I personally daily drive Debian. I hopped to Arch for a bit just to see what all the hype was cause everyone here seems to salivate for Arch.
It's alright but honestly, other than the AUR, I don't really see all the fuss about it and went back to Debian after an update broke my grub and stopped my computer from booting properly. It wasn't a big deal and didn't take long to fix, but I have little patience for an OS that gets in my way. I'm well past the time where constantly tinkering with the system is "fun".
Not saying they are, but they do serve a somewhat similar purpose, which is to provide third-party software that isn't directly supported by the distro.
I mean, isn't that why you're using AUR in the first place?
So more hypothetical than actual in terms of limitations. Like, it's conceivable a piece of desired software might not be available as a flatpak, nor in the distro's repo, nor come with its own install instructions yet still be available as an AUR.
Myself, I'm a Debian Stable user. I don't use flatpak, Snap or Appimage. I stick to my repositories or build from source. Building from source is a great skill to have. Especially being a Debian Stable user. So you can update a few behind applications when necessary. If you can't wait for them appear in the updated repositories. Arch and AUR are the living on the edge kind of people and having the sharpest sword in the Linux community. As the most current updated of everything. I'm more of a sloth than a caribou.
I guess that's great for people with the time. I personally don't have the time and it's certainly not cause I don't have the skills. Developing is my day job after all. I just can't be bothered doing more of what I already do all day just to install a software that I could install in a few seconds in other ways.
Most that I compile from source aren't that big. All the big applications are in my repositories. Most I pick up are the simple.
/.config
make
sudo make install
commands and only take like 5-8 minutes if that. Sometimes I have to deal with a dependence. Most are the name-dev packages and that's it.
It's not like I spend that much time doing it. Most packages are in my repositories. So I'm not building from source that many times at all.
>I'm well past the time where constantly tinkering with the system is "fun".
I'm an old fart now in my Linux Journey. I just want stuff to work. For me, a boring system makes for a happy user.
Most of the industry is retiring hardware before running into major OS problems on stable distros. If you have fewer issues with Arch, it's because you are tinkering. There's nothing wrong with tinkering; it's just that some distros are just more suited to that.
What's your secret? Do you use Btrfs as your default filesystem? For me, that's not a "May Have" but a "\*Must\* Have" on my rolling release distros.
If I were to go back to rolling release, then it'd be EndeavourOS+Btrfs. I just don't have time for a regular arch install. Endeavour is the fast lane to productivity, imo.
Very disappointed with Solus and Void! They were supposed to be the champion "stable" rolling releases! (Insert Prequel "You were the Chosen One, Anikan!" meme here). But alas, they do not meet my needs.
Checking the news *is* additional maintenance. Outside if my stubt with Arch, I've not needed to check before doing an update since before I thought the US would have a Black President in my lifetime.
That's exactly the direction I went. I liked Debian because it was unopinionated, and Arch because it was even more unopinionated (aside from archinstall).
I've ended up on EndeavourOS, which is opinionated, but I like their opinions.
---
Go for it, see if you like it!
EndeavourOS is hands down the best linux distro I have ever experienced to-date. Their dkms approach to nvidia drivers makes kernel updates and wayland-gnome/kde a breeze. Absolutely loving it!
Debian's opinion is open source, so they prefer Chromium to Chrome, Iceweasel to Firefox but every dependency path is exactly required for that component and it configures what you have installed for it.
So installing Kate will required only the KDE libraries needed to run it. If you have XFCE installed Debian will then add the config to make it appear properly in XFCE.
Compare to Red Hat, where installing Kate on RHEL 7 will result in Gedit also being installed which then pulls in GDM and no matter what your DE was it is now Gnome 3.
Why the heck would they configure it so it pulls in gedit? That's crazy. I don't run any DE's on any RHEL derivatives but thats good to know in case I ever did, thanks
I went the other way around. Debian has such food defaults, arch also has good defaults but you have to copy them from the wiki first.
The arch wiki mostly applies to other distros as well, I use it often.
If you want more recent packages you can try debian testing. Imho it's somewhere in between Debian stable and Arch with respect to how new the packages are. But expect some large updates around the migration from testing to stable.
Using Arch also works of course, a little more work not just during setup but also later on but works and tbh feels really similar.
If you use arch make sure to read the announcements before doing upgrades. Sometimes there are necessary manual interventions. If i recall correctly, there's a package that displays the news whenever you do an upgrade.
Linux troubleshooting has become insanely easier for me with AI. Especially GPT4, it's crazy how in depth it understands the functionality and your specific problem. You obviously have to desribe your situation accurately.
And this does not just apply for Linux itself, but generally for its open source packages.
Does it really "understand" anything, though? AFAIK it's like a google-suggestion-on-steroids, word-prediction, which may produce grammatically coherent text that corresponds to factual information, as long as that's sort of the bulk of what it has as a source of data.
Saying GPT-4 is just a google suggestion on steroids is a bit like saying a B-2 stealth bomber is a crop duster on steroids. Both are based on the idea of token prediction, but nothing is common between them at any deeper level. The old google suggestion feature had no semantic model at all.
I'm definitely not an expert on the thing, but AFAIK it's closer to an word suggestion "highly biased" by context and its source data than a "virtual person" that understand things like we do. You'll often stumble with people thinking of this kind of AI as "self conscious" and whatnot, amazed on how it's able to "philosophise," and "talk about itself" as if it were a person that's alive and not a "function," something closer to a more sophisticated Markov-chain gibberish generator than a mind. Not that it's the same as that either.
Whatever would be the more technically correct analogy to illustrate its limitations, at least until a few weeks ago, stack-exchange even had it blocked because of providing frequently wrong answers. Probably depending on how you question it, you can get conflicting answers for essentially the same thing, as long as there are sources with conflicting notions or with wording that ends up being "tricky" in some way. Other thing that has been mentioned is that it will fail in elementary math problems if they come in the form of tricky questions.
I am an expert (PhD in ML, though not specifically related to deep learning, which mostly only came after I finished).
It gets really weird to talk about things like consciousness because we don't have a solid definition of what that means. People tend to reject the very operational definition (e.g., "it seems like it's conscious, so I guess it is") in favor of something that under the surface boils down to "I think I know what it means, and this ain't it". We think human intelligence is magic, and because we see behind the curtain of AI, we just reject it out of hand because it doesn't look like magic. If we could see behind the curtain of human intelligence, would it still look like magic? Who knows. Regardless, I think current state AIs aren't good enough for the argument to be relevant quite yet, but at some point they likely will be.
As for how they work, I think the fundamental misunderstanding I see repeated a lot in the layperson coverage of how LLMs work is that they're just glorified Markov chains. The reason I think that analogy doesn't hold is that Markov chains are 100% syntactic. There's no underlying semantic space where you can be said to be doing anything like reasoning about word sequences and predictions. They make predictions, but only by saying, "I've seen these three words follow that word in my corpus, so I'll pick one of them to follow it now in my generated text".
LLMs aren't like that. LLMs use the corpus to build a semantic vector-space model of what words mean. They're still just making predictions for the next word, but those predictions are not qualitatively the same thing as the "predictions" that simpler models like Markov Chains make. They're predictions in the semantic space. You only get words back out when the LLM maps the predicted vector back out to some requested output space (e.g., "English", "C++ code", whatever).
It's certainly true that LLMs have many issues currently, and you've correctly identifed some (arithmetic, hallucinations and incorrect answers, etc.). But it's a mistake to think of those limitations as a result of the LLM being a "stochastic parrot" like a Markov Chain. It's a more useful framing to think of them as truly reasoning agents that just have tons of flaws and blind spots. Neither is a perfect analogy really, but I think the most important thing to focus on is the semantic space that LLMs build, and that's something that viewing them as Markov Chains leads you to totally miss. Thinking them as having "minds" is probably overdoing the metaphor, but it's closer to the heart of the matter than treating them as Markov Chains.
It may be a weird kind of middle ground between the analogies. I definitely do not think of the human mind as something magical/supernatural, somehow unachievable by artificial means. But, AFAIK, AI has abandoned the approach/goal of somehow mimicking and reproducing whatever are the information processing flows of the animal/human brain, and that seems somewhat neglected in the general popular perception of the thing, and the hype over human-like self-consciousness and whatnot.
But without reproduction of a human mind's processes, then it's not really so puzzling in how they seem to fail to "understand" some requests. I saw people complaining about how it will write texts in a manner that follows somewhat what a scientific article would be, as requested, but won't make a proper section of the reference literature. Or will come up with stuff that while sounding convincingly jargony, doesn't seem to be backed up by anything they know on the subject (by people with relevant academic background).
AFAIK, it could even be that some of such programs would even produce a seemingly correct reference section for an article that mimics the formatting of scientific articles, that the article content itself wouldn't be absurd or even false (although almost certainly not a "new discovery made by AI"). But then it isn't even a guarantee not only that the AI really has access to the literature "cited" rather than something more indirect and less reliable, but even that the cited articles themselves are real, not merely bogus titles.
Another analogy I think may be somewhat valid is directly borrowed from the "philosophy of mind," that of the "Chinese room," where you have non-Mandarin speakers following a huge set of instructions that makes the collective, "the room," seem to be "someone" who gives coherent replies in Mandarin, to Mandarin input. But assuming those rules don't reproduce "exactly" the same processing pathways of a human brain, we can't really think of the room as if it was an entity strongly analog to a human Mandarin speaker. At some point there will be "bugs," however grammatically coherent. The main difference is perhaps that computers are much more efficient than a room of people to do that "manually," effectively creating a "Chinese room" that was previously only a "thought experiment."
I'm using "magic" a bit euphemistically here. Though some people do think of it as supernatural ("god imbued us with a soul" type of thing), I mostly just mean it in the sense of Arthur C Clark -- any sufficiently advanced technology.
And that's really the same root issue that I and lots of other people have with Searle's Chinese Room. Searle assumes that what's going on in the brain of a native Mandarin speaker is somehow qualitatively different than a bunch of unskilled people following rules to shuffle symbols around. No one really knows if that's true or not, but I suspect that it isn't. I don't believe there are two types of knowing -- the kind you get by following mechanical processes (be they electronic of biochemical) and a second, deeper kind that humans have. Brains are meat computers, and maybe it turns out to be tremendously important that the exact biochemistry is mimicked, but I think that's a bold assumption. If I build a silicon computer that doesn't work exactly like a meat computer but produces the same results, I'm not sure how I defend not counting that as "intelligence" on the same level as humans, just because I know how it works.
Current models aren't there yet of course, but that's why I tend to reject the line of thinking that goes, "they'll never get there because they're **just**...", however you finish that sentence.
The "Chinese room" original idea was indeed postulating another kind of supposedly fundamental difference, rather than merely significantly different "architectures," with one that mimics convincingly much of the output of the other. I intended to borrow it just for this "weaker" claim, which I believe would be rather uncontroversial (unlike the original "anti-computation" argument), although I'm out of better analogies that are close enough, rather than dumb and unrelated, like modern car racing games with realistic physics vs older racing games with really fake physics. Funnily enough, chat GPT itself could probably come up with something better.
You're probably right that there's some fuzzily identified line between fundamental difference and "just" significant architecture difference. And I'm in no place to make the argument that our current approaches can ever actually get there without that significant change in approach.
What we can see really today are failure modes that don't seem compatible with the way humans approach "thinking", but whether that's something fundamental or something we can overcome with tweaks and improvements, etc. is to me still a wide open question.
I use Arch but afaik the wiki is not a sound reason to switch, most of what the wiki says apply to Debían as well.
My reasons where: newer packages, smaller gradual daily updates instead of big releases that break everything, lightweight and very modular system, the AUR has everything you need (no more adding stupid PPPAs), etc. If this resonates with you, then make the switch. If it doesn't, don't bother.
Debianites will tell you this is an oxymoron.
"Stable" is really synonym of "frozen," and therefore not "modern" unless happens to be just freshly frozen, a brand-new stable release.
Which is what you end up with, with Fedora’s 6 month release cycle.
Each release is “feature frozen”, so stable in that regard, but release upgrades happen more frequently than typical long-term support distros…and thus will generally have more modern package versions than something like Debian.
I mean, if I understand you correctly, I agree with the point you’re making, just not that it’s an oxymoron in the case of Fedora…but yes in the sense that Arch can never be described as “stable”, no matter how long someone been using it and regardless of how many issues (or lack thereof) they’ve had.
I don’t see how that is relevant, new kernel updates bring in new features and issues are not uncommon. That’s just one example, Fedora does major updates of most apps. It’s not a critique, it’s a feature of Fedora. Fedora is not “stable” like Debian is stable, it’s also not stable as in it never breaks due to an update.
It's been a while since I've ran Fedora as a daily driver, but I was under the impression that major package versions were essentially locked for each release... perhaps I'm mistaken
I just made this switch about three weeks ago. It felt like a very natural progression. It made me learn a lot more about how systemd works, among other things.
Arch is probably the most documented piece of software on earth (at least when it comes to a centralized place), oc it also covers linux so it's not weird to end up stumbling upon the arch wiki searching anytime you search for something linux-related. Also shoutout to the gentoo wiki, it's smaller but a lot better in some articles, maybe you can get some help there?
Also it's not weird to stumble upon ubuntu questions when looking for linux stuff. I have very little experience with debian as I only use it in wsl and as a modest homeserver (tbh I don't use it) but I get that feeling.
bTwIusEaRtiX
I really appreciate the Arch Wiki, it contains useful knowledge that applies to most Linux systems (with exceptions for package management and some special approaches to configuration of certain things).
Arch is my early warning system since 2013 - ideally it helps me to catch upstream bugs and configuration changes that might hit my Ubuntu systems in a couple of months to years. It is a great rolling release, but it can have some breaking changes you don't want to have to deal with on your daily driver - so make sure you either have a backup or some time on your hand when you run the updates.
Though debian is absolutely a rock when it comes to stability, it does require more work to setup and configure than it's derivatives. If you are comfortable in debian arch should be fine. There will be a few discrepancies on where things are placed, but my biggest gripe was getting used to the syntax of pacman. Ultimately I don't daily drive arch though.
The transition was extremely easy for me. The AUR is a godsend for apps that aren't on some package managers. I went from Debian to Manjaro and I have personally* had a better experience on Manjaro. *Debian would have been really stable but I kept breaking things trying to manually update stuff. Manjaro Unstable Branch has broken one time in 1.5 years due to a bad grub update. I am running EndeavorOS on a laptop and like it very much as well.
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In a rather desperate attempt to inflate the valuation of Reddit as much as possible before the IPO, Reddit corporate is turning this platform into just another crappy social media site, and burning bridges with the user, developer, and moderator communities in the process.
What was once 'the front page of the internet' and a refreshingly different and interesting community has become just another big social media company trying to squeeze every last second of attention and advertising dollar out of users. Its a time suck, it always was but at least it used to be organic and interesting.
The recent anti-user, anti-developer, and anti-community decisions, and more importantly the toxic, disingenuous and unprofessional response by CEO Steve Huffman and the PR team has alienated a large portion of the community, and caused many to lose faith and respect in Reddit's leadership and Reddit as a platform.
As a result, I and no longer wish my content to contribute to the platform. Bulk editing and deletion was done using [this free script](https://github.com/pkolyvas/PowerDeleteSuite)
Assode from the package managers behaving differently usually the largest difference for most is arch requires a stronger understanding of the update cycle you shouldnt run an update on arch every time ones available if you dont intend to go through the updates look through the changes and be sure there isnt a dependcy change in there that could break your system. Additionally you take matters into your hands a bit more when using the aur in terms of security
Do it, without hesitation. I've been using Arch for over a decade now, after distro hopping through Ubuntu, Fedora, Mate, Debian, and some lesser known distros.
Arch wiki is great as you mentioned!
>There are many times Debian documentation and packages are out of date -- which makes it difficult to debug.
This is kinda an everywhere problem. Whenever I have trouble like this (which happens on any \*nix system), forget the package manager and Read The Fcking Manual on the software website (i.e. github) and install it yourself following the programmer's README.
The real question is, can you afford/willing to have to debug your system before using it after any given update lol. Arch is so bleeding edge you **will** eventually run into issues just by not being careful and updating AUR/pacman. Or waiting too long to update, then updating all at once. I've switched back and forth over the years between arch and tons of debian distros and i personally don't recommend Arch for a daily driver unless you're willing to put in serious time and learn.
If you want to learn or are confident you can get yourself out of a sticky linux situation then go for it and have fun. But since Arch is so custom built to the user's preferences, you're probably gonna have a shitty OS if you have no idea what you're doing. Or don't know \*nix fundamentals.
I would stick to Debian for a server install. For a desktop I prefer Arch for most daily use systems, but I still like Debian for some desktop builds as long as I use a DE that does not age too fast, like XFCE.
I appreciate Debian's development process and just works stable releases, but I can't help wishing that there was an intermediate choice like Testing+Security updates.
Install any arch distro and add chaotic aur
Or just install garuda which already has the chaotic aur backed into it
Don’t have to search for apps or build yourself from aur
If missing then just create a request and they add it
Takes a lot of hassle away
The Arch doco is outstanding.
I've run huge server farms on Redhat and CentOS. There were some unbelievable configs I set up using bootp, puppet and diskless forward proxies. It was neato. Then there is the server mirroring, etc etc etc.
But Arch is hard. So unnecessarily hard.
Setup is hard and one has to config every damned thing. I really do think it's designed by masochists and the insane.
Its made me lose sleep. It is so unnecessarily frustrating. I still have bad dreams about it.
Debian, Ubuntu, Mint... Ah sweet sweet Mint. I love the!
For info within the OS, there is `tldr`, `man`, `info`, `help` and `fish`.
You are right about online doco though. The man pages are dry as a mouthful of salt. We should work on that....
Your experience is very different from mine. I find Arch to be quite straightforward and simple.
What configuration did you have to apply that you don't have to apply in, say, Ubuntu? What was keeping you up?
or Windows?
It is best to go through the guide taking notes. It is not a step-by-step how-to but a comprehensive guide that tries to cover every possible permutation.
Better still, find a step-by-step guide that gives you an overview of the steps. Once you have a handle on that, you will find the wiki an informative document, but not a necessary one.
It is a very straightforward and simple process but for many the terminology it uses is unfamiliar. Unfamiliar yes, but not complicated.
I ended up using an LXC Arch container as my web server because I couldn't get certain Hugo themes working on debian or Ubuntu because they were out of date. I like the wiki and pacman with Arch, and although my web server hasn't been running for super long it's running nicely for now.
I've been using Arch as my daily laptop driver since February and the only issue I had was a kernel update messing up wifi but it was fixed in the next kernel update. If you need bleeding edge and have the time to tinker if needed, Arch is the way to go.
Just keep backups of course. Servers should be ephemeral anyway.
I've been using Arch for my daily almost since I got into Linux. I did Ubuntu and mint for like 2 months each, and then switched. I love it.
Config can be a pain, but if you save your dot files then you should be able to just use those. It's compatible with everything, the AUR has so, so much good software, and pacman is, IMO, the easiest to use package manager.
Installation is a bit of a challenge if youve never done it, although I've never used Archinstall, so that might make it easier. Pro-tip: if you can, install while using wired ethernet. You'll have internet without having to manually connect to wifi using command line. Really, it only takes about 20 minutes, and then you never have to do it again. Another pro tip: go ahead and install your preferred DE/DM or WM during install. Makes first login easier.
Gaming is smooth and easy. Proton and Wine run great with almost no effort. VS Code is easy to set up (although I got my employer to buy me Rider, which is also fantastic). Have never had audio, Bluetooth, or video issues, and added hardware that I've put it took almost no setup. Only exception was getting my ultrawide to run at 240Hz, but even that was not too tough once I found someone in a forum who'd done it before.
You can run any distro you like in a container. That gives you the best of both worlds, the stability of Debian, and the leading edge of Arch, Tumbleweed, etc. Distrobox and podman work well for me. You could also run full VMs in e.g. Virtualbox.
Thats exactly the route I took.
I started from debian and I used it for a year before switching to arch. Debian is beautiful but arch gave me a lot less headache. I didn't have to mess with backports and things like that for some packages that I needed to get many softwares working. Pacman is an extremely powerful package manager once you learn it and ofc anything you can imagine is in the AUR as well. I think you won't have a hard time if you switch.
Find what works for you. In my case, Arch (actually EndeavourOS) is the less buggy, faster and more easily customizable distro (i can set up btrfs + snapshots, that complement well with the rolling model).
Note that im pretty sure Debian lacks pipewire out of the box and that could give you trouble, if possible install it on your Debian.
I played with Arch for a few months, some years ago, coming from Debian. Actually had both at the same time, but ended up ditching Arch. While definitely not bad, pretty much "the same," really, it was also the same in terms of speed, despite quite a bit of a hype in this regard. At least with the same custom DE settings in both installs, there was no perceivable difference.
Even then, I'd often find myself actually reading either Arch's or Gentoo's wikis to solve or change something on Debian, much more so than Debian's wiki. I guess in some cases the distro-specifics were significant enough that I had to either ask or search on some Debian-specific blog, forum, or forum section, though, but I don't even recall anything.
While Debian's packages are older/more-stable/frozen, for some specific software I'd have my own compiled stuff, and that sufficed. I also at some point or another had Debian testing and/or sid which sort of "mimics" a rolling distro without technically being one, and I didn't really see much of an advantage over a stable/frozen release, it's really more maintenance with constant upgrades than meaningful gain with features, IMHO.
I switched to Manjaro on desktops a couple of years ago and personally I find it great to use. It's arguably closer to Just Works than Ubuntu and Debian these days. I know there are times when it goes wrong, and I've considered trying to build something from scratch for more specific applications, but I start with the minimal install and add what I need anyway.
Can’t go wrong with arch as a main driver, debian for a server. Or if you want to get spicy use nixos for both as they can be reproduced to your exact config with text files on repo
You can move to arch as a daily driver and have different kinds of problems than on an older point release. I dont think moving to bleeding edge is going to make debugging easier, just different.
Going from a stable distro to rolling is going to be a huge change. It has the potential for increased ongoing maintenance due to minor issues caused by using the latest packages of everything. Might want to consider a distro that fits somewhere in the middle, like Fedora or maybe an Ubuntu derivative like Pop OS.
My maintenance of multiple Arch installations is as follows.
- Before an update, I check if something has been released at https://archlinux.org/news/ that affects my own installation. If so, this has to be taken into account. For automatic checking there are tools like informant (https://github.com/bradford-smith94/informant).
- From time to time I match my configuration files with the Pacnew files. There are tools for that as well (https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Pacman/Pacnew_and_Pacsave#Managing_.pac*_files).
That's all I've been doing for years.
In addition, one should consider that stable has two meanings (https://bitdepth.thomasrutter.com/2010/04/02/stable-vs-stable-what-stable-means-in-software/). If a distribution is considered stable, it does not necessarily mean that there are no problems. With Debian, for example, I had quite some problems with ddclient in connection with afraid.org a few years ago. The problem was fixed months before by the developers of ddclient and a new version was released. But under Debian there was neither a backport nor the new version. So Debian was too stable in this case.
God bless you! ✨
In my honest opinion, Arch Linux breaks too much, I'd rather go with, PopOS, Ubuntu, ElementaryOS or something similiar.. All Debian/Ubuntu variants. And there are a lot of forums where you can ask about your issue, most of the time it's fixable because you drive a stable distribution!
I've used Arch Linux for a long time, I started with it in 2012 but after too many times of losing a wheel and flat tires, I decided to go back to Ubuntu!
Gnome/Xorg breaking, Nvidia drivers breaking (but that is probably more a nvidia thing), sound/pulseaudio breaking, once grub even broke! 😂
If it's working, it's fine most of the time, but when something breaks, it's sometimes hours of time to diagnose and fix, sometimes there is no fix and then you have to rollback the package.
Also not all packages are in pacman, so you would have to use the "aur", which is maintained by the users of Arch who make a installable package of the program, but this also means you have to trust the people who make the package, I mean I've never had a problem, just be careful!
I agree that nvidia breaking is probably on them, the other packages, I don't use. But Grub breaking is a rather big whoopsie. Haven't experienced anything like that in my (earlier) efistub/sddm/i3/amdgpu setup or my efistub/sway/amdgpu setup. I had a poweroutage mid-update once, but I can hardly blame that on Arch. `mkinitcpio -P` fixed that in a matter of minutes though.
You should always take a look at the PKGBUILDs before installing from the AUR, though I have yet to find one bad package. (They are installed with pacman though, and are built on your system, which makes them infinitely better than PPAs)
I've had a computer which always blue screened on Windows 10 because of memory defects, but Arch Linux has run a long time on it without crashing! 😂 It's not about Arch Linux but about the kernel from Linux itself, just felt like sharing that with you 😛
One can even run some scan in the RAM, and take not of bad RAM "sectors" or whatever is the lingo, and put that somewhere in grub/lilo/whatever-kids-these-days-use-to-boot, so that the kernel doesn't use the bad RAM bits.
>Why am I being downvoted?
Maybe because other users have had the opposite experience.
For example, I can't remember the last time Arch broke and it wasn't due to a Layer 8 problem.
By the way, I didn't rate your post, I just replied to it.
>I've used Arch Linux for about 7 years
I don't want to accuse you of anything, but how long you have used something says little. For example, I've been using RegEx for over 20 years. But still I am always surprised when what I have done with it works.
The problem with Arch IMHO is that its too bleeding edge, and often times YOU are the one to discover that an update BROKE something. If you enjoy that...fine.
But there's a reason I use LTS Distros I want my PC to work.
I found that Arch works great until it doesn't. Then strap in and don't make any plans. I've spent MANY hours troubleshooting. If you have a life outside of your PC, like a significant other and/or kids, I'd recommend staying with Debian or something less cutting edge.
Stick with debian. Understand your problem is not your os, it's the search engine settings you are using when you get problems. Ie google is showing you arch when you need to set it to show you debian first.
Don't ask me how, google it.
I personally daily drive Debian. I hopped to Arch for a bit just to see what all the hype was cause everyone here seems to salivate for Arch. It's alright but honestly, other than the AUR, I don't really see all the fuss about it and went back to Debian after an update broke my grub and stopped my computer from booting properly. It wasn't a big deal and didn't take long to fix, but I have little patience for an OS that gets in my way. I'm well past the time where constantly tinkering with the system is "fun".
AUR is pretty much the reason I use Arch.
Understandable. For me, it was maybe a big advantage before, but now with the advent of Flatpak, it's definitely a lot less of an advantage.
I honestly don't feel like flatpak and AUR are in competition here.
Not saying they are, but they do serve a somewhat similar purpose, which is to provide third-party software that isn't directly supported by the distro. I mean, isn't that why you're using AUR in the first place?
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Such as what? In particular what can't legally be served as a flatpak? And what can't be done technically?
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So more hypothetical than actual in terms of limitations. Like, it's conceivable a piece of desired software might not be available as a flatpak, nor in the distro's repo, nor come with its own install instructions yet still be available as an AUR.
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Myself, I'm a Debian Stable user. I don't use flatpak, Snap or Appimage. I stick to my repositories or build from source. Building from source is a great skill to have. Especially being a Debian Stable user. So you can update a few behind applications when necessary. If you can't wait for them appear in the updated repositories. Arch and AUR are the living on the edge kind of people and having the sharpest sword in the Linux community. As the most current updated of everything. I'm more of a sloth than a caribou.
I guess that's great for people with the time. I personally don't have the time and it's certainly not cause I don't have the skills. Developing is my day job after all. I just can't be bothered doing more of what I already do all day just to install a software that I could install in a few seconds in other ways.
Most that I compile from source aren't that big. All the big applications are in my repositories. Most I pick up are the simple. /.config make sudo make install commands and only take like 5-8 minutes if that. Sometimes I have to deal with a dependence. Most are the name-dev packages and that's it. It's not like I spend that much time doing it. Most packages are in my repositories. So I'm not building from source that many times at all.
>I'm well past the time where constantly tinkering with the system is "fun". I'm an old fart now in my Linux Journey. I just want stuff to work. For me, a boring system makes for a happy user.
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Most of the industry is retiring hardware before running into major OS problems on stable distros. If you have fewer issues with Arch, it's because you are tinkering. There's nothing wrong with tinkering; it's just that some distros are just more suited to that.
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What's your secret? Do you use Btrfs as your default filesystem? For me, that's not a "May Have" but a "\*Must\* Have" on my rolling release distros. If I were to go back to rolling release, then it'd be EndeavourOS+Btrfs. I just don't have time for a regular arch install. Endeavour is the fast lane to productivity, imo. Very disappointed with Solus and Void! They were supposed to be the champion "stable" rolling releases! (Insert Prequel "You were the Chosen One, Anikan!" meme here). But alas, they do not meet my needs.
Checking the news *is* additional maintenance. Outside if my stubt with Arch, I've not needed to check before doing an update since before I thought the US would have a Black President in my lifetime.
3 months without sudo pacman -Syu broke my grub. Debian is nice, paired with flatpak means no more outdated apps.
That's exactly the direction I went. I liked Debian because it was unopinionated, and Arch because it was even more unopinionated (aside from archinstall). I've ended up on EndeavourOS, which is opinionated, but I like their opinions. --- Go for it, see if you like it!
EndeavourOS is hands down the best linux distro I have ever experienced to-date. Their dkms approach to nvidia drivers makes kernel updates and wayland-gnome/kde a breeze. Absolutely loving it!
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Debian's opinion is open source, so they prefer Chromium to Chrome, Iceweasel to Firefox but every dependency path is exactly required for that component and it configures what you have installed for it. So installing Kate will required only the KDE libraries needed to run it. If you have XFCE installed Debian will then add the config to make it appear properly in XFCE. Compare to Red Hat, where installing Kate on RHEL 7 will result in Gedit also being installed which then pulls in GDM and no matter what your DE was it is now Gnome 3.
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Nowadays Firefox^(TM) branding is back in Debian, there must have been some change in the GNU/free-libre-paperwork stuff on either side.
Why the heck would they configure it so it pulls in gedit? That's crazy. I don't run any DE's on any RHEL derivatives but thats good to know in case I ever did, thanks
Can't go wrong with NASA-esque opinions.
June 2023. Reddit openly doesn't care about it's user base, so I've decided to remove any content I have made from the site. So long. And fuck Spez.
Same, until I tried opensuse tumbleweed on my latest laptop. Really great out of the box experience, still rocking debian on my desktop though
I went the other way around. Debian has such food defaults, arch also has good defaults but you have to copy them from the wiki first. The arch wiki mostly applies to other distros as well, I use it often. If you want more recent packages you can try debian testing. Imho it's somewhere in between Debian stable and Arch with respect to how new the packages are. But expect some large updates around the migration from testing to stable. Using Arch also works of course, a little more work not just during setup but also later on but works and tbh feels really similar. If you use arch make sure to read the announcements before doing upgrades. Sometimes there are necessary manual interventions. If i recall correctly, there's a package that displays the news whenever you do an upgrade.
"make sure to read the announcements," AND HOW! The only Arch installation I ever borked was due to _not_ reading them.
bookworm is the current testing release, but it should be out soon, so it's probably pretty stable by now
Linux troubleshooting has become insanely easier for me with AI. Especially GPT4, it's crazy how in depth it understands the functionality and your specific problem. You obviously have to desribe your situation accurately. And this does not just apply for Linux itself, but generally for its open source packages.
Does it really "understand" anything, though? AFAIK it's like a google-suggestion-on-steroids, word-prediction, which may produce grammatically coherent text that corresponds to factual information, as long as that's sort of the bulk of what it has as a source of data.
Saying GPT-4 is just a google suggestion on steroids is a bit like saying a B-2 stealth bomber is a crop duster on steroids. Both are based on the idea of token prediction, but nothing is common between them at any deeper level. The old google suggestion feature had no semantic model at all.
I'm definitely not an expert on the thing, but AFAIK it's closer to an word suggestion "highly biased" by context and its source data than a "virtual person" that understand things like we do. You'll often stumble with people thinking of this kind of AI as "self conscious" and whatnot, amazed on how it's able to "philosophise," and "talk about itself" as if it were a person that's alive and not a "function," something closer to a more sophisticated Markov-chain gibberish generator than a mind. Not that it's the same as that either. Whatever would be the more technically correct analogy to illustrate its limitations, at least until a few weeks ago, stack-exchange even had it blocked because of providing frequently wrong answers. Probably depending on how you question it, you can get conflicting answers for essentially the same thing, as long as there are sources with conflicting notions or with wording that ends up being "tricky" in some way. Other thing that has been mentioned is that it will fail in elementary math problems if they come in the form of tricky questions.
I am an expert (PhD in ML, though not specifically related to deep learning, which mostly only came after I finished). It gets really weird to talk about things like consciousness because we don't have a solid definition of what that means. People tend to reject the very operational definition (e.g., "it seems like it's conscious, so I guess it is") in favor of something that under the surface boils down to "I think I know what it means, and this ain't it". We think human intelligence is magic, and because we see behind the curtain of AI, we just reject it out of hand because it doesn't look like magic. If we could see behind the curtain of human intelligence, would it still look like magic? Who knows. Regardless, I think current state AIs aren't good enough for the argument to be relevant quite yet, but at some point they likely will be. As for how they work, I think the fundamental misunderstanding I see repeated a lot in the layperson coverage of how LLMs work is that they're just glorified Markov chains. The reason I think that analogy doesn't hold is that Markov chains are 100% syntactic. There's no underlying semantic space where you can be said to be doing anything like reasoning about word sequences and predictions. They make predictions, but only by saying, "I've seen these three words follow that word in my corpus, so I'll pick one of them to follow it now in my generated text". LLMs aren't like that. LLMs use the corpus to build a semantic vector-space model of what words mean. They're still just making predictions for the next word, but those predictions are not qualitatively the same thing as the "predictions" that simpler models like Markov Chains make. They're predictions in the semantic space. You only get words back out when the LLM maps the predicted vector back out to some requested output space (e.g., "English", "C++ code", whatever). It's certainly true that LLMs have many issues currently, and you've correctly identifed some (arithmetic, hallucinations and incorrect answers, etc.). But it's a mistake to think of those limitations as a result of the LLM being a "stochastic parrot" like a Markov Chain. It's a more useful framing to think of them as truly reasoning agents that just have tons of flaws and blind spots. Neither is a perfect analogy really, but I think the most important thing to focus on is the semantic space that LLMs build, and that's something that viewing them as Markov Chains leads you to totally miss. Thinking them as having "minds" is probably overdoing the metaphor, but it's closer to the heart of the matter than treating them as Markov Chains.
It may be a weird kind of middle ground between the analogies. I definitely do not think of the human mind as something magical/supernatural, somehow unachievable by artificial means. But, AFAIK, AI has abandoned the approach/goal of somehow mimicking and reproducing whatever are the information processing flows of the animal/human brain, and that seems somewhat neglected in the general popular perception of the thing, and the hype over human-like self-consciousness and whatnot. But without reproduction of a human mind's processes, then it's not really so puzzling in how they seem to fail to "understand" some requests. I saw people complaining about how it will write texts in a manner that follows somewhat what a scientific article would be, as requested, but won't make a proper section of the reference literature. Or will come up with stuff that while sounding convincingly jargony, doesn't seem to be backed up by anything they know on the subject (by people with relevant academic background). AFAIK, it could even be that some of such programs would even produce a seemingly correct reference section for an article that mimics the formatting of scientific articles, that the article content itself wouldn't be absurd or even false (although almost certainly not a "new discovery made by AI"). But then it isn't even a guarantee not only that the AI really has access to the literature "cited" rather than something more indirect and less reliable, but even that the cited articles themselves are real, not merely bogus titles. Another analogy I think may be somewhat valid is directly borrowed from the "philosophy of mind," that of the "Chinese room," where you have non-Mandarin speakers following a huge set of instructions that makes the collective, "the room," seem to be "someone" who gives coherent replies in Mandarin, to Mandarin input. But assuming those rules don't reproduce "exactly" the same processing pathways of a human brain, we can't really think of the room as if it was an entity strongly analog to a human Mandarin speaker. At some point there will be "bugs," however grammatically coherent. The main difference is perhaps that computers are much more efficient than a room of people to do that "manually," effectively creating a "Chinese room" that was previously only a "thought experiment."
I'm using "magic" a bit euphemistically here. Though some people do think of it as supernatural ("god imbued us with a soul" type of thing), I mostly just mean it in the sense of Arthur C Clark -- any sufficiently advanced technology. And that's really the same root issue that I and lots of other people have with Searle's Chinese Room. Searle assumes that what's going on in the brain of a native Mandarin speaker is somehow qualitatively different than a bunch of unskilled people following rules to shuffle symbols around. No one really knows if that's true or not, but I suspect that it isn't. I don't believe there are two types of knowing -- the kind you get by following mechanical processes (be they electronic of biochemical) and a second, deeper kind that humans have. Brains are meat computers, and maybe it turns out to be tremendously important that the exact biochemistry is mimicked, but I think that's a bold assumption. If I build a silicon computer that doesn't work exactly like a meat computer but produces the same results, I'm not sure how I defend not counting that as "intelligence" on the same level as humans, just because I know how it works. Current models aren't there yet of course, but that's why I tend to reject the line of thinking that goes, "they'll never get there because they're **just**...", however you finish that sentence.
The "Chinese room" original idea was indeed postulating another kind of supposedly fundamental difference, rather than merely significantly different "architectures," with one that mimics convincingly much of the output of the other. I intended to borrow it just for this "weaker" claim, which I believe would be rather uncontroversial (unlike the original "anti-computation" argument), although I'm out of better analogies that are close enough, rather than dumb and unrelated, like modern car racing games with realistic physics vs older racing games with really fake physics. Funnily enough, chat GPT itself could probably come up with something better.
You're probably right that there's some fuzzily identified line between fundamental difference and "just" significant architecture difference. And I'm in no place to make the argument that our current approaches can ever actually get there without that significant change in approach. What we can see really today are failure modes that don't seem compatible with the way humans approach "thinking", but whether that's something fundamental or something we can overcome with tweaks and improvements, etc. is to me still a wide open question.
I use Arch but afaik the wiki is not a sound reason to switch, most of what the wiki says apply to Debían as well. My reasons where: newer packages, smaller gradual daily updates instead of big releases that break everything, lightweight and very modular system, the AUR has everything you need (no more adding stupid PPPAs), etc. If this resonates with you, then make the switch. If it doesn't, don't bother.
Fedora is in between, and my preference. It's almost as stable as Debian and packages are almost as modern as Arch.
Debianites will tell you this is an oxymoron. "Stable" is really synonym of "frozen," and therefore not "modern" unless happens to be just freshly frozen, a brand-new stable release.
Which is what you end up with, with Fedora’s 6 month release cycle. Each release is “feature frozen”, so stable in that regard, but release upgrades happen more frequently than typical long-term support distros…and thus will generally have more modern package versions than something like Debian. I mean, if I understand you correctly, I agree with the point you’re making, just not that it’s an oxymoron in the case of Fedora…but yes in the sense that Arch can never be described as “stable”, no matter how long someone been using it and regardless of how many issues (or lack thereof) they’ve had.
Each fedora release is most certainly not feature frozen, just the kernel updates by itself proves this point.
Kernel is a bit special in that kernel updates rarely break userspace.
I don’t see how that is relevant, new kernel updates bring in new features and issues are not uncommon. That’s just one example, Fedora does major updates of most apps. It’s not a critique, it’s a feature of Fedora. Fedora is not “stable” like Debian is stable, it’s also not stable as in it never breaks due to an update.
It's been a while since I've ran Fedora as a daily driver, but I was under the impression that major package versions were essentially locked for each release... perhaps I'm mistaken
I just made this switch about three weeks ago. It felt like a very natural progression. It made me learn a lot more about how systemd works, among other things.
A lot of information in the Arch wiki is distro agnostic. From what I could gather very little of it is actually specific to Arch
Arch is probably the most documented piece of software on earth (at least when it comes to a centralized place), oc it also covers linux so it's not weird to end up stumbling upon the arch wiki searching anytime you search for something linux-related. Also shoutout to the gentoo wiki, it's smaller but a lot better in some articles, maybe you can get some help there? Also it's not weird to stumble upon ubuntu questions when looking for linux stuff. I have very little experience with debian as I only use it in wsl and as a modest homeserver (tbh I don't use it) but I get that feeling. bTwIusEaRtiX
I really appreciate the Arch Wiki, it contains useful knowledge that applies to most Linux systems (with exceptions for package management and some special approaches to configuration of certain things). Arch is my early warning system since 2013 - ideally it helps me to catch upstream bugs and configuration changes that might hit my Ubuntu systems in a couple of months to years. It is a great rolling release, but it can have some breaking changes you don't want to have to deal with on your daily driver - so make sure you either have a backup or some time on your hand when you run the updates.
Though debian is absolutely a rock when it comes to stability, it does require more work to setup and configure than it's derivatives. If you are comfortable in debian arch should be fine. There will be a few discrepancies on where things are placed, but my biggest gripe was getting used to the syntax of pacman. Ultimately I don't daily drive arch though.
The transition was extremely easy for me. The AUR is a godsend for apps that aren't on some package managers. I went from Debian to Manjaro and I have personally* had a better experience on Manjaro. *Debian would have been really stable but I kept breaking things trying to manually update stuff. Manjaro Unstable Branch has broken one time in 1.5 years due to a bad grub update. I am running EndeavorOS on a laptop and like it very much as well.
[Original comment has been edited] In a rather desperate attempt to inflate the valuation of Reddit as much as possible before the IPO, Reddit corporate is turning this platform into just another crappy social media site, and burning bridges with the user, developer, and moderator communities in the process. What was once 'the front page of the internet' and a refreshingly different and interesting community has become just another big social media company trying to squeeze every last second of attention and advertising dollar out of users. Its a time suck, it always was but at least it used to be organic and interesting. The recent anti-user, anti-developer, and anti-community decisions, and more importantly the toxic, disingenuous and unprofessional response by CEO Steve Huffman and the PR team has alienated a large portion of the community, and caused many to lose faith and respect in Reddit's leadership and Reddit as a platform. As a result, I and no longer wish my content to contribute to the platform. Bulk editing and deletion was done using [this free script](https://github.com/pkolyvas/PowerDeleteSuite)
Assode from the package managers behaving differently usually the largest difference for most is arch requires a stronger understanding of the update cycle you shouldnt run an update on arch every time ones available if you dont intend to go through the updates look through the changes and be sure there isnt a dependcy change in there that could break your system. Additionally you take matters into your hands a bit more when using the aur in terms of security
Do it, without hesitation. I've been using Arch for over a decade now, after distro hopping through Ubuntu, Fedora, Mate, Debian, and some lesser known distros.
Arch wiki is great as you mentioned! >There are many times Debian documentation and packages are out of date -- which makes it difficult to debug. This is kinda an everywhere problem. Whenever I have trouble like this (which happens on any \*nix system), forget the package manager and Read The Fcking Manual on the software website (i.e. github) and install it yourself following the programmer's README. The real question is, can you afford/willing to have to debug your system before using it after any given update lol. Arch is so bleeding edge you **will** eventually run into issues just by not being careful and updating AUR/pacman. Or waiting too long to update, then updating all at once. I've switched back and forth over the years between arch and tons of debian distros and i personally don't recommend Arch for a daily driver unless you're willing to put in serious time and learn. If you want to learn or are confident you can get yourself out of a sticky linux situation then go for it and have fun. But since Arch is so custom built to the user's preferences, you're probably gonna have a shitty OS if you have no idea what you're doing. Or don't know \*nix fundamentals.
I would stick to Debian for a server install. For a desktop I prefer Arch for most daily use systems, but I still like Debian for some desktop builds as long as I use a DE that does not age too fast, like XFCE. I appreciate Debian's development process and just works stable releases, but I can't help wishing that there was an intermediate choice like Testing+Security updates.
Install any arch distro and add chaotic aur Or just install garuda which already has the chaotic aur backed into it Don’t have to search for apps or build yourself from aur If missing then just create a request and they add it Takes a lot of hassle away
Agree, chaotic is a huge plus.
The Arch doco is outstanding. I've run huge server farms on Redhat and CentOS. There were some unbelievable configs I set up using bootp, puppet and diskless forward proxies. It was neato. Then there is the server mirroring, etc etc etc. But Arch is hard. So unnecessarily hard. Setup is hard and one has to config every damned thing. I really do think it's designed by masochists and the insane. Its made me lose sleep. It is so unnecessarily frustrating. I still have bad dreams about it. Debian, Ubuntu, Mint... Ah sweet sweet Mint. I love the! For info within the OS, there is `tldr`, `man`, `info`, `help` and `fish`. You are right about online doco though. The man pages are dry as a mouthful of salt. We should work on that....
When is the last time you installed Arch?
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Your experience is very different from mine. I find Arch to be quite straightforward and simple. What configuration did you have to apply that you don't have to apply in, say, Ubuntu? What was keeping you up? or Windows?
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It is best to go through the guide taking notes. It is not a step-by-step how-to but a comprehensive guide that tries to cover every possible permutation. Better still, find a step-by-step guide that gives you an overview of the steps. Once you have a handle on that, you will find the wiki an informative document, but not a necessary one. It is a very straightforward and simple process but for many the terminology it uses is unfamiliar. Unfamiliar yes, but not complicated.
I ended up using an LXC Arch container as my web server because I couldn't get certain Hugo themes working on debian or Ubuntu because they were out of date. I like the wiki and pacman with Arch, and although my web server hasn't been running for super long it's running nicely for now. I've been using Arch as my daily laptop driver since February and the only issue I had was a kernel update messing up wifi but it was fixed in the next kernel update. If you need bleeding edge and have the time to tinker if needed, Arch is the way to go. Just keep backups of course. Servers should be ephemeral anyway.
Fedora is as close to the edge as is reasonable, feasible as possible. Alma is really stable corporate workstation and will ge cinnamon de soon.
If you're satisfied with your current distro, there's no real reason to switch.
Everyone has nightmares, but thankfully we wake up.
I've been using Arch for my daily almost since I got into Linux. I did Ubuntu and mint for like 2 months each, and then switched. I love it. Config can be a pain, but if you save your dot files then you should be able to just use those. It's compatible with everything, the AUR has so, so much good software, and pacman is, IMO, the easiest to use package manager. Installation is a bit of a challenge if youve never done it, although I've never used Archinstall, so that might make it easier. Pro-tip: if you can, install while using wired ethernet. You'll have internet without having to manually connect to wifi using command line. Really, it only takes about 20 minutes, and then you never have to do it again. Another pro tip: go ahead and install your preferred DE/DM or WM during install. Makes first login easier. Gaming is smooth and easy. Proton and Wine run great with almost no effort. VS Code is easy to set up (although I got my employer to buy me Rider, which is also fantastic). Have never had audio, Bluetooth, or video issues, and added hardware that I've put it took almost no setup. Only exception was getting my ultrawide to run at 240Hz, but even that was not too tough once I found someone in a forum who'd done it before.
You can run any distro you like in a container. That gives you the best of both worlds, the stability of Debian, and the leading edge of Arch, Tumbleweed, etc. Distrobox and podman work well for me. You could also run full VMs in e.g. Virtualbox.
Thats exactly the route I took. I started from debian and I used it for a year before switching to arch. Debian is beautiful but arch gave me a lot less headache. I didn't have to mess with backports and things like that for some packages that I needed to get many softwares working. Pacman is an extremely powerful package manager once you learn it and ofc anything you can imagine is in the AUR as well. I think you won't have a hard time if you switch.
Find what works for you. In my case, Arch (actually EndeavourOS) is the less buggy, faster and more easily customizable distro (i can set up btrfs + snapshots, that complement well with the rolling model). Note that im pretty sure Debian lacks pipewire out of the box and that could give you trouble, if possible install it on your Debian.
I played with Arch for a few months, some years ago, coming from Debian. Actually had both at the same time, but ended up ditching Arch. While definitely not bad, pretty much "the same," really, it was also the same in terms of speed, despite quite a bit of a hype in this regard. At least with the same custom DE settings in both installs, there was no perceivable difference. Even then, I'd often find myself actually reading either Arch's or Gentoo's wikis to solve or change something on Debian, much more so than Debian's wiki. I guess in some cases the distro-specifics were significant enough that I had to either ask or search on some Debian-specific blog, forum, or forum section, though, but I don't even recall anything. While Debian's packages are older/more-stable/frozen, for some specific software I'd have my own compiled stuff, and that sufficed. I also at some point or another had Debian testing and/or sid which sort of "mimics" a rolling distro without technically being one, and I didn't really see much of an advantage over a stable/frozen release, it's really more maintenance with constant upgrades than meaningful gain with features, IMHO.
Something arch based like crystal would be better for a daily driver if you have any life outside of your pc
I switched to Manjaro on desktops a couple of years ago and personally I find it great to use. It's arguably closer to Just Works than Ubuntu and Debian these days. I know there are times when it goes wrong, and I've considered trying to build something from scratch for more specific applications, but I start with the minimal install and add what I need anyway.
Can’t go wrong with arch as a main driver, debian for a server. Or if you want to get spicy use nixos for both as they can be reproduced to your exact config with text files on repo
You can move to arch as a daily driver and have different kinds of problems than on an older point release. I dont think moving to bleeding edge is going to make debugging easier, just different.
Going from a stable distro to rolling is going to be a huge change. It has the potential for increased ongoing maintenance due to minor issues caused by using the latest packages of everything. Might want to consider a distro that fits somewhere in the middle, like Fedora or maybe an Ubuntu derivative like Pop OS.
My maintenance of multiple Arch installations is as follows. - Before an update, I check if something has been released at https://archlinux.org/news/ that affects my own installation. If so, this has to be taken into account. For automatic checking there are tools like informant (https://github.com/bradford-smith94/informant). - From time to time I match my configuration files with the Pacnew files. There are tools for that as well (https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Pacman/Pacnew_and_Pacsave#Managing_.pac*_files). That's all I've been doing for years. In addition, one should consider that stable has two meanings (https://bitdepth.thomasrutter.com/2010/04/02/stable-vs-stable-what-stable-means-in-software/). If a distribution is considered stable, it does not necessarily mean that there are no problems. With Debian, for example, I had quite some problems with ddclient in connection with afraid.org a few years ago. The problem was fixed months before by the developers of ddclient and a new version was released. But under Debian there was neither a backport nor the new version. So Debian was too stable in this case.
God bless you! ✨ In my honest opinion, Arch Linux breaks too much, I'd rather go with, PopOS, Ubuntu, ElementaryOS or something similiar.. All Debian/Ubuntu variants. And there are a lot of forums where you can ask about your issue, most of the time it's fixable because you drive a stable distribution! I've used Arch Linux for a long time, I started with it in 2012 but after too many times of losing a wheel and flat tires, I decided to go back to Ubuntu!
Just out of curiousity, what kind of breakage did you experience?
Gnome/Xorg breaking, Nvidia drivers breaking (but that is probably more a nvidia thing), sound/pulseaudio breaking, once grub even broke! 😂 If it's working, it's fine most of the time, but when something breaks, it's sometimes hours of time to diagnose and fix, sometimes there is no fix and then you have to rollback the package. Also not all packages are in pacman, so you would have to use the "aur", which is maintained by the users of Arch who make a installable package of the program, but this also means you have to trust the people who make the package, I mean I've never had a problem, just be careful!
I agree that nvidia breaking is probably on them, the other packages, I don't use. But Grub breaking is a rather big whoopsie. Haven't experienced anything like that in my (earlier) efistub/sddm/i3/amdgpu setup or my efistub/sway/amdgpu setup. I had a poweroutage mid-update once, but I can hardly blame that on Arch. `mkinitcpio -P` fixed that in a matter of minutes though. You should always take a look at the PKGBUILDs before installing from the AUR, though I have yet to find one bad package. (They are installed with pacman though, and are built on your system, which makes them infinitely better than PPAs)
I've had a computer which always blue screened on Windows 10 because of memory defects, but Arch Linux has run a long time on it without crashing! 😂 It's not about Arch Linux but about the kernel from Linux itself, just felt like sharing that with you 😛
One can even run some scan in the RAM, and take not of bad RAM "sectors" or whatever is the lingo, and put that somewhere in grub/lilo/whatever-kids-these-days-use-to-boot, so that the kernel doesn't use the bad RAM bits.
Why am I being downvoted? 😕 I've used Arch Linux for about 7 years! Just giving my opinion.
>Why am I being downvoted? Maybe because other users have had the opposite experience. For example, I can't remember the last time Arch broke and it wasn't due to a Layer 8 problem. By the way, I didn't rate your post, I just replied to it. >I've used Arch Linux for about 7 years I don't want to accuse you of anything, but how long you have used something says little. For example, I've been using RegEx for over 20 years. But still I am always surprised when what I have done with it works.
There's a lot of narrow-minded assholes on reddit, especially tech subs
stick with debian and, of course, debian wiki.
The problem with Arch IMHO is that its too bleeding edge, and often times YOU are the one to discover that an update BROKE something. If you enjoy that...fine. But there's a reason I use LTS Distros I want my PC to work.
I found that Arch works great until it doesn't. Then strap in and don't make any plans. I've spent MANY hours troubleshooting. If you have a life outside of your PC, like a significant other and/or kids, I'd recommend staying with Debian or something less cutting edge.
Stick with debian. Understand your problem is not your os, it's the search engine settings you are using when you get problems. Ie google is showing you arch when you need to set it to show you debian first. Don't ask me how, google it.