linuxmemes

It's been years since I actually used Arch.

Yeah, as is everyone that makes memes about it. I wonder why no one that actively uses it memes about it hmm...

Maybe because shit don't break anymore.

As an interesting aside, try upgrading from Ubuntu 24.04 to 26.04.
They replaced coreutils with a metapackage that uninstalls GNU coreutils and installs one rewritten in Rust.
Or it would install one rewritten in Rust, if it still had any of the coreutils binaries required to, you know, install something.

I've been using arch for maybe 5 years now, maybe longer. It's broken 4 times i think. 3 of those were windows updates that fucked with the bootloader. 1 time arch broke on an update, and checking the website had the fix right up top and it took 1 minute to fix. There were a couple other times where things didn't seem quite right but still working, and again the fix was right on the homepage and easy to do.

I like to do a fresh install once a year. So even though im not currently on Arch btw, my longest install was about 1 year.

been on arch 7y now. I only needed a rescue disk once, and that was totally my fault

only issue that isn't (mostly) my fault is my screens sometimes just turn off and i have to restart the pc. probably an issue with my gpu and not arch tho

an update only ever bricked my pc when plasma 6.6 launched. i was on cachyos and it worked perfectly again when i went back to arch

I've had Fedora break way more on me than Arch ever did. Arch is easy to recover from. It's fine. And it's always the same song and dance from people who have clearly never used it. "how do you keep it going? how do you prevent it from breaking? how hard was it to install?" none of the above. Arch isn't some beast of a distro that you constantly need to feed to keep happy. you can literally update the thing once a month if you so choose. I'm on NixOS now and those updates are more likely to break than anything on Arch. which NixOS it's pretty much a monthly thing where you'll update your flake and some random dependency for Krita or like Steam just won't work anymore therefore those programs won't work (but that's easy to circumvent thanks to flake locks) I never had that issue on Arch. I HAD many issues with Fedora just straight up breaking the entire system if I happened to uninstall the the wrong thing.

With the Archinstall it's even easier than ever to install it. I think the hardest thing is if you're installing via wifi just remembering the commands for that. now Archinstall walks you through everything, even lets you select a DE/WM and installs sane defaults with it. Arch is fine, it's easier than ever. Dare I say it's easier than something like Void or OpenSUSE tumbleweed (dreadful installer)

it's fun just typing yay into the terminal :)

The first line of my pacman.log file is from 2015. I've not had a need to change or reinstall

No recues in two years since I booted it the first time. Shit's smooth on different hardware without any fiddling. Windows taught me good to be a bit more cautious and curious, so with a system that doesn't explicitly fight me or wants to do thing behind my back, I feel way safer than before. Like, I started to regularly seek new updates via yay, it's something you don't hear from a windows boy. Minus one year on Mint that borked itself on update a couple of times, I had no previous Linux expirience.

Arch is the most stable Linux I've used. The only problem I've ever had is not using one for long enough that the keyring and mirrors were stale, and that wasn't difficult to fix.

My arch install is usually stable, the last issue I ran into was pretty recently, where it decided to build the initramfs without usb drivers, because I have a usb drive as my primary drive it then proceeded to be unable to boot due to that drive not being accessible.
Before that it was running without issues and semi-frequent updates for 1.5 years tho

Running an update in a background tab, forgetting about it, and closing my laptop lid mid-initramfs generation has caught me out a couple of times. Recoverable with a boot disk. Apart from that, Arch has been rock-solid on multiple machines for years for me. Recommend it to anyone.

Me personally has never been failed by arch in a couple of years. But I've recently argued with someone who went "I wanna auto-updates and also no problems ever", so guess things are wildly different for different folks

From the outside, freedom always looks like chaos.

I had one Raspberry Pi that needed to be hooked up to a monitor after it failed to reboot after an Arch kernel upgrade. The device name for the Ethernet card changed, and the netctl setup I was using to set up some route or other no longer worked.

In my years of using Arch that was literally the only problem.

I've had pain with several Debian upgrades, mostly due to exim4 becoming more strict and me actually having to learn something about my email setup. Also an issue with a Debian upgrade changing Dovecot version. Neither really avoidable by Debian, but it was not less painful somehow than Arch.

Actually this reminds me of why I moved to Arch on Raspberry Pi. I had a SD card go bad, and ext4 just happily used corrupted data. I wanted to switch to btrfs, which I could do with Debian, but any time Debian updated the kernel it wiped my setup and I had to do work to get it booting again. Arch supports btrfs out of the box and has worked smoothly and easily.

Still running since 2020. No face plant, yet. It's the most vanilla Arch + KDE install though so I don't know what should be breaking.

I removed windows after their EOL announcement for windows 10. I chose mint at first and then migrated to endeavor. Endeavor was as easy to install as mint and it better suits my needs.

I upgraded yesterday and now I get games lock up on my PC.

No, I don't have an Nvidia GPU

Been on arch on multiple computers for at least 15 years. Personal and work computers. It just works. Although it's for competent users and that might be the issue most people have with it.

I've destroyed whole system by accidentally deleting the var folder and still recovered it without backups.

I've also had a computer without updates turned off for more than a year and it also still worked just fine when updating and reading some quick things on the news page.

I've used many ubuntus on work laptops and other distros before arch and they just would eventually break or get into a Frankstein state that there was no way out without a full clean reinstall. Never again.

Not much has changed (also Arch always had an installer one way or another 🙃). I've managed to keep it going till the machine wasn't needed. Rescue boot was needed like 5-6 times over 15 years, I think. Most problems with Arch come from being hasty or not being able to read. One of the harder and more involved processes and problems to solve was updating 6 years old abandoned install, took a few hours, because arch archive is pretty slow sometimes.

I've been running all my servers and my work computer on Arch since around 2018, ever since Ubuntu started shoving snaps everywhere. Even the instance I'm writing this from is running Arch. Overall, everything is great. The instance has 98-99% uptime. No issues with the work PC either.

UPD: While rereading the post, I remembered that rabbitmq was recently broken in the repositories. But everything was solved with a two-minute rollback and blocking of the version in pacman.

UPD2: I build packages with my hands periodically. It's not like I haven't done the same thing on Ubuntu or CentOS. On Arch make PKGBUILD really more easy then spec file for CentOS or deb structure for ubuntu. On Ubuntu this is really awful.

The only component actually fucking up boot has been the NVidia driver. Otherwise, Arch with testing repos has never failed me for years on many devices.

To provide an example from the debian world: I tried running Debian testing on a desktop system around 15 years ago. Lasted maybe a couple of months before it broke into a state I couldn't rescue it from. Now, I didn't have much Linux experience back then, but I also think that Debian isn't as user-friendly as Arch when it comes to update instructions for its rolling releases (testing and sid/unstable). Maybe there's a mailing list somewhere, but mailing lists are generally also pretty arcane. Plus there's lots of outdated info and dead links on the Debian wiki.

Can't say I've used Arch as my primary for very long periods but whenever I have used it as my primary there hasn't been a lot of issues for me.

Never had to roll back kernels, never really had any major issues that I know I didn't cause or could be traced back me doing something, things were pretty smooth. There was some hurdles but they've gotten easier over time with the distro itself becoming a bit easier too.

But I guess I've gotten that Linux intuition over the years.

Last time I had it not boot after an update has been years ago, it just works these days.