And of course I’m installing Linux on it. Install went well, even the fingerprint sensor built in to the laptop works.

Mostly this will be a school and DND machine but always nice to have a functional laptop for whatever else I may need it for.

  • T4V0@lemmy.world
    1·
    23 minutes ago

    If you upgrade often, you’re more likely to run into buggy releases. Just upgrade less often and reduce your likelihood of installing buggy latest releases. Just like Debian and other such distros do. You’re in charge on Arch.

    While it’s true you can do that, then why choose Arch in the first place? One of the key elements in the philosophy for Arch is: Modernity, i.e. to always have the latest version to be the stable version, aka the rolling release model. You can choose not to upgrade, but it can be a immense footgun. There’s a reason it’s harder to upgrade between release versions in distros like Debian.

    Besides being a stable release doesn’t guarantee no bugs either, only that they don’t change. Meaning as long as the bugs are minor or can be bypassed, it’s still considered stable.

    This is only one way of mitigating risk that you can do, but I do concede that Arch does not take every precaution that other distros do to ensure that broken packages are not released. They do however follow up with news posts if there’s an issue, with info about what to do. This is an awesome thing.

    No doubt, but you do have to keep track of this. People non familiar with it may find their systems temporarily borked if they don’t. One good mention for those of interest is their incredible documentation, it can also be used as a reference for other distros too.

    But still, I haven’t had an issue in over a decade, upgrading packages probably once a week or so.

    There’s no “maintenance” other than what you create for yourself. This Arch = “maintenance” (whatever that entails in everyone’s mind) nonsense has got to be put to bed.

    In over a decade using Arch, I have encountered bugs or changes when upgrading packages, following a similar upgrade cadence. I also used packages that have been deprecated from the official repository, and then maintaned by users in the AUR. These are things that break the users experience and require maintenance. Regardless if it’s a bug or not, or if it happens once or twice a year, the user has to pay close attention.