this post was submitted on 16 May 2024
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Arch Linux

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submitted 6 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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I was Nobara user, then I am using Fedora right now. I want to use things like Hyprland etc. and ya know, Its damn cool to say I am using arch btw. So I've decided to use Arch Linux. But everyone says its always breaking and gives problems. That's because of users, not OS.. right? I love to deal with problems but I don't want to waste my time. Is Arch really problemful OS? Should I use it? I know what to do with setup/ usage, the hardness of Arch is not problem for me but I am just concerned about the mindset "Arch always gets broken".

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago

But everyone says its always breaking and gives problems. That’s because of users, not OS… right?

It's an exaggeration, it doesn't always break but yes it occasionally does. Any Arch user who tells you otherwise is lying or hasn't used Arch for very long yet.

That’s because of users, not OS… right?

No it's because of regressions in new releases. Arch relentlessly marches forward and always tries to give you the latest-and-greatest version of any package on your system. There is some testing done obviously, but it can never be ruled out that newer software contains new bugs and regressions that are not caught in testing, and that it ends up being released.

To give an example of such a regression, the past few weeks there have been some kernel releases with broken bluetooth support for the (very common) Intel AX200 chipset. It is fixed now, but if you wanted to use bluetooth, Arch was in fact broken for some time.

The fix is usually: temporarily rollback the offending packages until the issue is fixed upstream or until a workaround is found. It does mean you will occasionally have to spend some time diagnosing issues and checking user forums to see if other users are having the same problem.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago

i think many people interpret "arch is unstable" as "arch breaks a lot" while it imho just means its bleeding edge and software is not only updated on upgrades but all the time. my arch installations did sometimes "break" but were much easier to recover than e.g. all the failed ubuntu upgrades which i had ni idea how tonfix without reinstalling. for me arch was the perfect learning distro and is now even easier to install since there is the archinstall script.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago

I used arch for ~5 years but recently switched to Nixos. It's been such a long time since I dared to 'play around' with my setup to try things out without worrying about how I'm going to reverse them. Also really enjoying the added benefit of keeping all my fixes and hacks versioned in a git repo.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I had more problems on 'user-friendly' distros, than I had on Arch.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago

As crazy as that might sound, as a "professional" distrohopper, I also find Arch to be much easier to set up and far less problematic, especially now with Archinstall which practically takes away a ton of the configuration and complexity of initial setup away.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago (3 children)

Who thinks that Arch always broke is one of the two:

  • An user that is trying to mess with the system always; or
  • A person that don't know Arch and is repeating non-sense

My Arch install has almost 5 years and I never had an issue that was like "oh no! O need to reinstall everything!"

Interesting enough, when I was using release-based distros, almost every big update my system become unstable and I had to reinstall me whole system.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago

The only times Arch broke for me were when I broke it. There were 2 exceptions, however.

  1. I once went a long time (a few weeks) without updating and I had issues relating to keys and the pacman keyring. Luckily, Erik Dubois had a video about exactly that and the system was fixed within <30 minutes (including finding the video and watching it)

  2. The other time my computer turned off during an update which involved updating the kernel so my system broke (I can't remember if I turned it off or if it ran out of battery). I recovered it using live media, chrooting and doing an update again from inside the chroot, which fixed it. Once again, took about 30 mins.

Every other case of breakage was caused by me actively tinkering with the system.

I should note that this doesn't include minor issues like some configuration no longer working because of an update or something like that, as 1. this isn't a system-level breakage and 2. it isn't Arch's fault.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago

As far as i see from the comments, I understood what i have to. I see that Arch has no problem in itself, the problem is user. I decided to install Arch on my pc finally. Thanks for your reply. Have a nice day.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago (2 children)

I love to deal with problems but I don’t want to waste my time.

Then Arch is not for you. The distro requires you to always be informed of the latest news regarding Arch before upgrading so you'll probably have to admin your system.

If you're not ready to do that then you should probably stay with Fedora.

My suggestion: run arch in a virtual machine and get familiar with it before installing it.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

Manual interventions in Arch are very very ralely needed. And most of the times they are needed... You don't need to do shit because it's about some weird legacy package you don't have.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I disagree. I’ve blindly updated every day for 5 years and not once had a failure. In the one or two times something went sideways, a quick check of the wiki got me up and running with very little fuss.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago

It's always a good idea to be aware of .pacnew/.pacsave files. If you ignore them everything might still work but you might end up using old configs. This might not break anything but could have security or performance implications. A system can slowly "rot" this way while still appearing to be fine.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago

sample size of 1, admittedly, but there's so few times I've managed to break arch - which I can't 100% attribute to myself.

Once the updates broke, somehow wiping bash -binary and kernel. Not entirely sure how or why, all I did was a normal pacman -Suy. I might have issued the pacman -command from a long path which didn't exist anymore, not sure if relevant or not. Hasn't happened since, so... dunno. It did spook me a bit, but nobody else at the time reported similar issues.

I've ran arch for years at work (webdevelopment, desktop and laptop), home server (irc shell, mumble, etc hosting) and now home desktop too (gaming, media, dualbooting with win10).

The home server has required a powerbutton -forced boot once or twice, many months of uptime & regular kernel updates can apparently mess something with networking and usb, so can't ssh in and keyboard doesn't get regognized when plugged in. So, you know, reboot after kernel updates? :D

It's always a good idea to check the website for breaking changes which require manually doing something, there has been a few along the years.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago

i have used arch with kde plasma for about a year on my ThinkPad. so far it is working (and updating) without a hitch. I think the Potential, that your OS breaks somehow is higher on rolling release distros but i think Arch isn't bad as daily driver if you take the time to install and customize the system to your needs. it is not so far away from a current fedora.