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Why should my pc be stable if I'm not stable
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I have questions now, about myself
I boot my arch laptop once in a blue moon and update it. Its not 2002 anymore.
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.
βStableβ distros often had a long and risky process of upgrading to the next major release.
But you only do that once every 3-4 years, and you have months to carefully plan ahead.
Meanwhile, pacman -Syu could just provide you a major breaking multi-package upgrade of, say, your desktop environment on any random Tuesday. And then your only options are to either roll the dice and accept that update right then, and deal with all the breaking changes it may introduce, or not receive any updates at all, including security fixes, until you do.
I use Arch myself, and it's been pretty troublefree the past 2 years or so, but it was pretty rough around the Plasma 6 release, and there have been other rough periods as well, like when there were bluetooth/wifi and amdgpu regressions in the kernel.
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.
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
This mirrors my experience. I -Syu on a weekly basis, spend about 3 minutes doing pacnews, and then I'm done.
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.
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
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.
OP never finished an Arch install
wtf is this bullshit
and more importantly, why is it so condescending?!
It's meant to be an attempt at humor/sarcasm/engagement bait I think.
nixCraft (at cyberciti 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").
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 itβs 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 itβs personal enough, getting support for your setup is nigh impossible because itβs so bespoke.
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 π
Arch really is the "Linux" of Linux users, complete with non users making shit up about it.
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
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. I'm happy with it.
Fedora Immutable Desktop users when Arch and Debian users fight about whose system is more stable. (I use Fedora Kinoite btw)

I've made ~6 Arch systems at this point. None of them have randomly broken on me, none of them have broken after an update and to be honest have been solid. I have no idea where the narrative of Arch being able to destroy itself at any point came from, but I don't think it's true at all.
This is a bit like saying "Honda Civics are Tamagotchis for car people" because there's a community of people who enjoy modifying them. The rest of us just drive, and they run perfectly fine if you're not doing a lot of invasive customization.
Arch is great for tweaking and customization, but it's also fine for a simpler use case.
to open a python code
This tells you everything you need to know about who wrote this.
That's not a meme BTW, why is this even here.
Sadly that tells you something about the linux knowledge of the nixcraft guy.
If he would've stopped at making fun with pacman -Syu, it would've been ok. You forgot a y and arch is not less usable than debian ..
I'm on opensuse aeon btw, I don't interact with the OS anymore. It's just there and works, like atomic fedora, I don't care.
Stay away from the AUR and arch is fine. Calm down
In the past 3 years of using arch daily I've had to remove some renamed packages after an update once, thats about it
Every time I do a point release upgrade on Debian the whole system breaks. It's so smooth until that point, but if I have to reinstall the OS anyway then I'm going back to EndeavourOS (which is what I'm using now)
15 year old install, one issue with crashes because of a regression in nvidia drivers that was solved after a month, I just rolled back till then.
Idk wtf you imagine people doing.
I've done 'real work' on computer with arch my whole professional career. I need a working computer with reasonably up to date programs not 3 to 10 years out of date because debian maintainers can't be bothered. On servers it's another story and there i would prefer rhel any day i would use debian.
Unpopular opinion, but how about we take Linux seriously? Arch is a solid OS, unlike Ubuntu, but it's still much more manageable than say Gentoo or LFS. Get off your high horses.
Anyone remembers Gentoo? ;)
I'm just chiming in to not announce which distro I'm using.
-sent from Voyager on Android
i genuinely wonder where people are getting their information when they talk about linux. mass schizophrenic hysteria?
I will preface this comment by saying I genuinely consider myself to be rather dumb, and slow to learn many things. With that being said, I've never had a single issue with the one arch based distro I have used (Cachy). I never had to really look up any docs, but to learn to install some specific programs. Overall it...just kinda worked? Only reason I switched to Fedora was for that extra peace of mind knowing its a bit more stable than rolling release, but still has more updated software than Debian based distros.

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