1y ago

Choosing Next OS

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".

19 comments

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.
- 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.
- I had one btrfs partition that just got corrupted for some reason. One day after changing nothing except updating the system, I rebooted and the partition wouldn't boot. Lost a lot of good stuff on it. This was Arch, but I don't think it has anything to do with it being Arch...
- The only times Arch broke for me were when I broke it. There were 2 exceptions, however.
  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)
  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.
- Agreed. I broke arch multiple times over the years. Once I learned to read the arch news, pay attention to the pacman log, and not just “yay - update complete” my way through updates - it’s been pretty solid for years. More so than the “stable, noob friendly distros”
I had more problems on 'user-friendly' distros, than I had on Arch.
- 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.
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.
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.
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.
The only thing that I have ever had break my Arch install was Nvidia Drivers. I wish I could afford replacing my 3090 with something equal or better to it from AMD.
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.
- I've used a few distros part-time over the years (ubuntu, fedora, mint, arch, pop), and can say that assuming you don't need the latest version of all programs, NixOS is my favourite. It's so easy to test things out and then undo them, it's great!
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.
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.
- 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.
  
  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.
- 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.
Arch is not at all problematic, however if you're still inexperienced with Linux in general, there might be smaller issues with some packages which might be unsolvable or hard to solve in that particular case (but any experienced user can easily solve those by e.g. downgrading the problematic package until a fix is available, or by restoring a filesystem snapshot). My current Arch installation is almost 5 years old and I only had a couple of very minor individual package update issues, and one time where the system couldn't boot anymore after an update, which could be desastrous for a newbie, but only for a newbie. So, any talk about Arch being unstable is most likely exaggerated. Windows 11 these days has more update failures than Arch, and Arch updates almost daily. Yes, Arch is not "perfectly stable" due to it being rolling release and receiving updates almost daily, but on the desktop or notebook that "less-than-perfect-stability" really doesn't matter much unless you have some kind of allergy against breaking changes or spending 15-30min to fix something or get annoyed if you have to reboot. The fast updates and generally very up to date packages generally more than make up for the disadvantages. At least on the desktop and notebook. I'm not sure if I could recommend Arch on servers. Also, you should at least update Arch once a week (or more often). If you don't update for multiple weeks, then updates might fail because Arch assumes that everyone is on or close to the most current updates. Or you might have to first update the pacman-keyring before updates work again. In any case, updating often is also a way to keep Arch more stable. If you don't like updating often, don't use Arch.

19 comments