Made this on a whim, while commenting on that other recent Arch related post… the tamagochi one.
It’s been years since I actually used Arch. I hear much has changed (~ like it has an easy installer now?). Does it still itch to faceplant from time to time, needing rescue or abandon? Does Arch still faceplant itself?
How long have you managed to keep an arch going? How many times needing rescued back to being bootable in that duration?
[And would have posted this from that account, but that lemmy.wtf instance is tempramental, currently 504ing again. Glad I recently made this alt account so I can still post this and carry on with life.]
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been on arch 7y now. I only needed a rescue disk once, and that was totally my fault
I hit upon a lot of pebkac errors.
… Though, in hindsight, maybe some of the determinations of “pebkac error” may have been a bit gaslighty darvo to hide bugs anywhere in the stack including up to ux. “you didn’t read the <obscure thing>, so it’s your fault” type of events. … reminds of the post-it note that’s there to save the world, then eventually it gets ignored, then eventually falls away, gets crumpled, dumped, forgotten…
I bet you do, that’s not hard to believe. Do not install Arch
Arch is the most stable Linux I’ve used. The only problem I’ve ever had is not using one for long enough that the keyring and mirrors were stale, and that wasn’t difficult to fix.
The first line of my pacman.log file is from 2015. I’ve not had a need to change or reinstall
Me personally has never been failed by arch in a couple of years. But I’ve recently argued with someone who went “I wanna auto-updates and also no problems ever”, so guess things are wildly different for different folks
Hrmm… that gets me pondering about cron’ing up a cascade of strata fetching (and whatever configuration copying required if any), such that there’d always be fallback… then, conceivably, could have “auto-updates and no problems ever”, and not even need worry about having adequate detection of problems to know when safe to proceed, as it would all just work, with something that just works still present, as bedrock strata. … May seem a mite heavy handed, and very wasteful for hd space though. … And no guarantees all that complexity on the back end (to confer simplicity on the front end) will stay "just work"ing, and not need problems mended. [edit… oh, and almost seems inevitable that some mirror layout change would break fetches too… so I guess it’s not so near to full proof.]
To my best knowledge, it has been solved with filesystems-with-backup (like btrfs) and/or immutable distributions, but I never bothered to use them
From the outside, freedom always looks like chaos.
As an interesting aside, try upgrading from Ubuntu 24.04 to 26.04.
They replaced coreutils with a metapackage that uninstalls GNU coreutils and installs one rewritten in Rust.
Or it would install one rewritten in Rust, if it still had any of the coreutils binaries required to, you know, install something.A lot of recent Ubuntu release upgrades have blown up leaving entirely broken machines. My machines. My home server has some how not been one but several laptops and work servers had to be rebuilt from scratch or deep package hackery from recovery kernels.
I use converted a laptop to arch BTW and haven’t run into this meme irl yet.
No recues in two years since I booted it the first time. Shit’s smooth on different hardware without any fiddling. Windows taught me good to be a bit more cautious and curious, so with a system that doesn’t explicitly fight me or wants to do thing behind my back, I feel way safer than before. Like, I started to regularly seek new updates via yay, it’s something you don’t hear from a windows boy. Minus one year on Mint that borked itself on update a couple of times, I had no previous Linux expirience.
Windows taught me good to be a bit more cautious and curious
Doesn’t it normally do the opposite for most people?
feel way safer than before. Like, I started to regularly seek new updates via yay, it’s something you don’t hear from a windows boy.
Yep, eager to upgrade, when it’s not stuffed down your throat when you don’t want.
Could be telling us all something important about freedom… ;D
I removed windows after their EOL announcement for windows 10. I chose mint at first and then migrated to endeavor. Endeavor was as easy to install as mint and it better suits my needs.
Running an update in a background tab, forgetting about it, and closing my laptop lid mid-initramfs generation has caught me out a couple of times. Recoverable with a boot disk. Apart from that, Arch has been rock-solid on multiple machines for years for me. Recommend it to anyone.
Not much has changed (also Arch always had an installer one way or another 🙃). I’ve managed to keep it going till the machine wasn’t needed. Rescue boot was needed like 5-6 times over 15 years, I think. Most problems with Arch come from being hasty or not being able to read. One of the harder and more involved processes and problems to solve was updating 6 years old abandoned install, took a few hours, because arch archive is pretty slow sometimes.
This is true. (always had installer, problems from haste & not reading).
It’s like I was fine reading to do the installation, but it was like then I was done reading, for the ongoing management. This does indeed make the pebkac errors inevitable sooner. … :/ I think, I see, why I read in gentoo, but didnt bother so much in arch… it’s not just the colours… it’s the pace. [Too easy to succumb to how, once past the installation, under use] Arch gets you accustomed to “now!” (/impatience). At least compared to old pre-binhost gentoo on older hardware.
Oh, and…
One of the harder and more involved processes and problems to solve was updating 6 years old abandoned install, took a few hours, because arch archive is pretty slow sometimes.
Restoring old gentoos to new is one of my fave geeky (~ and typically pointless) projects to undertake. … Not sure I’ve done one as old as 6 years yet… but I do have one that’s something like 16 years old. LOL. … When I amass the spoons for such an undertaking, I may attempt.
I’ve really disliked gentoo because there always were so much unknowns and moving parts which no umount of reading and ‘intuition’ can predict. Gave up when package manager killed itself during update with no (obvious) way to make it run again fast. It was combination of python version upgrade and pm upgrade and it shit itself in a spectacular way where you can’t run it with ‘current’ version of python, can’t use older version due to it being managed by python scripts somehow dependent on pm (details aren’t all there it was like ten years ago). All of that when I really needed to install and run some package. Built everything from source and disliked gentoo ever since.
Yeah, that is (or was) part of the gentoo fun. :3 Lots of that kind of fun around the python versioning. Figuring out what emerge’s output means is sometimes 90% of the challenge, and other times if feels like that, but then it turns out to be only 10% of the challenge. But as for python versioning specifically, that may have very recently had a big uptick in getting slipstreamed through with fewer bumps in the road for users to deal with. Fingers crossed in hope, ~ remains to be seen through many future versions yet.
And there are official binhosts now, so it generally only compiles what you’ve changed the useflags for. Gentoo package management’s as snappy as other distros now. Though still as involved as ever for configuring the system how you want (albeit with few more ways to make it bother you a little less often now).
I’ve been using arch for maybe 5 years now, maybe longer. It’s broken 4 times i think. 3 of those were windows updates that fucked with the bootloader. 1 time arch broke on an update, and checking the website had the fix right up top and it took 1 minute to fix. There were a couple other times where things didn’t seem quite right but still working, and again the fix was right on the homepage and easy to do.
Once the last 2 or 3 years I’ve had to manually fix something to keep the updates coming.
It’s less than other distros I’ve tried. But that may say more about the other distros than arch.
The only component actually fucking up boot has been the NVidia driver. Otherwise, Arch with testing repos has never failed me for years on many devices.
Been on arch on multiple computers for at least 15 years. Personal and work computers. It just works. Although it’s for competent users and that might be the issue most people have with it.
I’ve destroyed whole system by accidentally deleting the var folder and still recovered it without backups.
I’ve also had a computer without updates turned off for more than a year and it also still worked just fine when updating and reading some quick things on the news page.
I’ve used many ubuntus on work laptops and other distros before arch and they just would eventually break or get into a Frankstein state that there was no way out without a full clean reinstall. Never again.
The “Frankenstein state” is why nowadays I avoid traditional distros, Arch included. Traditional distros use something that programmers call the “imperative model”. Basically, it means that you define tasks as a sequence of steps. But these steps have to account for infinitely many scenarios.
Every new version of a package adds some files, deletes some files, and runs some commands. Imagine you left your PC off for a month and now you need to upgrade a package from version 1 to version 10. The system has to figure out which files from version 1 can be kept, which files need to be installed from version 2, which files from version 3, etc, and then how to combine the commands from each version. Maybe it messes up and forgets to clean up a file or two. This might not be an issue now but over time these inconsistencies accumulate and the system diverges so far from mainstream that it breaks.
The modern atomic distros like Bazzite, use a model called the “declarative model”. Instead of defining sequences of steps, you define the end goal. The system ensures that the final state matches the goal. Every update, is equivalent to re-installing the system from scratch (with clever optimizations so you don’t actually need to re-download the whole system). Everything is consistent with the mainstream, and stays consistent, all the time. You can just turn on automatic updates and forget about it. No need to read news or release notes or PKGBUILD files. It is extremely robust and reliable.
This declarative model is what major cloud infrastructure has been moving towards in the past 20 years. Docker, Terraform, Gitops, IaC, etc. This is why the modern distros like Bazzite like to call themselves “cloud native” distros. These distros follow the same update model as major cloud infra.
Don’t forget CoreOS and MicroOS.
Can’t say I’ve used Arch as my primary for very long periods but whenever I have used it as my primary there hasn’t been a lot of issues for me.
Never had to roll back kernels, never really had any major issues that I know I didn’t cause or could be traced back me doing something, things were pretty smooth. There was some hurdles but they’ve gotten easier over time with the distro itself becoming a bit easier too.
But I guess I’ve gotten that Linux intuition over the years.
