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Distro Focuses
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this post was submitted on 13 Dec 2024
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I've been using Arch since 2014. If I could be arsed, I could write you a looooooooong list of regressions I've had to deal with over the years. For an experienced Linux user, they're usually fairly easy to deal with, but saying you never have to deal with anything is just a lie.
My experience with Arch is basically: it's all very predictable until it isn't and you suddenly find yourself troubleshooting something random like unexplainable bluetooth disconnects caused by a firmware or kernel update.
What you've said is true, though it's a bit of a trade-off -- over the years I've wasted so many hours with those "user friendly" distros because I need a newer version of a dependency, or I need to install something that isn't in the repos. Worst case I have to figure out how to compile it myself.
It's very rare to find something that isn't in the Arch official repos or the AUR. Personally I've found that being on the bleeding edge tends to save me time in the long run, as there's almost no barriers to getting the packages that I need.
Yes, and that's why after more than 10 years I still use Arch. I like having the latest version of things and I'm confident enough in my abilities that I know that if something breaks I can always either find a fix, or at least identify the offending package, hold it back, report the bug and wait for the issue to be resolved.
There are times where it can be trying though. The first plasma 6 releases for example were rough. More recently, I've also been having issues with 6.11 and 6.12 kernels and my ax200 wifi that I only recently found a fix to. My wifi would freeze whenever I started streaming video from the PC to my TV, but only in kernels after 6.11. Turning off TCP segmentation offloading with ethtool resolved it (
ethtool -K wlan0 tso off). You don't want to know how long I had been pulling my hair out at that issue until I found the fix.Did you consider that the problems you have might not be problems that other people experience? I very highly doubt our two systems are at all similar. Your experience is just that, yours, and so you don’t have any right to be arbitor over whether or not I’m lying.
That's such a cop-out answer and totally missing the point. I've run Arch on 4 different systems, and yes I had different issues on each and sometimes issues that hit across the board.
At the end of the day, whether or not this was just my personal experience doesn't matter. What matters is that the issues were always caused by what Arch is: a unstable rolling release distro that pushes out the latest version of upstream packages, bugs and all. Sooner or later some will hit you, telling yourself and other people otherwise is deluding yourself and those people.
Yeah, and sooner or later, I’ll die of old age, or cancer, or an accident, or get audited on my taxes.
None of those things have happened yet either. Not only that, but the same is true for every operating system that has ever existed, or will ever exist, including every distro of Linux.
Here's the thing: your answer is both invalidating and ignorant, and it shows a lack of understanding of what differentiates Arch from a stable distro.
None of these issues were a fault of my own, all I did was
pacman -Syu, and none of this would happen on a stable distro. I'm not saying Arch is shit because of this, I'm saying: beware of what you are getting into when you choose Arch: for every single package on your system, you are effectively at the mercy of whatever "upstream" decides to shit out that week. Being delusional about that fact and having guys come crawling out of the woodworks everytime this is mentioned, saying platitudes like: "I nEvEr HaD aN iSsUe" doesn't help anyone.Yeah, neither does "eVeRyOnE wIlL hAvE pRoBlEmS". Kinda a stupid thing to say, all things considered.
I've had my own issues with two different laptops over the years, and in that time I've seen multiple packaging/dependency issues hit a majority of Arch users. My own issues are often caused by bugs on the bleeding edge that users on a non-rolling distro dodge altogether. For me these have mostly been easy to resolve, but it's a much different experience compared with "stable" distros, where similar changes that require manual intervention (ideally) happen at a predictable cadence, and are well-documented in release notes.
I still strongly prefer Arch, as I've hit showstoppers and annoyances with "stable" distros as well. I guess I'm saying I don't really understand your responses, and why you seem so critical of user anecdotes in this space, when your original comment was a (perfectly fine) anecdote about how everything's working for you. That's great! But we can also point to many examples caused directly by bugs or dependency issues that only crop up in a rolling release. Taking all these data together, good and bad, pros and cons, working and not working, can help us learn and form a more complete picture of reality.
I'm so critical not of other anecdotes, but of a comment that explicitly stated I was lying, and that there was no chance I could possibly have had a perfect experience so far with Arch. He didn't infer, he didn't imply, he straight up said I was lying. That's literally the words he used.
Of course I'm going to be critical of that.
I see. The word lie is strong, and it's entirely within the realm of possibility that you never had any issues arise with your install. I see your point, and apologize for perhaps a bit of grandstanding on my behalf. I was more focused on the pros/cons of different types of distros, and missed the reason why you were acting defensively.
I feel this kind of conversation still isn't super helpful though (for either of you). I mean it clearly can be true that one person (or one chunk of the community) has no issues, while another person (and maybe another good chunk of the community) does have issues. Though perhaps in getting involved, I haven't really helped either.