• bloogoose@lemmy.zip
    2491·
    2 months ago

    I’m not one of those Arch evangelicals, but this isn’t true at all now.

    • fartsparkles@lemmy.world
      621·
      2 months ago

      100%. I’ve got servers running arch for the past 5 years or so and they’re the most stable systems I’ve got. I got so tired of the painful upgrade paths on “stable” distros so decided to switch a server to a rolling release.

      After I found arch got security patches into the repos faster than the stable distros could backport, I decided to switch them all over.

      I’m even a mad man and have them self update with a script that checks informant (or something, can’t actually remember) for installed packages against news. If no installed packages are found in news, it continues with the scheduled update.

      It’s glorious.

  • sanpo@sopuli.xyz
    811·
    2 months ago

    Ironically, it’s the rolling release that’s much more stable for me.

    “Stable” distros often had a long and risky process of upgrading to the next major release.

    Meanwhile, my Arch install has been pretty damn stable for over 10 years and went through several different PCs.

      • Eggymatrix@sh.itjust.works
        321·
        2 months ago

        Sure bcachefs sounds like a pretty good idea, especially since the author thinks his AI coding assistant is sentient and a “her”. What is it with file system maintainers and mental illness…

        • ViatorOmnium@piefed.socialEnglish
          22·
          2 months ago

          From what I know, the AI Assistant is the least of Kent Overstreet’s problems. If anything it’s a blessing he’s fixanting on a random number generator instead of risking becoming Hans Raiser 2.0.

        • Aatube@lemmy.dbzer0.com
          1·
          2 months ago

          it seems there’s elevated adverse behavior in people who work on things that combine deep hardware and software in general. see jailbreaking, emulation, hyprland, something

    • ranzispa@mander.xyz
      4·
      2 months ago

      Fair, I’m always scared to upgrade to a new Debian release and the process is always painful. But that happens every couple years and I can take a week or two to look into it before doing it.

      Every time I did pacman -Syu it was a Russian roulette. Most of the times everything was fine, but often enough there was a problem and something was broken and I had to spend a couple days figuring out what was the problem.

      • Ooops@feddit.org
        1·
        2 months ago

        I’m always scared to upgrade to a new Debian release and the process is always painful.

        At least in my personal experience this is one of the big triggers for distro hopping. Most of the people I know that stuck to one distro for years and years are on a rolling release.

    • eleijeep@piefed.socialEnglish
      1·
      2 months ago

      You’re confusing two different meanings of stable. When people refer to “stable” distros such as Debian, they are referring to the meaning of stable as “unchanging,” not the meaning of stable as “doesn’t crash.”

      A rolling release distro by that definition cannot be stable.

  • KindaABigDyl@programming.dev
    59·
    2 months ago

    I wonder how many Arch haters have actually used Arch and ever ran into a breaking issue.

    In my 8 years of daily driving Arch, I have had 1 ever, and it was only bad bc I didn’t know of BTRFS yet.

    That happened 3 years in, and I went on a new distro-hopping spree in between, trying Fedora, NixOS, and others, and they had actual problems. Not “oh an update broke my system and was fixed in a day.”

    So now I’ve been back on Arch for more years.

    This whole “Arch is always breaking and takes so much maintenance” is a myth. In reality, Arch is the most stable, because it packages everything Vanilla. Everything works the “standard” way. On Debian, things decay, and then some stuff that’s new breaks with some stuff that’s old. On Fedora, there is a Red-Hat tax: configs in weird places, strange scripts, software missing from main repos (COPR sucks btw). On Arch, it’s just “normal” Linux; and that works

    • Badabinski@kbin.earth
      15·
      2 months ago

      This mirrors my experience. I -Syu on a weekly basis, spend about 3 minutes doing pacnews, and then I’m done.

    • NekuSoul@lemmy.nekusoul.de
      13·
      2 months ago

      Yeah, I’ve noticed there’s this subsection of people that have a completely wrong understanding of what the term “stable” means in the world of distros, and that it often creates as many problems as it solves, particularly on a desktop PC, or even worse, a gaming PC.

      And for there record: Stable just means that things don’t change. That doesn’t mean it contains less bugs, is easier to use or is more secure. And on the flip side it doesn’t mean that distros that are not “stable” are necessarily “unstable” in any shape or form.

    • Baleine@jlai.lu
      8·
      2 months ago

      Interesting, my two friends with Arch keep breaking their system 😅 They say its not their fault though!

    • Ooops@feddit.org
      5·
      2 months ago

      I wonder how many Arch haters have actually used Arch and ever ran into a breaking issue.

      A lot… they install it, screw up because they didn’t bother to read the instructions, then did the usual… a new install.

      Those who pass the first basic barrier to just chroot into the system and fix a simple mistake or roll back a package for the few hours it takes to get fixed instead of starting fresh usually stay for a long time…

      In fact with the people I know there is a correlation between either “oh, I don’t bother to fix anything and just do a fresh install (that idea is especially persistent in Windows users)” or “there’s a big distro upgrade that had issues” and distro hopping. Once you settled on a rolling release and learned the basics in terms of fixing stuff the urge to hop yet another time vanishes for many.

      • hraegsvelmir@ani.social
        3·
        2 months ago

        “oh, I don’t bother to fix anything and just do a fresh install (that idea is especially persistent in Windows users)”

        In fairness, not everyone who did that was just trying to avoid looking into things and learning the correct way. I can’t be the only one who had Arch on a system before getting a smartphone, so early days, that was my sole means of accessing the internet, so if it went down hard and I didn’t immediately understand enough of the error message to at least have an idea of man pages to give a read, I didn’t really have a whole heck of a lot else available to continue trouble shooting. These days, worst case, I can turn on my laptop or grab my phone and search things until I understand the issue and find a solution.

        That said, nearly all of my system breaking issues were self-inflicted by trying to do things I didn’t fully understand, just because I thought the end result sounded cool, or not checking the news and unwittingly doing the exact thing the latest post was warning people to be aware of and not do with some sort of major upgrade/change in the base system.

    • rumschlumpel@feddit.org
      2·
      2 months ago

      Debian decays? Can’t relate, I’ve often been running Debian releases until they almost fell out of support (happens on servers) and they were always rock solid after I set them up. It’s only ever an issue if you want to run new software versions without some kind of virtual environment, and generally I just don’t care about that.

      • Ooops@feddit.org
        4·
        2 months ago

        I think you can get problems once you are a full release cycle behind the last supported one.

        Funnily enough it’s mostly an issue with mirrors and signing keys, so basically the same fix Arch users need if they are behind for many months: update the packages for keys and mirrors first, everyting else afterwards.

  • otacon239@lemmy.world
    29·
    2 months ago

    I use EndeavourOS for my primary gaming setup and will sometimes go a month or more before I remember to update again. Even with a relatively modern nVidia card, it seems to keep up just fine.

    That being said, every vanilla Arch experience has been a disaster by the end and while it’s not the same situation as the meme, you very much have to have a ton of prior knowledge to get a system that actually feels personal and by the point it’s personal enough, getting support for your setup is nigh impossible because it’s so bespoke.

  • floquant@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    28·
    2 months ago

    My machines got borked every time I tried to do a Debian or Fedora dist-upgrade following the official guide, like 4 times total. Rolling updates on Arch require manual intervention once in a blue moon and haven’t broken my system since I got rid of Nvidia

    • sudo@programming.dev
      7·
      2 months ago

      Ubuntu will actively break itself via snapd at like 2am on a Sunday.

      Fedora could not do a fully system update on a 1GB VPS because dnf would OOM.

      The dumbest thing I’ve seen Arch do in over a decade of using it is put RabbitMQ in its official repos while also rolling the latest version of Erlang which RabbitMQ doesn’t support.

    • HCSOThrowaway@lemmy.worldEnglish
      15·
      2 months ago

      Isn’t Debian pretty clear that they don’t support upgrades and it’s likely to break if you try?

      • pmk@piefed.caEnglish
        5·
        2 months ago

        No, you may be thinking about combining repos from different releases aka frankendebian? That isn’t supported. Upgrades are definitely supported.

        • HCSOThrowaway@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          2 months ago

          All I know is I was ready to go through the process to go from 12 to 13 and their documentation was full of disclaimers saying that it’s not officially supported.

          I did my best, and it broke.

          • pmk@piefed.caEnglish
            1·
            2 months ago

            Can you show me this documentation? Debian famously takes great care to ensure a good upgrade path with thorough instructions, like herehttps://www.debian.org/releases/stable/release-notes/upgrading.en.html

            • HCSOThrowaway@lemmy.worldEnglish
              1·
              2 months ago

              I’m 99% sure I was going with their official documentation, which you linked just there.

              I can’t speak for what I read or how I interpreted it ~6 months ago, other than to say I understood upgrading was not supported and I was SOL that mine broke.

              No, I’ve never used “sloppy backports” (as the only warning of lack of support I can currently find lists as a problem) and I knew that back then too, so that wasn’t the issue.

    • diaphragmwp@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      4·
      2 months ago

      nixCraft (at cyberciti <dot> biz) is a site that has been slop publishing tutorials for everything ever possible with common unixy commands. And also shit like “30 Cool Open Source Software I Discovered in 2013”. It often calls Unix “Linux”, other times it uses both “Unix/Linux” for some reason, and sometimes it even says “on BSD, MacOS” for flags that only function on GNU coreutils. It started pre-AI, so it’s like clickhole but for “installed Fedora yesterday” people (although I would imagine most traffic being “I’ve been using this for 24 years and forgot some flag”).

  • mrmanager@lemmy.today
    24·
    2 months ago

    My arch system is so stable it’s boring. Year after year, just runs. Doesn’t slow down, doesn’t install crapware.

    So I dont know. Maybe I should install something that requires problem shooting but I’m too lazy.

  • Valmond@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    24·
    2 months ago

    Linux Mint user here, I have no idea if Arc is that complicated, I don’t care really. All I need is a rock stable system where I can do things like developing, or just use it as “a computer”.

    I reboot every month or three, and feel extra happy after any interaction with m$ windows.

    Life’s good 😊

  • GaumBeist@lemmy.ml
    20·
    2 months ago

    What about you? When did you choose stability over the rolling release?

    This is such sloppy engagement baiting. If it was just a hot take shitting all over one of the larger linux communities, that would be one thing, but to follow it up with a “let me know in the comments” just makes it all feel disingenuous and like somebody is being sponsored by NordVPN or Incogni to post their ragebait

  • e8d79@discuss.tchncs.de
    211·
    2 months ago

    Fedora Immutable Desktop users when Arch and Debian users fight about whose system is more stable. (I use Fedora Kinoite btw)