nixCraft on Mastodon
Has nix in their profile name and doesn't use NixOS π€ /s
this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2026
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I'm just chiming in to not announce which distro I'm using.
-sent from Voyager on Android
I've used debian and arch. Only on debian have I discovered my wifi driver wasn't yet supported. Only on debian have I turned on a server that I'd left off for a bit and abruptly discovered packages and updates no longer worked due to end of support and that I couldn't run dist-upgrade without them. I've had to do more major surgery on apt then I've ever done with pacman.
My machines got borked every time I tried to do a Debian or Fedora dist-upgrade following the official guide, like 4 times total. Rolling updates on Arch require manual intervention once in a blue moon and haven't broken my system since I got rid of Nvidia
In the past 3 years of using arch daily I've had to remove some renamed packages after an update once, thats about it
I wonder how many Arch haters have actually used Arch and ever ran into a breaking issue.
In my 8 years of daily driving Arch, I have had 1 ever, and it was only bad bc I didn't know of BTRFS yet.
That happened 3 years in, and I went on a new distro-hopping spree in between, trying Fedora, NixOS, and others, and they had actual problems. Not "oh an update broke my system and was fixed in a day."
So now I've been back on Arch for more years.
This whole "Arch is always breaking and takes so much maintenance" is a myth. In reality, Arch is the most stable, because it packages everything Vanilla. Everything works the "standard" way. On Debian, things decay, and then some stuff that's new breaks with some stuff that's old. On Fedora, there is a Red-Hat tax: configs in weird places, strange scripts, software missing from main repos (COPR sucks btw). On Arch, it's just "normal" Linux; and that works
Interesting, my two friends with Arch keep breaking their system π They say its not their fault though!
This mirrors my experience. I -Syu on a weekly basis, spend about 3 minutes doing pacnews, and then I'm done.
I'm not one of those Arch evangelicals, but this isn't true at all now.
100%. Iβve got servers running arch for the past 5 years or so and theyβre the most stable systems Iβve got. I got so tired of the painful upgrade paths on βstableβ distros so decided to switch a server to a rolling release.
After I found arch got security patches into the repos faster than the stable distros could backport, I decided to switch them so over.
Iβm even a mad man and have them self update with a script that checks informant (or something, canβt actually remember) for installed packages against news. If no installed packages are found in news, it continues with the scheduled update.
Itβs glorious.
But it says this screenshot post happened 4h ago.
Did the internet lie to me?
It still says 4h ago. I checked a while ago, still the same. What the heck? Is it moving in time? Always four hours away? How is this possible?!
There might be a bug in your time, check the logs
Ask fusion researchers, they've been maintaining a 30 year difference for decades.
Sincerely, a Gentoo user.
Ironically, it's the rolling release that's much more stable for me.
"Stable" distros often had a long and risky process of upgrading to the next major release.
Meanwhile, my Arch install has been pretty damn stable for over 10 years and went through several different PCs.
You're confusing two different meanings of stable. When people refer to "stable" distros such as Debian, they are referring to the meaning of stable as "unchanging," not the meaning of stable as "doesn't crash."
A rolling release distro by that definition cannot be stable.
Fair, I'm always scared to upgrade to a new Debian release and the process is always painful. But that happens every couple years and I can take a week or two to look into it before doing it.
Every time I did pacman -Syu it was a Russian roulette. Most of the times everything was fine, but often enough there was a problem and something was broken and I had to spend a couple days figuring out what was the problem.
I always just rollback then wait until I feel like they might've pushed an update to fix it.
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Why should my pc be stable if I'm not stable
wanda.jpg
I have questions now, about myself
I boot my arch laptop once in a blue moon and update it. Its not 2002 anymore.
I don't know where my Linux journey takes me next yet, but I only half way agree with this post. Arch is not quite as bad as this post makes it out to be, but there's definitely always a bit of russian roulette involved in whether your system boots tomorrow or not (most of the time it does).
I just had my EndeavourOS (which is just a thin layer on top of Arch) kill itself and some weird-ass hyperspecific flags in the initrd build process brought it back to life.
Tho in the ~10 years of using arch now I'd say it was still preferable to the extremely stable experience, and I don't think recommending Debian Stable is such a good idea either.
Yeah I could unfuck my EOS system with a bit of trickery, but once you get a good franken debian going, when that thing breaks there's no rescue.
I've had some stuff on Arch break after an upgrade too because some config variable names changed. I rember when I had KDE with i3 going and one day the desktop was gone. Was just because the variable names in KDE had changed and a quick i3 config change was all that was needed.
Having to selectively install packages from other sources because the main repo will keep you on a too outdated version for 6 months is just not a viable idea in today's world.
There are luckily more than just these 2 options.
I use EndeavourOS for my primary gaming setup and will sometimes go a month or more before I remember to update again. Even with a relatively modern nVidia card, it seems to keep up just fine.
That being said, every vanilla Arch experience has been a disaster by the end and while itβs not the same situation as the meme, you very much have to have a ton of prior knowledge to get a system that actually feels personal and by the point itβs personal enough, getting support for your setup is nigh impossible because itβs so bespoke.
Endeavouros is great! Just use Flatpack before the AUR. AUR is basically the Wild West and should only be used as a last resort.
I use EndeavourOS as my main as well and never have issues as long as I stay away from the AUR.
I love EndeavourOS. It's easily the most stable Linux experience I've had.
Linux Mint user here, I have no idea if Arc is that complicated, I don't care really. All I need is a rock stable system where I can do things like developing, or just use it as "a computer".
I reboot every month or three, and feel extra happy after any interaction with m$ windows.
Life's good π
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I use Debian on my homelab servers (Ubuntu when I have to for some reason) and Ubuntu LTS on desktop. And more or less ignore everything else outside of as a curiosity.
My main workhorse VM is Ubuntu LTS because when I set it up I just picked it instead of spending another week researching and trying different distros. I could look into swapping it out but nothing has annoyed me about it once I figured out to disable snaps.
It feels like every time I finally have something set up and running I find some article telling me that what I chose is dumb for reason xyz and I really should be using something different, but refactoring at this point is a pita so why mess with something that isnβt broken?
This is a bit like saying "Honda Civics are Tamagotchis for car people" because there's a community of people who enjoy modifying them. The rest of us just drive, and they run perfectly fine if you're not doing a lot of invasive customization.
Arch is great for tweaking and customization, but it's also fine for a simpler use case.
Fedora Immutable Desktop users when Arch and Debian users fight about whose system is more stable. (I use Fedora Kinoite btw)
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Arch really is the "Linux" of Linux users, complete with non users making shit up about it.
Sadly that tells you something about the linux knowledge of the nixcraft guy.
If he would've stopped at making fun with pacman -Syu, it would've been ok. You forgot a y and arch is not less usable than debian ..
I'm on opensuse aeon btw, I don't interact with the OS anymore. It's just there and works, like atomic fedora, I don't care.
It's been proved to me before that this guy (people?) Really have no idea what their talking about.
They installed ubuntu one day and decided to make it their whole personality.
Every time I do a point release upgrade on Debian the whole system breaks. It's so smooth until that point, but if I have to reinstall the OS anyway then I'm going back to EndeavourOS (which is what I'm using now)
You must have a very strange apt config to break Debian with a point-release upgrade.
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And then there's Fedora in the corner, quietly getting the best of both worlds.
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Arch isn't just an operating system but a way of life.
I've done 'real work' on computer with arch my whole professional career. I need a working computer with reasonably up to date programs not 3 to 10 years out of date because debian maintainers can't be bothered. On servers it's another story and there ~~i would prefer rhel any day~~ i would use debian.
Never had a system breaking update. Idk what arch people be using.
fedora on main and debian on home server
it just works
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