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?
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!
You have to watch the factory mailing list and make any manual interventions for Tumbleweed, and frankly, you should be watching the news and taking any action required no matter the os.
A decent daily driver distro for regular user should not break on blind update - at most, it should warn the user automatically before applying updates. If user is expected to check news every time they want to update their system - it is not a good fit for anyone but enthusiasts.
Where did you get the idea that Arch is a daily driver for regular user? The very distro that tells in big letters: stuff can break, you better watch out on updates? The very distro that has command-line install process with chroot-like commands as official one?
Plenty of people seriously propose it as such.
It is not - at least if you’re not an enthusiast happy to tinker with your system all the time.
Yup, it really is not. Those plenty of people are doing a big disservice to others with such proposing. I am sad to hear it
Anyone who is not curious enough to type
yay -Pwbefore typingyayshould probably stick with something like Windows. And even then, you should watch out for the rare manual intervention.Edit: Tone.
I don’t think it makes sense to gatekeep Linux only to those who has time, energy, and dedication to continuously check for necessary interventions and to familiarize themselves with all the terminal utilities in the first place.
That is a sort of elitism we need to carefully avoid - one, because otherwise it would halven the desktop Linux community, and two, because there’s a huge group of people out there who need what Linux offers, but cannot dedicate themselves to it in the way enthusiasts do.
For them, there must be an option to push the button and get a smooth update, with everything resolved automatically or prompted in a user-friendly way. Arch is not that.
You feel comfy doing this - alright, no one stops you, Arch is great and has a purpose. But we should never put blame on users for not using their system The Arch Way™, because it’s too technical, too engaged, and is just a poor fit for most. People will not and should not accommodate for this just to use their system. There’s no need to.
If someone chose Arch and complains that it breaks things, it could be useful to point out Arch doesn’t have required guardrails to make it operable in a way they expect, and direct the user to other distributions that have them and potentially least painful ways to migrate.
Having tried Arch and its derivatives, and recognizing their strong points, I can absolutely tell the person needs another distribution, and that’s alright! Whatever fits anybody is up to them. And for stable rolling release experience without the need for manual checking (but also without some of the power features of Arch mainly geared toward enthusiasts) there’s OpenSUSE Tumbleweed.
Edit: Tone.