Realizing Arch isn't for me after updating broke VLC
from makeitwonderful@lemmy.sdf.org to linux@lemmy.ml on 15 Jul 01:42
https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/38580174
from makeitwonderful@lemmy.sdf.org to linux@lemmy.ml on 15 Jul 01:42
https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/38580174
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?
threaded - newest
OpenSUSE TUMBLEWEED, always updating, but they have an OpenQA tool that checks the builds for success, and if for some reason something did go bad you just reboot and pick the previous (automatic) snapshot. Lots of GUI tools to manage the system and packages via the various Yast2-GUI apps.
This is probably the best answer.
+1 for Tumbleweed. It’s a rolling release distro without (most of) the hassle and YaST is a fantastic utility which you can use to do many things. Nice graphical stuff to help you configure things like backup. Never had any breakages so far with Tumbleweed :)
Another +1 for Tumbleweed. It's an simple setup, easy to roll back if needed, and has solid tools like Yast that help manage most aspects of your os.
Also, obs and opi are such useful services, I don’t think it’s possible to not use them once you’ve tried them. OpenSUSE Tumbleweed just gets so many things right that I’d recommend it to any person who’s moderately familiar with Linux with how easy it’s to use.
Thanks! This wasn’t a distro I knew much about but it’s looking like one I will try out. The way they test packages is exactly the kind of choices around updates I’m looking for.
I like how many options Yast exposes. I enjoyed learning how to do most of what I need in the terminal with Arch but being able to do everything I need through GUI helps when I’m not able to recall a lot in the moment but still need to do a thing.
The repos have a lot of stuff, but if you ever get stuck for q package you can install debs with alien command, or find community repoes here software.opensuse.org They typically offer 1 click installs, or direct rpm downloads
Plus, their equivalent of the AUR, the open build system, can actually be used to build packages for any system.
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.
Been that way since the beginning. It’s an experimental distro, not for production systems.
Arch is definitely not “an experimental distro”. It doesn’t just break, and all the software in their repos is considered stable.
If you have been using Arch for any meaningful amount of time, the massive output from OPs upgrade should be glaring.
It is an experimental distro, that’s what was the original purpose. That’s coming from what their website stated toward the beginning of the project. They may not call it that now, but not much has fundamentally changed in arch since that time besides the introduction of systemd.
Just look at their principles.
Maybe it’s me, but while you have outlined the events that got you to this point, I don’t understand either the ‘attitude’ you find problematic or what it is about Arch you would hope to find elsewhere. Hard to make a recommendation without those.
Did you forget your ‘btw’?
You’re right, I was leaning heavily on the events to give context for defining the attitude (maybe policy would be a less loaded word for me to use). I don’t like the expectation that I would have to look for information in multiple places before updating. I’d prefer to be able to update often without needing to take in a lot of information.
If your upgrade says anything out of the ordinary, which it most definitely did here, that should probably trigger something in you. This is the case for any distro.
en.wikipedia.org/…/Principle_of_least_astonishmen…
Someone should inform whoever made that change. If a package is split in a new release, the initial state should match the final as closely as possible, in this case by installing the new optional dependencies automatically. (Although I’m not sure why they’d want to split everything out like that anyway; no other VLC distribution does that, so splitting is itself a violation.)
Maybe Manjaro might be an alternative? I haven’t personally used it. I don’t like this kind of surprise, so I stick to boring distros like Debian. I used to use CentOS but it was too boring.
You just gave me words for something that was previously just vague internal grumbling and emotions.
Manjaro knows how to aesthetically please me with their color choices and background art. I’ve got a negative impression from various podcasts and forum posts but I’m realizing I need to look into that more because I can’t recall specifics besides something about a past issue with package distribution.
i would recommend against manjaro or endeavorOS and such similar arch based distributions. they’re neat and more stable but have similar issues sometimes, for example the manjaro maintainers are generally known as pretty egregiously irresponsible.
arch is kind of a clusterfuck. the user experience is really poor for a modern linux distribution and the community has an insular attitude of calling everything a skill issue.
i used and maintained a bunch of arch systems for a long time. if you do this you inevitably end up using AUR packages, as some utilities a normal person would use for home and server shit are only available through AUR. updating gets fucky and it’s way more annoying bc you end up needing to constantly read long ass changelogs bc some dude changed the formatting in one UI element and pushed to main at 3AM and it won’t just updated with -Syu or similar args.
i was talking about this earlier on lemmy as an example of terrible UX and all the arch fanboys came to downvote me and write paragraphs in droves talking about how it’s actually just the user’s fault for using the AUR and that i don’t know how pacman works. one guy claimed it’s like Debian PPAs. uh no, the AUR is far less optional lmfao. and i do know how yay and pacman work, i had no trouble, i was just pointing out it was annoying to deal with constantly when using a system like a normal person.
when an OS has no user in mind when designing it… it’s kind of a shit OS and apparently forms a shit culture around it too, in my experiences the past few years on the internet.
Manjaro is significantly worse with updates breaking.
I used for a little while in 2018 and again in 2019, both times ended because it once became stuck in a boot loop after updates, and another time couldn’t boot after updates.
I started using Manjaro in 2018. I can’t remember any significant break.
Mate it’s been six years. Half a decade. Manjaro hasn’t exploded a single time in at least the last three and beyond that has had only minor issues related to their website in that time.
You have to be dense to be holding something that happened six years ago against a project.
So go and use it then? I don’t care what you do.
Sometimes. Some of us out there have use cases where we really, really don’t want our systems making choices for us and would rather read the notes every time. One could equally well argue that an OS whose entire purpose is letting the user make the choice suddenly doing something automatically without asking for input is the break in state that users would find astonishing.
I’d say you want Linux from Scratch then, but even then the Linux kernel maintainers are making choices for you.
But Linus is very firm in that they never break userspace, so you should never see an issue like this when updating the kernel.
Not necessarily
Had a kernel update which couldn’t read a specific HDD controller chip. Since then I always install LTS version along with regular just for booting up if the kernel upgrade fails.
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.
Arch is really for those who like to troubleshoot and actively maintain things when they break.
I’m pretty decent with linux and for the most part, I can fix arch when it breaks, but I don’t have the time for that. For that reason, I use Fedora and recommend mint.
Yup, OP has done his time in Arch meaning now competent, probably, time to go to Fedora and relax, close enough to the edge but not bleeding, good QA, For extra chill go atomic, check out uBlue…
I'd go for an atomic distro if it weren't for the AUR. It's too comfy.
Run Arch in a distrobox, done (in atomic you lean hard on distrobox and flatpak).
Can you install an app with GUI in a distrobox that then shows up on the app list? That'd be amazing but I doubt it since it's using containerization, I wonder what "tightly integrated" really means. Anyway, I'll look it up, thanks!
yup, the syntax is (from within the distrobox)
distrobox-export --app appname.
I’ve been using arch for almost a decade, and haven’t had the system break.
I also don’t use aur helpers as I don’t like or trust them - I do tend to read PKGBUILDs before using them.
Still shocked that OP thought a new opt-depends was “lost in pages and pages of changelogs”.
I did break my endevaourOS after I was unlucky enough to upgrade when grub got a huge non-bootable bug and probably there may have been some app bugs since which are minor tbh. Like currently I can’t run the bauh app, because it misses “bauh” in the python packages (lol).
Good for you that EOS now runs on systemd-boot, not grub lol. It grabs the EFI lines automatically from the boot partition and it just works. Personally, booting should be as simple as possible, as little personalisation as possible, make it just work.
Yeah no hate towards grub, because it doesn’t get too much breakful versions, but it’s a bootloader after all. Systemd boot works just fine for me, although I miss the customization aspect of it, but that’s what rEFInd is for.
I’m sorry, I thought about it more and remember the reason I had trouble with arch the last time.
It was that I could not get hardware decoding to work when playing videos in Firefox.
Everything reported that it should be working, but it didn’t.
I sometimes forget or delay updates because of life and have over 500 updates. Skim through them if they are patches, minors or majors, and just run. In any case, my disk's are brtfs and I have timeshift for backups. If anything breaks horribly a live USB can restore it, if anything is weird I can restore it via UI. It autoruns every time I run Pacman and stores 5 copies of the "before" state. It also creates a daily copy for the last 5 days so 10 copies in total.
It's more than enough that if something fails I'll have something to go back to, and since it internally works with something akin to hardlinks snapshots don't take that much space.
I've not had issues since setting it up, so, great.
Fedora if you do not gain joy from troubleshooting
Debian sid if you do.
Honestly NIXos. Run it impermanent or traditional OS style. If your coming from Arch and want less breakage and more declarative configuration. Immutable or not. Pick almost any DE and all you maintain is your nix config. Nix config is your master file its not huge and the machine runs from it as you tell it. The machine does the rest. No system drift, no cruft. Just works and if you break it. Select your previous generation at boot and your back exactly as you were before.
Downside: it requires knowing a new coding language, Nix, to maintain your laptop.
If you don’t understand it, it’s going to be painful to fix anything that doesn’t work.
The syntax is cake but your point is entirely valid. If your config is commented and plain. There’s not much of learning curve. I came from windows to mint, now to NIX. I did a full custom install luks, all my apps and settings pretty much loaded, settings and all, from my mint machine to make the transition easy as I could. Damn near like I never left and even more so now that I have backups, systems in place and working on impermenance and using a golden USB to boot my machine from any device, anywhere. Once I got gen 1 running the rest was simple. The day to day is zero fuss. It’s totally mental burden free. That’s what I wanted. To finally be stable and out of the way.
I don’t mind trading upfront effort for stability. I enjoyed setting up Arch and I’m still benefiting from insights gained from choosing my setup packages there.
Having nearly latest versions of packages is important to me because I can get into a flow after the initial excitement of a new feature being released but if I have to wait long to get my hands on it that won’t happen. In this case, a smaller loss of my excitement to watch a video happened in the time it took me to figure out what was up with VLC.
.
One thing I appreciate about NixOS is the ability to use overlays and override package sources. For example, overlays can be used to selectively install unstable and stable packages alongside each other:
While there may be caveats, this approach has been working for me just fine, as I can install VSCode from unstable to get the most recent monthly releases as they roll out, but then pin the rest of my desktop environment to stable to limit anything else shifting underneath me unexpectedly.
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.
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.
You can mitigate this with Timeshift
Snapper!
I like having Timeshift in place for if I can’t figure out what went wrong.
In this case, I didn’t use VLC until days after I had updated so my mind didn’t go to an issue from updating right away. I make a high amount of accidental inputs while using laptops and I don’t always notice so a lot of my issues end up being unintentional configuration changes from weeks or months ago.
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.
I’d recommend opensuse tumbleweed. Codecs can be a little weird, so I recommend installing a flatpak for VLC and your browser. Otherwise, I’ve found it to be a very similar experience.
If it is the rolling aspect OP likes about arch. Then absolutely. OpenSUSE Tumbleweed is amazing. But I do think something like Gentoo is more arch like in the sense that you got to do most things your self.
This is why I do not use a rolling release distro.
this is an arch linux problem, not a rolling-release problem. tumbleweed doesn’t have issues like that
I’ve been enjoying Guix for the last 8 days. You declare your OS and home config in a file and you can check them into source control. It was originally a fork of NixOS, but has diverged a lot.
The CLIs and APIs are pretty nice. They have a concept of “channels”, which are git repos you can download software from. The default official channel only hosts FOSS software, but you can trivially add non-FOSS channels and they work just as well as the first-party channels.
Each channel update and package install, removal, update get put on a log, which you can trivially jump between.
guix package --switch-genereation=28and boom you’re at that generation (it’s like a git commit). The software and config changes get saved in the generation so the jump is clean and atomic. I actually bisected my OS yesterday to track a bug! That was cool. You can also create and share isolated, reproducible environments.Guix works with Flatpak and distrobox as well, in case some software isn’t available in existing channels. I got HiDPI, Zoom, Logseq, Syncthing, and Tailscale working.
The biggest drawback for me so far is that it doesn’t use systemd. Not sure if it’s a dealbreaker for me yet. Systemd does way more than just manage system services, so GNU Shepherd (which Guix uses) isn’t a real replacement.
I mean it’s not your fault, btw sudo downgrade vlc then reboot and uninstall vlc and install the required vlc plugins
Luckily just installing the plugins worked. Thank you for offering advice.
I mean I don’t read news before upgrading too, but since I switched to mpv with custom skins, I’m linking it so far.
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.
I posted on the Arch forums ONCE. Didn’t get a single reply, lol. Actually had to open an issue on the upstream git repo to get any info.
Interesting. Been an Arch user for about 12 years now. Your posts made me curious to check my forum post history. I have 4 Topics I started where I never got any reply or the only reply is from myself stating that I found a solution and what it is. Then I have 3 Topics where people actually engaged with me, asked for some more info gave some tips and pushed me in the right direction.
Gentoo, honestly.
The community is much more friendly, the system is probably more arch than arch. The downside is compiling, but big packages have binaries now, and small packages build and install just about as fast as a binary distro.
Good hunting!
Thanks for the suggestion. I enjoyed how much I learned from picking out packages to get Arch working. I’m getting a similar excitement reading about Gentoo use flags. Giving it serious consideration.
The problem with Gentoo is that you can’t install anything in a hurry.
Run VMs on Arch:
Run VMs on Gentoo?
Yes, this is an extreme example, but many large packages are a bit like this.
That’s why you will tripple-check if you really need sonething before installing it on Gentoo, or you are like me and install Boxes in a Flatpak instead.
Personally i like Gentoo more than Arch because of all the buttons and knobs, and once it’s set up it does not need more time than Arch, but installing stuff is sometimes hard.
I loved Gentoo, it was the first distro I actually stuck with for more than a couple months, I used for 7 years or so.
I went to arch because something broke (probably my fault) and I needed to write a paper that was due soon, and compilation of the required software took too long, so I switched so it wouldn’t happen again. Arch was sold to me as “Gentoo with binaries”.
That being said I think you’re being unfair. I read the Arch’s wiki before installing unknown packages, mostly skimming, just like I did with Gentoo but Gentoo’s docs were somewhat superior. The docs were one of the things I missed.
Most of the time I didn’t read about the use-flags, except for big packages like Gnome. I only changed the use-flags if I knew for sure I wouldn’t use that functionality, so all the maybes and what-ifs still got compiled. TBH fiddling too much with use-flag feels like a newbie thing. On Arch there are actually more steps: I install the big multi-packages then uninstall the ones I don’t want, because those are less than the ones I want, and I don’t risk missing something.
On neither Gentoo or Arch I read the docs of the dependencies unless there’s a specific reason.
Same goes for the Kernel. Don’t disable things you don’t know about, enable all things you maybe will use and all the what-ifs. Once I knew what these were, setting this was quick and simple because they are actually just a couple options.
All that only has to do once, because once you know, even if you reinstall the OS you don’t have to investigate again unless something goes wrong because of changes.
The community of Gentoo is great! Arch’s community is okay.
With both Arch and Gentoo you have to learn about the system and make choices. With Gentoo you have to make more choices but making them and learning is easier than Arch. If OP used Gentoo this would have gone smoother.
I agree that the Gentoo wiki is almost always better than the Arch wiki (and would recommend it to any user), but i really doubt installing complicated packages is remotely as hard as on Gentoo.
While i have never used Arch before, i did use Manjaro, and there stuff was always just install the package and be done. I never had to alter the Kernel config, and all program features were just there. I also had VMs on Manjaro, and i do not remember any manual configuration (though that was many years ago, so maybe i misremember).
Recently i wanted to encode a video in ffmpeg, but it didn’t work. After a bit of searching i found that the codec requires a use-flag to be set. Classic Gentoo moment.
It’s not that i dislike Gentoo. In fact i do not consider returning to Arch (but i might switch to NixOS if my Gentoo install breaks). But i wouldn’t switch to any other distro.
It’s just that Gentoo is configured in a way that is so minimal by default that even basic use-cases require changes in the Kernel config: systemd? Kernel config. Bluetooth? Kernel config. LUKS? Kernel config. Amdgpu? Yes, exactly. BTRFS? Yes. Blender? Yeah OK, that goes without kernel config.
And the worst about the Kernel config: You don’t know which values are set by default. You might just end up in nconfig realizing that the values were already set.
Then there is the instability in the distKernel (which i use). I think i started with Kernel 5.10LTS ish. Every upgrade went well until like 6.1 LTS, when Emerge complained about i think module ordering or something. It would not emerge a newer Kernel any more, which made me reset my Kernel config and redo it entirely because i thought Kernel 5 and 6 configs might be incompatible. That worked (somehow) until 6.6 LTS, which i wanted to install at version 6.6.6 LTS. But emerge complained it could not install it. I waited and ignored the update, and eventually got trough at version 6.6.20 or so. After that it refused to update again, which made me blacklist all non LTS kernels. I am now on 6.12 LTS, even though i am not a LTS guy, simply because i don’t want the hassle.
And still, after all of this effort for being minimal, it boots in like 20s, while Arch does it in like 3 or so. Gentoo hates me.
Gentoo certainly teaches you a lot, but I would never recommend it to an average user. If you want to get any benefit from use flags for any packages, you will be compiling them from scratch and possibly their dependencies as well. Small packages are pretty fast, sure, but if you try to do something like compile Firefox, you could be waiting all day for that if you don’t have a Threadripper or similar.
Practically, unless you run exotic hardware you’re unlikely to get any actual tangible benefits from tweaking most use flags on most packages. Which begs the question of why you’re using such a low-level distro in the first place…
Idk maybe I just didn’t get it, but my month of running Gentoo was mostly just annoying. Again, great learning experience, but didn’t make sense to me as a daily driver. It feels like it’s for people who want to pore over the detailed patch notes for every package on their system, which is clearly not OP.
NixOS gives me enough control over how individual packages are configured if I really want it, but in a way that stays entirely out of my way until I specifically want to fiddle. I’m not saying NixOS is any better for a new user, but as a pretty experienced one I found it more rewarding once I understood the ecosystem.
I’m a social worker, not a CS major.
Firefox, binaries.
Benefits, community and flexibility.
Basically what OP is asking for, yes?
This might be the answer really, Gentoo is my favorite distro in theory. In practice I’m a lazy ass that just ends up installing binary packages for everything and missing the AUR.
I’m lazy too!
Gentoo stable scratches that itch quite effectively.
Front loading though, that’ll take some work!
arch is for people who want to play linux. if you actually want to use linux, go with something else
I enjoyed getting to pick out a lot of the small details by choosing what was going on my system. Something about having the minimum amount needed to meet my needs eases a variety of my computing related anxieties.
I’ve always managed to solve issues I’ve encountered but reading that forum post made me realize I may have been attributing issues from updates to Linux in general instead of my distro choice.
yeah, it is pretty fun, i used arch for a long time years ago and i liked it. but it’s a huge commitment and you can’t ever forget the system exists (which sometimes you need to do if you have a life)
I use the same arch install for 10 years on my home server, and its really solid.
Same, my desktop PC had Arch installed in 2012 lol
it is
…if you’re willing to put in the effort to play linux
What does this even mean? I had more problems with Fedora on my Notebook in the last few months (wouldn’t randomly boot anymore?!) than I had with Arch Linux in 10 years.
i believe you. also, my great uncle has smoked since he was 13 and he’s now 86 and is still alive
seriously, though, if you do everything right, arch is a great system. it is really well put together and very stable all things considered. the problem is the “doing everything right” part. what happened to op is pretty common if you stop reviewing your updates one by one for a week or two. if you’re used to that, then arch is perfect. otherwise, it’s a chore
This is just not true. Its pretty rare that you have to manually intervene when updating.
that’s a little besides the point. my point is that you have to always be ready, even if an actual intervention event takes a while to happen. you’re used to it and/or got lucky, but the op is not the first person i see having issues like this and getting blamed for them because they should know better
That’s insane wtf 😂
funny and glib, but not true
arch only works if you think maintaining every detail of a linux system is fun, because you have to constantly know what you’re doing and that’s a huge commitment. stuff like what the op described is bound to happen if you ever get bored of it and decide not to pay much attention to the system one particular week
i really don’t think that’s true about arch, but in general i get that there is a spectrum of how much ppl want to be active in the maintenance of their computer.
i use EndeavourOS, but for my wife i give her Kalpa, which is atomic and much more “less fuss, just use computer.”
maybe @makeitwonderful@lemmy.sdf.org would like an immutable distro.
What’s your point of comparison, Ubuntu LTS? Arch does not require nearly as much upkeep or attention as you’re claiming. Try setting up a Gentoo or NixOS system, or better yet just do Linux From Scratch, and come back to us.
I have been on Arch , and I’m now running NixOS as my daily driver… IMO NixOS is less of a hassle to set up, and nearly maintenance free compared to Arch… Twice a year when the channel updates there’s a bit of stuff, but every change I need to make is usually explained in the output of my
nixos-rebuild… If something suddenly breaks in an update, I just boot into my previous generation, roll back myflake.lockand wait a few days for a fix to be available…Having dailied both as well, I only agree once you’re over the very significant learning curve. And even then, I’d say initial setup is pretty similar, if not a bit easier on Arch.
Arch and NixOS are kind of like C and Rust. Arch/C give you the power and flexibility to do pretty much whatever you want, but also will let you do it in very stupid ways that will come back to bite you. NixOS and Rust give you the same amount of power, but with a higher barrier to entry that ensures you have a pretty good idea of what you’re doing, which results in a much more stable experience.
debian
fedora
opensuse tumbleweed (which happens to also be rolling release)
gentoo and lfs make it very clear they’re demanding distros. arch is just a little easier, but it’s closer to gentoo than to debian
I have dailied Arch and Debian unstable and they both took about as much effort. Arch is really not that complex, it just gives you access to some potential footguns. Also, Arch absolutely makes it clear that it’s a more advanced distro – that’s the entire reason for the meme, although these days it’s a lot simpler thanks mostly to the installers.
you should be good after installing the optional dependencies
Installing the dependencies did fix it.
I decided I wanted to switch because in the time it took for me to figure that out I lost the excitement for what I was about to watch.
New optional dependencies also happen in other distributions, just happens a lot less as they aren’t rolling release distributions.
Learning to parse terminal output for what’s relevant is a good and sometimes necessary skill.
You’re probably right, this is a issue that isn’t unique to Arch. In this case, I would have been fine if a default had been chosen for people who didn’t do the reading. Something like installing a plugin that will keep basic functionally of the app working.
I agree that reviewing terminal output is a valuable skill. I’m often lacking the attention or energy to pay attention to every update. I wish that wasn’t the case because I believe I have higher than average emotional reactions when things go unexpectedly but the lack of attention -> unexpected event -> emotional reaction loop is a pattern of my life I’ve come to accept.
Please note that I wasn’t passing judgement with my comment, I’m just stating that it will happen with pretty much all Linux distributions.
For example, when upgrading major Debian versions, the same will happen - but you’ll usually get thrown into a full screen TUI with interactive buttons asking you how to proceed. So it isn’t really possible to leave the system in a non-functional state.
Definitely check out a different, stability first distro. However, note that you will then have the problem of software being old when you want a new feature!
Rule of Thumb: if your use case is not satisfied by your current Distro, then move to the one that does.
Arch or rolling release distros are great if you want latest version of software/packages as soon as possible. Downside is you need to put more effort/time to maintain it by yourself.
On the other hand, fixed release distros (e.g. Debian) doesn’t offer latest packages immediately. But, given that packages are tested for distro release, so you will have a more stable (in relative term) system for yourself with minimal effort.
I used to like rolling release distros on my college days as I had plenty of time back then. Now, I’m settled on fixed release ditro as it suits my current use case.
I use Debian, for the stability.
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.This is what drove me to Debian. I like stability, I don’t need cutting edge, simple as.
Debian is my go to for setting up a new server because of the stability and project longevity.
The excitement of features from the cutting edge gives me free energy to start new projects that I don’t experience if I wait for the stable release.
I don’t understand how Debian limits that. You can use Debian for your distribution BUT for whatever you want to be cutting edge, use whatever alternative method you want. It can be alternative package managers, e.g.
ambut if you want the absolute bleeding edge, go on the repository of the project, get a specific branch, build, install, use. That’s absolutely no problem with even Debian stable.I’m genuinely confused at comments implying that have a stable distribution means having outdated software.
For me, at least, that feeling is because I just like knowing my software is up to date. Only rarely do I come across an issue that is solved by a newer version, but that’s just me I’m sure. I definitely see the appeal to not having to think about your desktop applications individually.
Wouldn’t that be solved with random notifications saying software X has been updated to version Y.Z even though it might not be true?
.
The closest to Arch, a rolling cutting edge distro, is probably openSUSE Tumbleweed. openSUSE has excellent snapper integration that takes a snapshot before and after you touch zypper, so it’s easy to undo changes that might ruin your system. CachyOS also has that same great snapper integration, but that’s still Arch.
The closest to Arch, a rolling cutting edge distro, is probably
openSUSE TumbleweedVoid Linux.You can install snapper on normal Arch and it’ll snapshot before and after package installs
I can totally understand that. In case you still want to give it a chance, I can highly recommend EndeavorOS. It’s basically pre-styled, pure Arch. But it has a welcome dialog, where you have a warning banner at the top if you need to be careful regarding an update. This directly links you to their Gitlab and forum with the steps you’d need to take to not break anything. This saved me multiple times already and I never broke my system, despite not even reading the Arch RSS feed or changelogs.
Besides the EndeavorOS forum is waaaay friendlier compared to the Arch one.
Endeavour forums helped when I upgraded during the 24 hours when Arch removed Amdgpu firmware. It did kind of make me wonder how many issues like that were present but that I’ve just dodged by random upgrade timing.
I prefer Debian-Testing. Basically, a rolling release, but not unstable. Arch is akin to Debian -Sid, which is unstable. The latest packages are brought in to -Sid after some rudimentary testing on -experimental. But only the stuff that make it and are solid on -sid, make it to -testing. Basically, Debian has 2 layers of siphoning bugs before they even make it to -testing. And that’s why the -stable branch is so solid, because whatever makes it there, has to go through the 3 branches.
So if you like rolling releases with much newer packages, consider -testing. The easiest way is to wait for the Trixie release, and then do the manual update to -testing by changing the repository names (there are online tutorials about it). The other way is to get a -testing iso, but these usually are broken because most people “upgrade” their installed distro to testing instead of just install it outright.
I’ve been using -testing for over a year now with 0 problems. Even Google is using -testing internally! I also have had Arch installed and endeavouros, and have had 3 problems that I had to fix in 5 months.
What do you do for security updates?
What do you mean? They are included in the updates to -testing.
Only after they meet the requirements to be moved from unstable.
From the wiki:
and
- wiki.debian.org/DebianTesting
There is some advice on that page about how to deal with security updates for testing and I’m wondering how people who use testing take that advice, and what changes they make to get security updates. Or maybe you don’t bother. That’s what I mean.
There are security updates on testing. Maybe not as fast as they’re on Sid, but they are.
I’ve installed Debian testing from ISO a handful of times and never had any issues.
Very often it’s broken. I had two such instances. Even Debian recommends that you just upgrade from stable.
The old preferred way is to run testing/unstable with apt-pin (testing repos with higher priority). This way, if a package causes breakage, it’s a quicker fix from unstable than from testing. Also, security patches come to unstable first.
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
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).
Fedora and Bazzite both do it.
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
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
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.
The only issue is that you provide free testing for IBM, so it’s a no go if you try to boycott/avoid US companies. If you don’t it’s indeed a great choice.
Turn off telemetry?
And don’t report bugs when you find one ?
As long as they’re not for the core Fedora projects why not? Bugs for those should be scarce and there are many other users to report them anyway.
Using and contributing to FOSS is hardly scabbing regardless. Unless you’re donating to the project I wouldn’t consider even bug reporting as directly supporting IBM. The tangible profit to them is pennies if that.
How are you providing free testing by using something if you don’t actively file bug reports and such?
Telemetry, but I don’t know if many Linux user doesn’t turn it off. But I also don’t know if many Linux user doesn’t fill bug reports.
Also, if you use Fedora you may recommend it to people that will leave telemetry and/or file bug report. And you also contribute to make the red hat ecosystem relevant, potentially bringing paid customers for RHEL. It’s a drop in the ocean of course, but personally I don’t want to contribute to it.
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.
<img alt="" src="https://mander.xyz/pictrs/image/d75bb70e-1084-4ef1-a1d9-c8674a975bce.gif">
My favorite Linus moment ever.
Linus is about as far from a normal user as you can get and using him as a measuring stick if anything should be indication of the worse option for normal users…
¯\_(ツ)_/¯ In this case, my personal experience and the dozens of other people who have agreed with me beg to differ.
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
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.
Based on what you describe, I would strongly recommend going with OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. It’s just as bleeding-edge as Arch, but all packages go through automatic testing to ensure they won’t break anything, and if some manual actions are required, it will offer options right before update. Moreover, snapper in enabled by default on btrfs partitions, and it makes snapshots automatically before updates, so even if something breaks somehow, reverting takes a few seconds.
One small footnote is that you’ll need to add separate VLC repo or Packman for VLC to have full functionality - proprietary codecs are one of the rare things official repos don’t feature for legal reasons.
On Arch rant: I’ve always been weirded out by this “Arch is actually stable, you just have to watch every news post for manual interventions before every update, oh, and you better update very often” attitude.
Like, no, this is not called stable or even usable for general audience. Updating your system and praying for it not to break while studying everything you need to know is antithetical to stability and makes for an awful daily driver.
You have to watch the factory mailing list and make any manual interventions for Tumbleweed, and frankly, you should be watching the news and taking any action required no matter the os.
This is not really true for fixed release distros. I can’t remember when was the last time I had to read through the release note before Ubuntu version upgrade, or upgrading any package.
I used to think that, then I learnt the truth. Now-a-days, I say that you may as well use a rolling release because it’s not really any more work that a fixed release and you have up to date software.
Just to reiterate the same point - in fixed release, a package version is not released until all known issues are resolved.
At no point, it is end user responsibility to bother checking anything before installing a new version.
Oh yes, the most mythical of software. Bug free.
Bugs are of two types - known (found during testing by Distro maintainer) and unknown.
Fixed release fixes known bugs before pushing packages.
It is following the standard development life cycle.
So do rolling releases. What’s your point?
Are you familiar with the term “Regression testing”?
That’s not really true. It’s more important that the issues are known. Sometimes they actually wait longer to fix issues since it would introduce changes
My bad, I meant “known major issues”. If minor issues are not fixed, they document it on release note. But, at no point any fixed release distro ever released breaking changes “knowingly”.
Ubuntu was by far the worst experience I have had in terms of updates destroying things. The number of times my post update reboot brought me back to a GRUB prompt, I’ll never go back.
Wayland or X11?
A decent daily driver distro for regular user should not break on blind update - at most, it should warn the user automatically before applying updates. If user is expected to check news every time they want to update their system - it is not a good fit for anyone but enthusiasts.
Anyone who is not curious enough to type
yay -Pwbefore typingyayshould probably stick with something like Windows. And even then, you should watch out for the rare manual intervention.Edit: Tone.
FFS dude. It’s not lazy want updates to be as simple and pain free as possible. The entire point of these universal machines is to automate shit so we don’t have to think about it so much. We have different distros to run them because people prefer different ways of doing things. The one you pick doesn’t make you better or worse in any way. OP found out Arch is more work than they want to put up with for their daily driver and the benefits aren’t worth the cost. That’s a pretty big fucking club to be calling everyone in it lazy.
This kind of elitism is the most unnecessary, useless, vacuous, tedious horseshit and hurts Linux by pushing people away for nothing. Stop it.
I don’t think it makes sense to gatekeep Linux only to those who has time, energy, and dedication to continuously check for necessary interventions and to familiarize themselves with all the terminal utilities in the first place.
That is a sort of elitism we need to carefully avoid - one, because otherwise it would halven the desktop Linux community, and two, because there’s a huge group of people out there who need what Linux offers, but cannot dedicate themselves to it in the way enthusiasts do.
For them, there must be an option to push the button and get a smooth update, with everything resolved automatically or prompted in a user-friendly way. Arch is not that.
You feel comfy doing this - alright, no one stops you, Arch is great and has a purpose. But we should never put blame on users for not using their system The Arch Way™, because it’s too technical, too engaged, and is just a poor fit for most. People will not and should not accommodate for this just to use their system. There’s no need to.
If someone chose Arch and complains that it breaks things, it could be useful to point out Arch doesn’t have required guardrails to make it operable in a way they expect, and direct the user to other distributions that have them and potentially least painful ways to migrate.
Having tried Arch and its derivatives, and recognizing their strong points, I can absolutely tell the person needs another distribution, and that’s alright! Whatever fits anybody is up to them. And for stable rolling release experience without the need for manual checking (but also without some of the power features of Arch mainly geared toward enthusiasts) there’s OpenSUSE Tumbleweed.
Edit: Tone.
I don’t use Arch, I use Endeavour because they took Arch and made it better. As to why I used yay as my example, there are two reasons:
I see!
I do, in fact, use Endeavour on my desktop as well, simply because I like snappiness and choice of Arch and similarly don’t wanna bother with the pure one (and also EndeavourOS forums are more friendly in my experience). I run OpenSUSE Slowroll (an experimental Tumbleweed build, same idea as Manjaro, but actually done right) on my other laptop, so can speak from the experience on both ends.
With Slowroll (and my gf’s Tumbleweed) I’ve only once faced the need for manual intervention, and it was simply to resolve a dependency change by choosing which package to leave - literally enter one number, and then it went on peacefully and correctly installing 1460 updates (yeah, they pushed a big Tumbleweed dump, 3.5 gigs total). On Arch and EndeavourOS, the last intervention was just recently, that’s the one OP talks about, and they do happen more often and are more complicated than I’d like.
I used Tumbleweed for eight or so years before switching to Endeavour and it only really bit me hard once. Update, reboot, and sudo no longer worked! If I had spent a bit more time going through the mailing list, I could have made a simple configuration change before rebooting and saved a lot of stress! It affected nearly everybody who installed that particular image.
I’d say one issue in 8 years is a stellar track record!
But I agree they should have warned users a better way.
Anyway, I like how btrfs is treated within Tumbleweed - snapper is fully configured and enabled by default, and you can load a snapshot and rollback into it from the boot menu - all that would take you less than a minute, and any faulty update will be gone for good. With ext4, though, you might need Timeshift. But then, all that can be done within Arch with just a few more tweaks!
Yeah, it’s a pretty good track record. It was definitely a failure of communication in that instance, but iirc, they ended up rolling the change back a couple of days later.
I have been using Arch, EndouvourOS, and Chimera Linux now for years.
I never do this.
As I have been a Linux user since the early 90’s, I don’t think Windows is really the right fall-back for me.
Where did you get the idea that Arch is a daily driver for regular user? The very distro that tells in big letters: stuff can break, you better watch out on updates? The very distro that has command-line install process with chroot-like commands as official one?
Plenty of people seriously propose it as such.
It is not - at least if you’re not an enthusiast happy to tinker with your system all the time.
Yup, it really is not. Those plenty of people are doing a big disservice to others with such proposing. I am sad to hear it
There are distros based on Arch that are proclaimed to be user friendly and ready for general desktop/gaming use. Plus plenty of people online tell others to use Arch as a daily driver.
Regardless I don’t think an update should happen if it’s going to break something, unless you manually over ride the warnings it should be showing.
Well, Arch wiki explicitly tells you are expected to read the page before doing an update. Those distros which claim to be user-friendly as in “we treat you with kids gloves” definitely should take care of this, no questions here
Well… not really. My current installation of Tumbleweed is three and a half years old, and back in 2022 the only reason I re-installed it was changing the NVMe drive. I’ve never read factory mailing list and don’t ever recall having made manual interventions. I’ve just booted it, updated (zypper ref; zypper dup), rebooted and continued working.
You can do this on Arch too and it will work great until it doesn’t. Manual interventions are rare and usually don’t affect everyone.
I’m running Arch for a very long time. I agree this is not a distro for general audience. I disagree, however, that it is not stable. When I’m doing work I don’t update my system. I enjoy my stable configuration and when I have time, I do update, I curiously watch which amazing foss software had an update. And I try them. I check my new firefox. I check gimp’s new features. etc… or if I have to do something I easily fix it, like in no time because I know my OS. Then I enjoy my stable system again.
Do you want to know what’s unstable? When I had my new AMD GPU that I built my own kernel for, because the driver wasn’t in mainline. And it randomly crashed the system. That’s unstable.
Or when I installed my 3rd DE in ubuntu and apt couldn’t deal with it, it somehow removed X.org. And I couldn’t fix it. That’s also something I don’t want. Arch updates are much better than this.
Guess we simply apply different meaning to the word “stable”. (you do you, though, and if it’s alright with your workflow, yay!)
To me, stable means reliably working without any special maintenance. Arch requires you to update once in a while (otherwise your next update might get borked), and when you update, you may have to resolve conflicts and do manual interventions.
Right now, I run OpenSUSE Slowroll (beta, not released yet) on one of my machines and EndeavourOS on the other. The former recently had to update 1460 elements, and one intervention was required - package manager asked me if I want to hold one package for a while to avoid potential dependency issues. Later, it was fixed, and otherwise it went without a hitch. This is the worst behavior I’ve seen on this distribution, and so to me it renders “acceptably unstable” for general use (although I wouldn’t give that to my grandma).
In the last three years there’s been a single time I can recall pacman telling me I needed to do a thing.
I copy pasted that warning into google it took me right to the news post. I threw in the commands that the news post said I needed to do.
Nothing broke. So this isn’t like it’s a weekly problem.
Nice to know!
I upvoted you, I am a fellow openSUSE fan and contributor.
But I need to point out that if you install VLC from a repository outside of Factory, then it’s not auto-tested.
Moreover, Packman is external to the openSUSE project altogether. If you use it, you are supposed to “just trust” that everything will be fine.
You are better off installing VLC through Flatpak.
Fair point! Honestly, that’s exactly what I ultimately went for, I just know there are people around who strongly prefer native packages.
Flatpak contains all codecs etc., and works flawlessly.
The VLC thing can be solved relatively easily by installing
opiwith zypper, and then runningopi codecs, which will add all the necessary repos and install everything. After that VLC (and h.264 etc) will work like a charm.True!
Although, as another commenter pointed out, this will use Packman repo which is not official and apps there are not going through the same testing as in official repos.
So Flatpak is generally a better option. Still, if you want VLC as a native package, opi is indeed an easy and reliable way of providing it.
The same thing happened to me. The package was split into separate packages. Install the package vlc-plugins-all.
Problem solved
I don’t want to fault people for avoiding Arch’s instability in general but this is a very minor issue.
VLC is not a system critical package. I absolutely understand the mods choice to not put it in the RSS. At most they could put a notice in the pacman logs when it updates.
I like Arch because of the AUR and Pacman. Debian and Ubuntu had me adding a bunch of PPA’s which I found way more annoying. Debian probably would be my second choice though. As for the VLC thing, it took me less than 5 minutes from noticing there was a problem, to finding the solution online. Then I was watching The Whitest Kids U’ Know in VLC.
Thanks for this. My VLC broke similarly, but I use it rarely enough that I hadn’t looked into it yet.
Happy to help!
I’m curious as to why the package manager doesn’t fix this automatically?
They will probably get to there. It’s just not that important for the developers rn. They are working on a pacman rust rewrite and hopefully we can see more contributions to the project. I already considered contributing but C deterred me.
You can see the milestones here: gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/alpm/…/milestones
Void is Arch, but stable and without systemd.
If you know your way around Linux in general, that’s a good choice.
Void is NOT based on Arch. It was an original distro created by an ex-NetBSD dev. But yeah, I’d recommend it too.
I didn’t say that in a sense it was based on Arch, I said it like it was like arch: rolling and keeping the kiss principle.
Void is its own thing, which is another great point of going with Void.
Idk man, Void is cool but I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone unless they had a strong philosophical aversion to systemd, or wanted to try a musl-only system, and wanting a degree of “it just works” is kind of the opposite end of the spectrum.
Rocky or AlmaLinux
https://endeavouros.com/ https://garudalinux.org/ both arch based maybe you will like the forum style better and they will probably also give you this information.
I like Garuda community.
I do too. Though to be fair to OP, Garuda didn’t advise about the vlc problem either. I had to go hunting on my own to figure it out. But anyway, still loving Garuda and it is much less painful than any other OS I’ve ever used.
I doubt the forum style is really the issue.
EndeacourOS, one of my favourite distros, uses the same packages (the real Arch ones). So everything he says here applies.
i mean the communication style on the forum.
i think almost all arch based distros use the arch repos plus there own. i think only manjaro does there own thing.
+1 for Garuda. It’s nice that they have their own way of updating (garuda-update), which also handles situations like this one. It was very satisfying to not have to do anything when the linux-firmware change happened a couple of weeks back.
Oh, also snapshots by default are a chef’s kiss
i used arco linux and they just linked the word update to the arch command to update and that made it very easy to update i don't remember the correct name for this. i do not know if garuda does the same or if they have there own program to do this.
Garuda works differently. You use garuda-update instead of pacman, and it takes care of just about everything for you. So, for example, if you have something like needing to uninstall a package because it was split (like linux firmware), garuda-update just takes care of that for you (after they update the scripts, which takes at most a week usually)
ah ok good to know.
.
I’d recommend opensuse tumbleweed. It’s still a rolling distribution, it still has more bleeding edge software, but its package manager, zypper, does atomic updates, so if something doesn’t install right it rolls it back.
That’s the real thing for me: how painless is it to live with long term? After I’ve installed a couple of weird things, and configured some stuff custom - is this a distro that keeps rolling into the future, or is it one that makes me wish I had the time to re-install from scratch every 6 months?
I’ve run tumbleweed for quite a while with no issues. I’ve never had to reinstall it.
I also noticed vlc has broken (installed last week apparently)
Using the pacman syntax:
pacman -Q -i -d vlc
showed a conflict with the vlc-plugin (which appeared to be uninstalled already) and no vlc-plugin-#### installed.
The dependencies were fully explained in the list, including the vlc-plugins-all dependency. I’m lazy so that’s the dependency I installed on my EndeavourOS.
After having a similar feeling as yours I went for NixOS.
My thoughts then : if it breaks I can rollback, and the unstable channel is quite comparable to what arch offers.
Now : I’ve moved to stable channel, because it’s updated enough and allows me to only deal with breaking changes twice a year. Moving to NixOS was time consuming (but fun) because it required to rewrite all my dotfiles and learn something new.
What issues did you have? One of the many awesome things about NixOS is that you can write overrides for any particular package if you need an older version, or even to change some options.
I’ve been an Arch user for more than a decade and I’ll usually be first in line to defend it from dodgy claims about unreliability.
But that forum response is bizarre. Literally the last two RSS items right now are about how splitting packages will require intervention for some users (plasma and Linux firmware). VLC is an officially supported package, and surely this change would impact almost every VLC user?
New opt-depends is a nice pacman feature, but it hardly implies that things have been removed from the base package.
Maybe a nitpick, but the linux-firmware situation is different, it’s not about needing to install extra packages (they turned the existing package into a meta package or whatever it’s called), but about that coinciding with some changes that can break the upgrade process and require you to force uninstall a package before proceeding.
But yeah, good point about plasma, the only differences I can even think of are that plasma is probably more popular, and definitely more important to have working.
If you don’t want to get into the rabbit hole that is NixOS (which is a distro i also like), then i would say void linux, if you still want that arch minimalism. Void is a rolling release, but it’s more like a slow roll if that makes sense and focuses on stability. It’s package manager is also rock solid, fast, and can update even when the system hasn’t been updated in ages. If you’ve done a manual install of arch before, you’ll probably breeze through the install process as well, since it is a guided ncurses installer.
I second that, void is a solid and stable rolling distro.
People are not gonna like this at all but I’ve been using manjaro for years and it’s been pretty solid for me.
Manjaro has been pretty quiet for a long time. There’s gotta be a point where we forgive and forget. I like Manjaro and used it as my entry point to Arch. It sets a lot more up for you out of the box and has manjaro-specific package bundles that just work on install.
According to Manjarno, its been just under three years since their last mistake, and that was just forgetting to renew the SSL cert for their archived forums. Probably about time we let it back into the Arch family.
If we all can love steamOS then there’s zero reason to hate on Manjaro. They basically do the same thing.
They are both arch at the end of the day.
Least till Manjaro fucks up again. lol
I encountered this same VLC issue on Manjaro this week, so YMMV.
I was going to say that Manjaro will have the same issue in a short while because they delay the updates a little bit but follow them, so VLC will get split in Manjaro too, but someone already commented that it has already happened
Yup, it happened to me, installing necessary vlc plugins fixed the issue.
How about NixOS unstable?
Yeesss come to the dark side
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!
yeah i had that happen to me too, didn’t look in the update screen because updates before went with a breeze but i took another look after VLC wouldn’t play anything, it was something with the VLC plugins and i needed to reinstall those, just had to do
sudo pacamn -S vlc-plugins-allto get VLC to play video files back, but man, that should have been in the news imo.I had the same issue, hadn’t found the solution yet (also didn’t looked too hard) and while I sort of agree that it should have been in the news I also understand why it’s not (it only affects people with VLC, and not everyone uses VLC, if every time a package gets split it was in the news the news would be all about that). That being said I think that there were other solutions that would have been much better, namely split the package with a mandatory dependency on vlc-plugins-all and convert that to optional dependency in a month or two, that way everything keeps working as is for people during the transition, but after a short while it can be modularized.
Even better would be to automatically install vlc-plugins-all for people upgrading, so that it preserves the existing behavior.
Yes, that’s what I said, but AFAIK the only way to achieve that is to make it a mandatory dependency.
.
Calling people idiots is not helping them, it’s insulting them.
So to be clear, you are willing to upend your entire system and potentially your workflow because a single package update was mishandled and because somebody was a little too direct on a forum?
Have you considered Mac OS? Yes, I’m being snarky, but the Linux world isn’t fully user friendly. If you’re unwilling to roll with the punches, it may not actually be for you.
EDIT: I guess tough love from somebody who ran slackware from a stack of physical representations of save buttons is unwelcome. Noted.
I guess you’re an Arch user, but this is exactly the wrong thinking. Yes, stuff sometimes break for pretty much every distro, but that doesn’t mean we should dismiss people who want stuff to “just work” (which OP went above and beyond). We should absolutely strive to not break stuff, and if it does be humble and polite. Unless you literally want Linux to never become mainstream…
And btw I’ve been using Fedora for ages now, don’t have to follow anything, and when stuff breaks they are generally apologetic about it and try to fix stuff.
Yes, I’m an arch user. But that’s not the point. Even using something like mint, you still have to pay attention. Someone who’s not willing to do that needs a curated operating system. Simple as that.
I also like to watch locally hosted videos from time to time. I also had the problem with VLC. 10 minutes later I had my answer, the problem was fixed, and I went on with my day. I didn’t need to whine about the attitude of someone providing free tech support to someone else, and I didn’t whine about a simple package adjustment.
I’ll say it again. Linux isn’t for everybody. Not yet. It still takes a little bit of grit.
I don’t think the answer OP got falls under “tech support” (there would have had to be support for that). Additionally I don’t think anyone should be subjected to whims of authority figures, regardless of project. Being nice is free
Then you and OP might consider spinning up your own distribution from scratch, because one of the basic facts of life in this world is this: As long as you’re taking advantage of the fruits of somebody else’s labor, you’re also subject to their “whims”.
Whatever, bro
Thank you for your well-reasoned response.
So you’ve acknowledged the same issue, and instead of offering a solution to their issue, you decide to criticize them. They even said they’ve used Arch for 5 years. That’s not a small amount of time to be using an OS. You are what’s wrong with the Linux community, not OP.
OP already said their issue was resolved. My response is to the amount of grit OP is showing in their reaction.
As you like. The grit to find and create one’s own answers is what started the platform. Use it or not, blame the ones who came before you or find your own answers. It’s all up to you. I’ll be nothing more than an unpleasant memory in a day or two.
i don't really care about being rude. but just saying Linux isn't for everybody seems stupid to me because this has nothing to do with Linux itself. its about the people you depend on to get your information and no Linux user benefits from making Linux smaller because of attitude on a forum i never got this. i liked arco linux because you had a video for every problem you don't need a forum moderator to tell you anything if you can see the problem and the solution. seems the best way for everybody to learn and that should be the whole point the rest is just people sniffing there own farts. https://www.youtube.com/@ErikDubois
IMO, you didn’t say anything untrue nor offensive. People just can’t handle if some people straight up tell them world isn’t just a walk in the park ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Thanks. I have more to say from a long perspective on the subject, but I feel like I might shatter a few psyches along the way.
You’ve got it right. I appreciate the directiness of the forum moderator because it was a clear signal to me that the Arch community doesn’t value my experience at the level I would like.
Supporting iMacs for 8 years taught me Apple doesn’t value my experience either. I’m happy to upend my system and workflow if it means I’m a step closer to living in the world I want to exist. Most of my life is chosen for me so I want the decisions I have control over to be meaningful to me.
I’m truly sorry that’s the takeaway you got from all this. My (attempted) point was along the lines of “Linux is still the wild west.” If you’re looking for appreciation from random people on the internet, you might be in the wrong place.
I get it, probably more than most (my handle isn’t random). But from that very perspective, IMO you have to be able to withstand a few assholes and pick your battles. An asshole in a forum that isn’t even replying to me specifically doesn’t exceed that threshold.
If this is upendable, im sure the next distro will be fun for this user.
Heck, I’m feeling that vibe through this whole thread. I weep for the time these folks get to Senior or Associate levels - if they manage to.
i have no problems with assholes on the internet i find them very entertaining i like the wild west. but i would also like for my computer to work. it just seems the wrong attitude to have for the situation. there not fucking windows with an almost monopoly i find it just very counterproductive and maybe just don't be like windows in any way. its very bad for first time users that don't know there is more then 1 place to find info or a solutions. i just don't respect anybody that sniffs there own farts its just funny.
I’m running EndeavourOS and waiting for something like this to happen.
I ran Endeavour OS for 3 years, and it had a habit of breaking to no return every couple of months. I still liked it, but just got tired of that issue. Cachy OS has been much better
Is Cachy also Arch based?
Yup.
Use Gentoo, as it is way more stable and can do anything that Arch can.
I’ve tried Endeavour (after failing miserably to do stuff in Arch) and ended up breaking it really bad.
I just went back to Fedora, and haven’t looked back (in 3 months, until the distro-hop urge kicks in again 😁)
I use Fedora its a good reliable in between distro if you like fast updates but want tested updates.
Cachy OS has been treating me very well. Perfect all around. Very helpful people and very nice. I am not going anywhere
NIXOS never worry about this every again
I’ve only once had a broken firmware update in years and it was an easy fix.
I’m not sure how people can recommend other distributions when they all have issues of one sort or another and you just have to do the bare minimum sometimes to fix them.
Judging from how hasty you are to dismiss a distribution based on a singular event, I would say it will be hard to find other distributions that can be what you wish them to be.
Not gate keeping here, but even in Windows/Mac there are issues which require some research to fix, sometimes even harder than linux ones.
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).
If that happened to me I’d not want to deal with that again either.
What has made arch work for me is BTRFS filesystem with the grub module grub-btrfs. It gives you BTRFS snapshots you can load into at grub and with snapper and auto snap it will automatically create a restore point before updating.
It’s worked flawlessly and thanks to BTRFS black magic the snapshots don’t take up much storage space. I also recommend BTRFS assistant in the aur if you don’t mind using a gui.
If you want an easy arch setup + friendly community forums + easy BTRFS setup I can’t recommended EndevourOS enough.
It didn’t break my system. I refused the update, installed qt6-phonon-backend-mpv, updated the system, and uninstalled everything VLC related. Even though I don’t use the backend there are no VLC packages that I don’t need
Ah yes, the issue with modern Linux, the community.
I feel the shift to the current “git gud” style of blaming the user in any support has done more damage to Linux then any part of the software.
I don’t feel like this is a terribly recent attitude. It’s definitely one I’ve encountered repeatedly over a decade or more of dipping my toes in the pool. It’s not incorrect in a lot of circumstances, but it’s very difficult to find support when no one wants to help you improve. There’s always been a significant degree of ego in Linux user communities.
Not wanting to help would be better then this, its like they just want to “win” the support ticket. Its so terribly counterproductive.
I agree, people were telling me to RTFM in support chats on irc 30 years ago.
omg you guys are fragile af
I just had this exact same issue. I installed the package. Done.
No whining. It’s one fucking line of code.
They are not tech support. Maybe call applecare.
Why even type this?
Do you feel better doing so?
This is not a support forum, this is not tech support, this is lemmy and other then giving a great example of what the OP is getting at what does your comment address?
I’m amazed at the idea that in any technical community, an urging to gain more skill in your chosen environment could somehow be seen as negative.
I would make a joke here about arch and gatekeeping but its not just an arch issue.
It is most certainly not. (He says, as he comes fuming out of yet another meeting about a ticket that could have been solved at Tier 2 if support would learn how to read a log)
Oh pebkac is alive and well, no doubt about it. But expecting any level of expertise from an non commercial end user while simultaneously shooting down their questions is not going to help.
I absolutely agree, but here’s the problem in this context:
Arch gatekeeps on occasion, yes, but this isn’t that. This is the simple rules of that particular distro. OP is free to find something that better fits their needs; and it appears they have.
I see no problems with someone showing frustration, and in this case I don’t think arch should be proud of this example.
This is very much that, and why arch has the reputation it does. It will always be a fringe distro with the way the people (you included) shame and gatekeep.
the community is the worst part of most things, the RTFM attitude is better than toxic positivity though
Sure, but when I am looking for an answer toxic positivity and RTFM are often the same thing. The number of times people jump up to defend the manual and glaze the program without even checking if the info is in the manual (or if the manual even makes sense at all) is way too high.
I used to have to work on new stuff all the time and would have to read whitepapers or engineering change docs on the daily, and no the tangled mess most Linux documentation is in does not count as a functioning source of information.
The part that still grinds my gears is why bother to type out nothing of value like RTFM at all? Forums are filled with terrible posts belittleing the question instead of just answering the question. Its not helping anyone and at least to me makes little sense.
I switched from Manjaro to Bazzite on my gaming PC. I don’t have time to read changelogs.
Things went fantastically so I put Kinoite on my laptop. I do a lot more random shit on the laptop so it’s a bit more complicated but so far so good. Atomic distros take getting used to but it still feels less stressful than coming back to my computer after a few days and digging through like 100+ package updates and eventually saying “Fuck it” and just updating blindly.
IMHO the actual problem here is the Arch moderator being an ass.
This happens in all operating systems from time to time. An update kills an app. Usually, the app is wildly out of date and hanging on to the last vestiges of a deprecated call that finally gets removed. I recently experienced this with V4L (for OBS virtual camera) and a kernel update in NixOS. Had one hell of a time tracking it down. It was one of the twice-yearly OS upgrades. Luckily, I had only updated one of my devices, and it still worked on the old one. After tearing apart the changes, I was finally able to specify V4L and a Linux kernel version. Immediately, the problem popped right out. The new kernel now needs a specific value passed for the expected video stream, where it used to use a default if it wasn’t specified.
Apple breaks apps all the time. Windows does, but less so. The difference is usually before an update happens, Windows and Apple have had TONs of people testing on their own teams and their insiders people.
In the end, I just needed to roll back the kernel one revision until the V4L guys make the change, or I needed to recompile V4L myself with the option defaulted to something useful.
I don’t think you can safely get away from this kind of issue. (app incompatibility on upgrade, not mods being an ass)
Debian or Mint seem to be pretty welcoming and easy going to get rid of the asshole issues, but chances are, you’re going to break something eventually, and it’s going to be super hard to figure out why and how to get around it.
LMDE. Debian stability with the usability of mint. It works… That’s it. No gimmicks.
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^[To be clear, I meant the package manager. Determinate System's installer is probably your best option.] 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.