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?
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I had the same problem, i did start with arch ,but man i remember doing a update after 4 days(4Gb of new updates) and my system faild to boot. From that moment i went debian route.
I’ve been an Arch user for about 15 years now, and I’ve never posted to the forums. Not because I’m great at this and don’t break things. I constantly break things and need to fix them. I don’t ask questions there because before you’ll get any help you are going to get sat down and explained (in great detail sometimes) how you are the stupidest piece of shit on Earth.
Debians testing branch might be a good shout. Packages stay pretty up-to-date and usually stuff doesn’t break. Worst case you can pull a package from unstable when needed.
debian testing is for testing purposes only. you should never daily drive debian testing (unless you know what you’re doing)
also, we’re about to get a new debian release (trixie), this is literally the worst time you could choose to daily drive debian testing
I second Debian Testing. The only issues I have are updates slow down during package freezes and sometimes, a package you are using becomes a victim of a package transition. Both are symptoms of Testing being exactly what it says, so I can’t blame them, but still a valid annoyance.
The worst example was FreeCAD had a dependency being transitioned, so FreeCAD disappeared from Testing for a while, meaning my system wouldn’t update if I wanted to keep FreeCAD. In the end, I just gave up and used the Flatpak. (I probably could have installed from Unstable, but whatever.)
Truth be told, I kind of wish there was a project to keep some new packages flowing to Testing users during freezes. I get why Debian themselves doesn’t do it - it would be a nightmare to maintain - but an outside community project would be amazing. It wouldn’t exactly be easy, but such a project wouldn’t need to necessarily do every package (just desired ones), and they would only need to maintain them a couple months until new versions start flowing into Testing again. I think the biggest difficulty is not going too far ahead of what will end up in Testing post-freeze.
There is a way to “pin” package versions isn’t there?
I wonder if that would prevent this kind of thing from uninstalling a package that is in transition. Ofc, it wouldn’t get any updates, but I’d take that over just not having the package.
Flatpak works though!
Yeh. Also, Debian tends to hold back packages like that automatically. It’s just a really obnoxious thing to deal with for me, and Flatpak allows me to circumvent that.
Though truth be told, I’m thinking of just staying on Trixie once it hits stable. While Testing certainly has its uses and I rather love it, there’s simply times where I don’t want to deal with the odd system maintenance ordeals, as comparatively rare as they are relative to other rolling release distros. I’ve been rather enjoying Bookworm on my laptop for a year now, which makes me think I would enjoy it on desktop.
All the power to ya! Doesn’t matter if it’s Stable, Testing, or Unstable, if it works for you that’s all that matters.
Sorry for not answering your questions, I haven’t used arch before. But dang that sucks I’ve been wanting to try arch for a little while but I didn’t know they would happily push updates they know will break certain programs.
It’s more like they expect you to do more reading than I would like to do. If I had been reading more of what they would like, I would have known I was expected to make a decision before updating and install an additional package. So from that view, they didn’t push a breaking update.
When an upgrade spits out that much text, you should bat an eye.
I’d like to be able to take it all in but I can go weeks without the energy or interest to read a wall of text. Other times I’ll start an update and lose interest while it downloads. I realize these are personal problems but that’s why I value custom tools like Linux I can adapt to my needs and shortfalls.
Off-topic: A meta-analysis if you will, but I’m just astonished by the engagement this post has received. I wonder what this tells us about the Linux community on Lemmy.
On-topic: OP, honestly, others have chimed in and left very good answers already. So perhaps you won’t find anything within my comment that hasn’t been said. But, as I’m a latecomer to this thread, I might have an advantage that some didn’t (try to capitalize on). To be blunt, the original post didn’t reveal much about what you liked and didn’t like about Arch. As such, my initial impression would have been to suggest Gentoo. But, you’ve since provided the engaging community crucial insights that help us in grasping the full picture. Below you may find my own notes on your distro preferences based on what you said:
- care-free updates
- repo packages receive updates shortly after upstream
- rewards effort put into initial setup
Furthermore, I’ll take the liberty to assume that (native) package availability is expected to be vast. And that you wish for the process of updating to be snappy.
Based on the above, I recommend NixOS.
If jumping ship to NixOS seems too daunting, then consider installing Nix[1] on Arch. Consider to slowly but surely expand its usage within your system. And, then, when you’re comfortable, embrace NixOS as a worthy successor to your Arch installation.
To be clear, I meant the package manager. Determinate System’s installer is probably your best option. ↩︎
Use Gentoo, as it is way more stable and can do anything that Arch can.
I’ve been using Ubuntu/Kubuntu since 2004 and I’ve always been happy and had very little problems.
It’s a good, no hassle distro that works and is fairly up to date, especially if you use the non-LTS ones. I prefer staying with LTS though. At least my OS is stable and I don’t have to spend my free time troubleshooting anything.
My first experience with Linux was Ubuntu back in 2007! I thought it was interesting but didn’t become a Linux user until 12 years later when I realized gaming was possible without dual booting.
Something I experience a lot is getting excited for new features. It gives me an energy I can use to start a project I wouldn’t have done otherwise. I need to be able to start soon after hearing about the new feature or I risk losing the excitement and missing out on the energy it would have provided.
I used to be like that. I just get so tied from work, seeing computers and software all day and having to constantly learn new technology that at home I’m just looking for something that doesn’t change too much and is familiar.
Opensuse tumbleweed or if you want to keep the arch featureset but with the rollback-ability of BTRFS check out CachyOS
Opensuse Tumbleweed has made my list to try out.
Thanks for CachyOS. This is my first time hearing of it so I’ve got some reading to do.
CachyOS and Endeavour OS are the two common Arch derivatives - basically “Arch in easy mode”. They’re both very good.
Manjaro is another but it brings its own set of problems that I never have the time or patience to deal with.
I’m using CachyOS now since October. I’m enjoying it and haven’t come across any issues yet that weren’t easily fixed.
This is the first time in 5 years I haven’t been on opensuse.
I recently switched to Void after making runs with Arch and Fedora.
I’m not anti-systemd. I just like Void. Rolling release model. Light weight. Minimalistic. I’ve read how the package manager is small but for me everything I need is there. That’s the first time that’s happened for me as with other distros I would have had to install via flatpak, snap by source, appimage and by the package manager.
Not sure if that would work for your use case or not.
I got burned by something like this on Manjaro when a rolling update completely borked my graphics card. The devs reacted in a similar way and it made me realise that my priority is stability over bleeding edge and tinkering.
On that day I moved to Fedora. Stable as hell, no fuss. My main OS should just work and not kill itself.
I still love it but jumped over to Bazzite Gnome recently, which is like Fedora with a few bells on top, coupled with having a read-only root-filesystem (stability, man!). It also comes with distrobox, which will let you run arch natively in a container if you need the AUR.
I had a similar moment of clarity after troubles with Manjaro and a couple other Arch based distros.
I really like the idea of a rolling release, but definitely nedd stability first.
I swung back the other way, and jumped on Ubuntu LTS. And gradually over time I ended up having to get updates from external repos etc, and ended up in the same position where updates broke things or didn’t work.
Currently running Ubuntu, and I just do an upgrade to the latest release each 6 months - after waiting a month after release date for everything to settle down. The upgrades to new releases have gone smoothly, I get updates to newer versions of software, and it’s been very rare anything breaks. Being a popular distro also means a big community to help with any issues as well.
Dammit, it’s like I just wrote an ad for Ubuntu!
Would a flatpak would survive this update? I do use arch on some computers but with several flatpaks for some applications that I feel will be safer - but i don’t really know.
Maybe i just update and see what happens.
The whole point of the update is to avoid the silly Windows-like mentality of flatpack. It splits the package up so you can choose what you want instead of installing a bunch of crap you won’t ever use. If OP had been awake while doing a full upgrade on his bleeding edge system, he would have noticed.
Surely that can be OPs choice.
If a user has a large number of programmes they might not want to hand hold updates of all of them each time.
If they choose only the handful they want from arch repo or aur then they might have a quicker update and find it easier to stay awake.
I’d think it should be up to them if they want to trade off bloat vs the burden of an update.
I find, especially for AUR stuff the update can become vexatious.
Of course it’s his choice, it’s his system.
The general advice is that handpicking updates from main repos is a big no-no. There are only a couple of reasons you would ever need that, like updating
archlinux-keyringon a very outdated system.Even on my 13 year old install with many thousands of packages, it’s not hard to spot if anything is out of the ordinary when doing huge upgrades. You should pay attention.
That being said, I often just do
pacman -Syu --noconfirm && poweroffthese days. It’s so rare that anything breaks and I can very easily fix it if it does.
NixOS might not be for you, it is horrible if you don’t want to adapt to it. But if this happened on NixOS, you would just reboot into the state of your computer before you ran the update. Or if it’s just a program like VLC you could just close VLC switch to the previous generation and open VLC again
vlc was already like this on arch for a long time, literally took just a moment to look at the optional dependencies and grab the latest “actually give me everything lmao” package group
Yeah I can’t believe he’s been using Arch for 5 years and didn’t even bat an eye over the massive pacman output
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).
Fedora, great blend of bleeding edge and stability. Plus Linus uses it, so what better praise could you get.
Can definitely recommend Fedora too. Software updates are at a good pace, and the system has a lot of polish all around. For example, all you need to do for updates is to press “update” in Discover and it’ll do everything for you, applying on reboot for stability. Most things “just work”.
that’s exactly how updates should work in every desktop distro. as an option of course.
systemd made it possible to install updates on shutdown.
packagekit enabled kde software to automatically obtain and prepare the updates.
plasma does the final touch nowadays to ask you on the reboot/shutdown dialog whether you want to install them.Basically all the system is in place, with code from widely used parties. packagekit can even integrate with your filesystem to make a snapshot before install. It’s wonderful. yet, it seems as if only fedora supports this full setup right now? or is there anything else?
I’ve tried quite a few distros (openSUSE, Ubuntu, Solus, Arch, so on) and none seem to offer this feature. It’s a shame, as it’s quite useful to have since updating a live system can sometimes cause some trouble. Even just the updating from Discover can be broken on some systems (I know openSUSE at the very least acts a bit funny when it comes to PackageKit, I think Arch as well).
I’ve been told that opensuse tumbleweed has it. I’ve also read a suse forum post saying leap 16 will support offline updates, releasing in January, so they could be the first to support all of this with fs snapshots
Even just the updating from Discover can be broken on some systems
if you didn’t enable offline updates in systemsettings, then it’ll do roughly the same as you would in the terminal, so that’s not unexpected
Fedora and Bazzite both do it.
Discover is a KDE thing, not a fedora thing. Not fedora exclusive.
It is a KDE thing, but Fedora is the distro on which it works best. On a lot of other distros it often runs into problems.
I can attest to that. It’s remarkable on how few distros updating through Discover actually works reliably. I always update through the terminal because at least that works. I’ve noticed this issue on Kubuntu (apt), Debian (apt), and OpenSUSE (zypper). I think these issues are related to the PackageKit integration.
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¯\_(ツ)_/¯ In this case, my personal experience and the dozens of other people who have agreed with me beg to differ.
I hope we’re talking about that Linus, and not that Linus. You know, the one that works with computers, and not the other one that works with computers.
My favorite Linus moment ever.
