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?
IMHO the actual problem here is the Arch moderator being an ass.
This happens in all operating systems from time to time. An update kills an app. Usually, the app is wildly out of date and hanging on to the last vestiges of a deprecated call that finally gets removed. I recently experienced this with V4L (for OBS virtual camera) and a kernel update in NixOS. Had one hell of a time tracking it down. It was one of the twice-yearly OS upgrades. Luckily, I had only updated one of my devices, and it still worked on the old one. After tearing apart the changes, I was finally able to specify V4L and a Linux kernel version. Immediately, the problem popped right out. The new kernel now needs a specific value passed for the expected video stream, where it used to use a default if it wasn’t specified.
Apple breaks apps all the time. Windows does, but less so. The difference is usually before an update happens, Windows and Apple have had TONs of people testing on their own teams and their insiders people.
In the end, I just needed to roll back the kernel one revision until the V4L guys make the change, or I needed to recompile V4L myself with the option defaulted to something useful.
I don’t think you can safely get away from this kind of issue. (app incompatibility on upgrade, not mods being an ass)
Debian or Mint seem to be pretty welcoming and easy going to get rid of the asshole issues, but chances are, you’re going to break something eventually, and it’s going to be super hard to figure out why and how to get around it.
I switched from Manjaro to Bazzite on my gaming PC. I don’t have time to read changelogs.
Things went fantastically so I put Kinoite on my laptop. I do a lot more random shit on the laptop so it’s a bit more complicated but so far so good. Atomic distros take getting used to but it still feels less stressful than coming back to my computer after a few days and digging through like 100+ package updates and eventually saying “Fuck it” and just updating blindly.
It didn’t break my system. I refused the update, installed qt6-phonon-backend-mpv, updated the system, and uninstalled everything VLC related. Even though I don’t use the backend there are no VLC packages that I don’t need
I left Arch for the same reason but in relation to my system’s graphics. If you are an end user, an operating system should work for you, not you for the system. I installed Tumbleweed 5 years ago and its snapper tool gives great peace of mind when using a rolling system. My advice, try Tumbleweed, its package manager (zypper) already supports parallel downloads and although it is slower than pacman, it is more complete in package and repository management (an example is what has happened in Arch recently with firmware packages and that requires manual user intervention because pacman cannot make those changes automatically).
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.
Cachy OS has been treating me very well. Perfect all around. Very helpful people and very nice. I am not going anywhere
I’ve tried Endeavour (after failing miserably to do stuff in Arch) and ended up breaking it really bad.
I just went back to Fedora, and haven’t looked back (in 3 months, until the distro-hop urge kicks in again 😁)
I’m running EndeavourOS and waiting for something like this to happen.
I ran Endeavour OS for 3 years, and it had a habit of breaking to no return every couple of months. I still liked it, but just got tired of that issue. Cachy OS has been much better
Is Cachy also Arch based?
Yup.
Use Gentoo, as it is way more stable and can do anything that Arch can.
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.
Even better would be to automatically install vlc-plugins-all for people upgrading, so that it preserves the existing behavior.
So to be clear, you are willing to upend your entire system and potentially your workflow because a single package update was mishandled and because somebody was a little too direct on a forum?
Have you considered Mac OS? Yes, I’m being snarky, but the Linux world isn’t fully user friendly. If you’re unwilling to roll with the punches, it may not actually be for you.
EDIT: I guess tough love from somebody who ran slackware from a stack of physical representations of save buttons is unwelcome. Noted.
You’ve got it right. I appreciate the directiness of the forum moderator because it was a clear signal to me that the Arch community doesn’t value my experience at the level I would like.
Supporting iMacs for 8 years taught me Apple doesn’t value my experience either. I’m happy to upend my system and workflow if it means I’m a step closer to living in the world I want to exist. Most of my life is chosen for me so I want the decisions I have control over to be meaningful to me.
I’m truly sorry that’s the takeaway you got from all this. My (attempted) point was along the lines of “Linux is still the wild west.” If you’re looking for appreciation from random people on the internet, you might be in the wrong place.
Most of my life is chosen for me so I want the decisions I have control over to be meaningful to me.
I get it, probably more than most (my handle isn’t random). But from that very perspective, IMO you have to be able to withstand a few assholes and pick your battles. An asshole in a forum that isn’t even replying to me specifically doesn’t exceed that threshold.
If this is upendable, im sure the next distro will be fun for this user.
Heck, I’m feeling that vibe through this whole thread. I weep for the time these folks get to Senior or Associate levels - if they manage to.
I’m being snarky, but the Linux world isn’t fully user friendly. If you’re unwilling to roll with the punches, it may not actually be for you.
I guess you’re an Arch user, but this is exactly the wrong thinking. Yes, stuff sometimes break for pretty much every distro, but that doesn’t mean we should dismiss people who want stuff to “just work” (which OP went above and beyond). We should absolutely strive to not break stuff, and if it does be humble and polite. Unless you literally want Linux to never become mainstream…
And btw I’ve been using Fedora for ages now, don’t have to follow anything, and when stuff breaks they are generally apologetic about it and try to fix stuff.
Yes, I’m an arch user. But that’s not the point. Even using something like mint, you still have to pay attention. Someone who’s not willing to do that needs a curated operating system. Simple as that.
I also like to watch locally hosted videos from time to time. I also had the problem with VLC. 10 minutes later I had my answer, the problem was fixed, and I went on with my day. I didn’t need to whine about the attitude of someone providing free tech support to someone else, and I didn’t whine about a simple package adjustment.
I’ll say it again. Linux isn’t for everybody. Not yet. It still takes a little bit of grit.
I don’t think the answer OP got falls under “tech support” (there would have had to be support for that). Additionally I don’t think anyone should be subjected to whims of authority figures, regardless of project. Being nice is free
Then you and OP might consider spinning up your own distribution from scratch, because one of the basic facts of life in this world is this: As long as you’re taking advantage of the fruits of somebody else’s labor, you’re also subject to their “whims”.
Whatever, bro
Thank you for your well-reasoned response.
The guy is not saying hello, goodbye, thank you. You think those people are tech support? They’re volonteers. I would be rude too.
Beside, if an dependency issue arise, just fix it. Are you mad because your ego got hurt? There’s a solution in your forum post, idiot.
Calling people idiots is not helping them, it’s insulting them.
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.
In the last three years there’s been a single time I can recall pacman telling me I needed to do a thing.
I copy pasted that warning into google it took me right to the news post. I threw in the commands that the news post said I needed to do.
Nothing broke. So this isn’t like it’s a weekly problem.
Nice to know!
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).
How about NixOS unstable?
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.
