• fartsparkles@lemmy.world
      541·
      22 days 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.

        • metallic_z3r0@infosec.pub
          2·
          21 days ago

          Especially when customizing the kernel is the default experience with Gentoo, reducing the theoretical attack surface even more if you know what you’re doing.

      • Ooops@feddit.org
        10·
        22 days ago

        I was too lazy for scripting the update to check the news and just get a mail when the update has issues… or should get one.

        In reality I check if the email process still works once every blue moon because I didn’t get one from a failed update in years.

      • Lucy :3@feddit.org
        31·
        22 days ago

        If you want to have at least some thrill, use testing repos. I had to fix GitLab two (2) times due to the main package not being linked against testing libraries (it took 10 seconds to ln -s the new to the old version), and had one breakage due to dovecot revamping their whole config system, but publishing no example/useful docs.

    • hansolo@lemmy.today
      151·
      22 days ago

      But it says this screenshot post happened 4h ago.

      Did the internet lie to me?

  • sanpo@sopuli.xyz
    761·
    22 days 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.

    • eleijeep@piefed.socialEnglish
      132·
      22 days 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.

    • jatone@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      81·
      22 days ago

      Same, and next year when bcachefs has nailed down the kinks it’ll be basically bullet proof with snapshotting prior to its daily updates.

      • Eggymatrix@sh.itjust.works
        291·
        22 days 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
          19·
          22 days 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
          2·
          22 days 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
      6·
      22 days 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
        2·
        22 days 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.

        • ranzispa@mander.xyz
          2·
          22 days ago

          I mostly run Debian on servers. I do not want a rolling release on a server, at all. I don’t care how well they check their packages, I just want the thing to work. I do not care about new features, I just want it to work.

          • Ooops@feddit.org
            1·
            21 days ago

            That’s my point. A version upgrade having issues would have forced you to do it by now.

  • KindaABigDyl@programming.dev
    49·
    22 days 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
      14·
      22 days ago

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

    • Ooops@feddit.org
      6·
      22 days 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.

    • rumschlumpel@feddit.org
      4·
      22 days 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·
        22 days 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.

    • insomniac_lemon@lemmy.cafeEnglish
      2·
      21 days ago

      I’ve used my current install for at least that long (going back further with Antergos) and you’re correct about non-rolling options… I definitely would’ve had more pain with system upgrades and PPAs etc in those years.

      That said, I think the Tamagotchi comparison probably makes sense in a way if it “dies” you probably did something “wrong” as on-paper it’s also not difficult to maintain a digital pet either.

      I’m using an outdated system, it’s on three strikes:

      1. Slow, shared internet for me. This adds friction to updates, and when I don’t update as frequently as Arch expects this is the breakage you won’t see.

      2. I hate that updating today vs days-from-now might yield drastically different results. Admittedly the actual problem with my last few updates is that the reason-I-updated issues persisted.

      3. The AUR is the biggest reason to use Arch. But use the AUR very carefully and not for system dependencies! Your graphics card is now legacy, so we put the driver on the AUR* ;)

      Though I don’t think these sort of problems are unfixable**, and other rolling distros probably do fix some of them but may also not have as good of a packaging system as Arch.

      For instance I’m trying Void Linux on an old machine and have already ran into 2 (non-default) applications missing dependencies (which might be an issue with package maintainers, but also Void doesn’t seem to track optional dependencies).

      Tumbleweed/Slowroll would probably be a better fit for me, if not for Patterns.

      * also if you update without switching, blank screen for you

      ** internet+GPU are also material problems as well, but those cannot get fixed today and probably will not be fixed next month either

  • floquant@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    33·
    22 days 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
      9·
      22 days 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.

    • Random Dent@lemmy.mlEnglish
      3·
      22 days ago

      I have Arch (btw) on my laptop which is the tinkering machine that only I use, and a Win10/Linux dual-boot desktop which is the one other people use that I’m not allowed to break. I had Fedora Silverblue on there originally because I figured it would be pretty stable, but it honestly gave me nothing but trouble. I switched that one over to CachyOS and it’s been smooth sailing ever since.

    • airgapped@piefed.socialEnglish
      2·
      22 days ago

      I had nothing but trouble with Suse, Fedora and Debían on my nightmare of a machine (laptop with AMD/nvidia GPUs) and honestly thought that was my lot until I hit upon Arch, which I have been more than happy with for over 3 years now.

    • HCSOThrowaway@lemmy.worldEnglish
      16·
      22 days ago

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

    • diaphragmwp@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      141·
      22 days 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”).

  • otacon239@lemmy.world
    23·
    22 days 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.

  • Valmond@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    22·
    22 days 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 😊

  • azuth@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    22·
    22 days ago

    Arch really is the “Linux” of Linux users, complete with non users making shit up about it.

  • mrmanager@lemmy.today
    21·
    22 days 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. I’m happy with it.

  • GaumBeist@lemmy.ml
    20·
    21 days 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
    201·
    22 days ago

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