remember doing a update after 4 days(4Gb of new updates) and my system faild to boot. From that moment i went debian route.
