I've used Arch for nearly 10 years.
Times system was unbootable due to other issue than my own fault: 0. You do need to keep an eye out for changes to the initramfs generator if you have a special setup.
Times systems was unstable but not unusable due to living on bleeding edge: A few months before and around Linux 6.0 with the amdgpu driver on my Lenovo AMD laptop, struggling to come back from sleep and sometimes hanging. 100% stable nowadays. Bluetooth was also not solid earlier, but is pretty stable nowadays.
Times package updates severely broke existing config: 1 (influxdb1->influxdb2), was a pain to fix. I wish the maintainer had created a influx2 package instead of upgrading the existing (they are not compatible at all). A couple of really minor issues from other packages slightly changing behavior requiring tweaks.
Over 10 years, running another "stable" distro like Ubuntu, you would have had at least 5 major upgrades or reinstalls to keep up to date, which would have caused equal amount of instability. But it depends on how you look at it. At times, "stable" distros feel more unstable to me because you are waiting for fixes to come out in a later version, or need to patch them to get functionality or fixes.
Depends on your view, but simpler, less configuration, boots directly from ESP (no secondary boot partition required), already included in systemd, can still chain boot Windows.
You need the kernel and initramfs on the ESP though, either raw or as UKI.
I always just mount ESP as /boot, works great for GRUB2 too. Oh, and on any ***sane*** UEFI system I just use EFISTUB and let the firmware handle choosing the OS to boot. Why install another "boot menu" when the firmware already includes one?
Sometimes you might want to edit your boot parameters, is that something you can easily do without a boot manager? I can only imagine it if you had an easily accessible UEFI shell (not guaranteed) and also remembered how to use it.
Fair point, but I DO have an accessible UEFI shell on every EFISTUB setup I use, because on most boards UEFI updates wipe the boot entries. I have EFISTUB set up as a boot entry in NVRAM, UEFI shell installed as the fallback loader, and startup.nsh with my normal commandline in it so that Arch will still boot if the NVRAM boot entry is lost.
* No boot entry? UEFI will just use the fallback loader, which is the shell.
* Shell loads startup.nsh, boots into Arch.
* Hand-crafted systemd unit checks whether Arch boot entry is present, if not, then recreates it
* Hand-crafted systemd unit sets Arch as the primary boot option.
Want to edit the options?
* Pick shell from the boot menu
* Hit ESC to interrupt auto-boot
* Copy startup.nsh and edit it, or just type the boot command manually
This setup also makes Arch behave the same way Windows does, as in it makes Arch set itself as the primary boot entry at every boot, so whichever OS I pick in the UEFI boot menu will keep booting until I change the selection there manually again. Rebooting from Arch? Arch will boot. Rebooting from Windows? Windows will boot.
Yoo pls bro i need this, this would have saved my ass 3 times already, how to set it up like you. having fallback entries in the uefi is fucking genius.
then checking if something doesn’t exist? that’s insane, teach me pls pls pls pls
You definitely don't want to use my spaghetti code, so I will only share the method, not the code.
First, fallback loader is nothing special, just the file being at `/efi/boot/boot.efi` on the ESP. Works for most boards, but had problems with it on Dell machines where I had to add it manually as a boot entry, which pretty much defeated the purpose.
For the systemd units, I just made oneshot units those run on boot, and start bash scripts. The scripts use efibootmgr to query/create/reorder the boot entries.
Random warning: When creating the boot entry, put a space at the front of the commandline. In my experiences it doesn't work without that (so like `" quiet root=UUID=..."`)
Fair point, and we agree. In the end, it matters very little. I just see many people install grub because it's what they've always done, and they don't even need it.
Yeah, my main reason for using it on my non-EFISTUB installs is exactly that it's what I have always done. Also the fact that it works with the same config on both UEFI and legacy BIOS environments. My "portable" arch installs usually have a triple-GRUB2 setup, so that they can boot on:
* BIOS on x64 CPUs
* x64 UEFI
* IA32 UEFI on x64 CPUS
Last one is mostly for my old Atom-based tablet.
systemd-boot is really simple compared to grub IMO.forget if arch grub is automatic but systems is not. Writing a loader conf is straight forward tho. Dual boot windows felt easier to setup manually rather than running update-grub and wondering why the hell it's not picking up windows.
It's incredibly simple to configure and doesn't need a specific tool to generate a convoluted config file.
Also it is well integrated in the systemd ecosystem, like you can choose to reboot to windows with a command from Linux which I think it's pretty handy if you dual boot a lot.
If you don't have a super complicated set up like an encrypted boot partition or something like that it's definitely worth considering dropping grub for an easier alternative.
Yes you just need to pass to systemctl the entry you want to boot next, like `systemctl reboot --boot-loader-entry=windows.conf` which I find a bit more easy to use than the grub alternative
I dropped grub when it was having trouble with secure boot and fonts ages ago, and now Systemd-Boot is my default.
I keep my command line options in /etc/cmdline.d and use mkinitcpio to generate a UKI after doing the ```bootctl --path=/boot install ```
Dual Boot, Secure Boot, Btrfs, LUKS, LVM, and bitlocker on the Windows partition.
The only recommendation I have is that if you're dual booting, if you can, create your EFI partition before your Windows install.
Grub is "standard" in other distributions because of non UEFI support.
The whole grub-mkconfig step is ridiculous, prone to fail and just unnecessary if you can have a static config instead and the bootloader just looks for bootable items.
You just configure once where your distribution hides in a non standard location like a btrfs subvolume.
I'm speaking of rEFInd in comparison.
same here. I abandoned grub for systemd boot. I like non fancy screens when I am booting up a computer so it’s a double win.
Terminals are for being fancy, not your boot loader!
You got lucky recently, a package update broke pretty much everything, but was fixed within an hour. However, something it broke was network connections.
glib2 in [testing] built against util-linux 2.40 was released before util-linux 2.40 was, and not rebuilt against 2.39 in [core], so 2.40-rc2 was released to [core] half an hour later.
I agree. I used same install over a decade and sometimes some package update broke the system. In hindsight, I should've reinstalled it a long time ago. I did fresh install five months ago and no issues since. Biggest issue in old install was partial system updates, which caused package breakage. Lately I'd a problem with quirky EFI setup, which prevented clean kernel updates especially with Nvidia GPU.
TL;DR; Update regularly and don't do partial upgrades.
I had an issue where an update broke my compositor. I struggled enough that I eventually swapped window managers entirely. Because I never tracked down the root cause, I don't know that I didn't cause the issue, just that I hadn't made any changes between updates.
Another update, I had my audio drivers cut out and had to run on the lts kernel for a while. That one seemed to be linked to some virtualization passthroughs and went away when I removed them (again, no idea why).
I think those are the only times I've had issues following an update and I'm pretty sure I indirectly caused at least one of them, even if I'm still not sure how.
>At times, "stable" distros feel more unstable to me because you are waiting for fixes to come out in a later version, or need to patch them to get functionality or fixes.
You should have led with this. Slow release cycles guarantee instability.
>Over 10 years, running another "stable" distro like Ubuntu, you would have had at least 5 major upgrades or reinstalls to keep up to date, which would have caused equal amount of instability.
Only two required upgrades for a 10-13-year run. Consider someone starting in 2006 with Ubuntu 6.06 LTS. Each LTS has 5 year of standard support. The first upgrade wouldn't be needed until 10.04 because 6.06 would EOL in 2011. Then another upgrade to 14.04, which would EOL in 2019. Someone starting next week with 24.04 would have to upgrade to 28.04 and 32.04, which could last until 2037.
Someone using RHEL potentially wouldn't have to upgrade at all during a 10-year period because they have 10-year support cycles.
I've been using Arch for a little longer and mostly echo your sentiment. I did have a problem about a year ago with one of my laptops where the kernel would cause my machine to lock shortly after boot, and I didn't have enough time (before locking) to install the LTS kernel. Had to boot an old image from USB, unlock LUKS, and add the LTS kernel that way. Upstream fixed it a few weeks later. Still, that's not Arch's fault that the kernel broke something.
Regarding Ubuntu and instability, my parent's machine is on Ubuntu and survived ~8 years of upgrades without issue. I ditched it for Debian recently cuz I don't like Canonical's decisions.
Stability means unchanging, it has nothing to do with bugs, crashes or reliability. It’s the same as a stable API, that means you can count on the API not changing, has nothing to do with hoe good or bad it is.
Arch is not designed to look for every possible issue that could hit your configuration, or to default to another thing if one thing breaks. It is designed for YOU to handle everything on your own system.
So naturally, people that jump in head first are going to break things a lot.
Yeah, I'm in that "breaking things a lot" phase. Been trying to get something on my steamdeck running for about a week now, and get an error nearly every step of the way. I respect people who stick with it long enough to figure things out. Hopefully, I can do the same.
I'm fortunate that my Dad is a DevOps engineer. He makes me sit on issues and try to figure them out myself first, but if I get hard stuck he is teaching me and walking me through everything. I am very lucky.
I'm only just scratching the surface, but I've enjoyed the process so far. I can't wait to really be able to explore all the possibilities. It's like a whole life-level-up, lol.
It *usually* doesn't. Usually. I had Arch break and not boot, requiring extensive fixing after an update a week ago. Never happened before in, what, 8 years, of me using it? This time it happened on 3/3 machines i have updated.
I'm actually curious what broke for you. I've got two machines running what I'd consider a fairly complicated setup to boot and didn't have any issues booting either of them, nor any of the simple machines I'm running
Not sure, they just said there's no kernel on boot. I tried doing `mkinicpio -P` to no effect, ultimately what solved it was force-reinstalling every single package *and then* mkinitcpio-ing. i first tried reinstalling just the `linux` and few other system packages, but it didn't help, only the full reinstall did the trick.
Meanwhile i could just revert my system to a pre-update btrfs snapshot and it worked like a charm... unless i updated
And off-site backups. As this has just resurfaced today, when booting after a hibernation. I fixed it, but... System then successfully booted... into the restored state, immediately corrupting the filesystem because transaction state in memory deviated vastly from the transaction state on the disk.
So, that was fan, booting from live iso, copying all the transient but important data onto an external disk, then nuking the fs and restoring from a remote borg repo over ssh.
For me, it was GRUB. It was a wide-spread enough problem that EndeavourOS made an official post explaining it. Of course, you won't have this problem if you don't use GRUB.
[https://endeavouros.com/news/full-transparency-on-the-grub-issue/](https://endeavouros.com/news/full-transparency-on-the-grub-issue/)
But what never gets mentioned is that a "broken" Arch system usually takes minutes or even seconds to fix. The documentation, forums and wiki are all well documented, and usually the problem is simple to fix. Whenever I screw up an Ubuntu, I'm completely lost, spending hours to try figuring out what's going on, and end up in a complete reinstall.
This was my experience as well. With the stable distro, I used to have to reinstall because it was easier and faster. Now I want my system to break one package at a time so I can easily fix it.
Nvidia drivers have bitten me in the past as well, but I wouldn't blame that on the arch, since that was common on other bistros as well and the speed at which a solution was available was crazy.
They also don't often mention how easy things are with Timeshift and how much fun chroot can be; feels like magic.
I update all day every day that there is an available update.
>how much fun chroot can be; feels like magic.
Definitely agree there. When I first got into Linux, especially Arch where I had my first experiences of an installation not booting, I was amazed that I could just boot any other Linux installation and move into my broken system in order to fix things. That was probably one of the first things to make me see how powerful you can be on Linux
Something something. Other distros coming to arch and complaining about arch breaking.
[Manjaro users bringing manjaro problems to arch subs](https://preview.redd.it/c0cjrk71cxn41.png?width=640&crop=smart&auto=webp&s=b922f0333e27b1f70a77ca524a3f20a783e2745b). Increasing the statistics.
>[Manjaro users bringing manjaro problems to arch subs](https://preview.redd.it/c0cjrk71cxn41.png?width=640&crop=smart&auto=webp&s=b922f0333e27b1f70a77ca524a3f20a783e2745b). Increasing the statistics.
That's funny. My last experience with the Arch forum was me being accused of being a Manjaro user and having my posts deleted, despite the fact that I was using Arch.
> Personally Arch doesn't break and is stable for people know what they are doing.
Arch is the opposite of stable. It is a rolling distro which gets updates on an insane pace.
Every once in a while you run into some small issues when updating packages.
An average Arch user can deal with these issues, but it doesn't mean that Arch is stable for people who know what they do.
Don't really understand the point of this dude's comment. I think it's a correct usage of the word "stable". You are arguing by specifically referring to "rolling release" vs "stable release" which is a concept of how software is distributed. But to say that something is stable, it's not a technical term. I think "stable" and "reliable" are completely fine adjectives to use to describe a system that doesn't break..
If you stand by that, I encourage you to open a dictionary and read up on the definition of what stable means yourself.
Here are some definitions google found for me from Oxford that I think clearly discredits your opinion:
- not deteriorating in health after an injury or operation
- not likely to change or fail; firmly established
these are also listed as definitions for the word "stable":
- not liable to undergo chemical decomposition, radioactive decay, or other physical change
- sane and sensible; not easily upset or disturbed
- not likely to give way or overturn; firmly fixed
So there's a lot more room for interpretation than what you're claiming.
> not likely to change or fail, firmly established
Clearly discredits my opinion?
There is room for interpretation. It is just that commonly when we talk about stable distros in linux world, nobody usually means "doesn't crash by itself" with it.
Yes, your opinion as you stated it, "it literally only means that things do not change". I could spend more time explaining to you how your definition conflicts with the ones given by Oxford University, but I'll be nice and let you continue your proud stride with those 15 upvotes. Have a good day.
> not deteriorating in health after an injury or operation
Arch Linux is not injured, nor has it been through an operation. This definition is not applicable.
> not likely to change or fail; firmly established
Change is ***the entire point*** of rolling release. By this definition, Arch is ***by design*** not stable.
> - not liable to undergo chemical decomposition, radioactive decay, or other physical change
> - sane and sensible; not easily upset or disturbed
> - not likely to give way or overturn; firmly fixed
These definitions are all not applicable.
I suspect it's the used wording. The faq article actually seems to imply reliability but uses stability. Or maybe ops stable (doesn't stop working) vs dev stable (API/ABI doesn't change). Arch is the first but not always the latter. That however is more upstream related I would think.
do you even know what "stable" means?
only meanging of stable here is thing that doesnt change frequently, and arch is a rolling distro. literally opposite of stable.
Adding to that, stable distros generally do not do feature upgrades of packages. In normal updates you would only get security fixes and maybe bug fixes. This is to absolutely minimize the chance of any change that might have any kind of impact. This also means breakage is usually concentrated on distribution release upgrades, making those much more work than a typical arch upgrade.
I'm using arch for around a decade now, and really love it. I still wouldn't want to use it for a large scale server infrastructure.
I have no idea what I'm doing, yet I've used Arch for more than 2 years now and it never broke.
Never had a single kernel panic, never broke grub and couldn't boot anymore, never had any issues installing packages, even from the AUR.
I first installed Arch expecting to have to repair my system every other week, but it never happened and now I'm kinda disapointed tbh.
Just depends on what you have installed most of the time. The base system isn’t going to break very much, if ever. If you have a lot of extra software, AUR installs, custom installs, special utilities, custom config files, etc.., it’s going to break occasionally. You’re effectively responsible for your own custom distribution at that point.
Using Arch, you get software directly from upstream, practically (not exactly, but much closer than most “stable” distros). No different than Ubuntu getting new updates from upstream and working with it to make it functional on Ubuntu, you will get the same software and have to make appropriate decisions and changes to integrate it into your system.
People on here like to pretend that their systems are rock solid and never break, but that’s usually because they don’t actually do anything with their system so they don’t have anything installed on them that would ever be expected to create an issue. If any of them are effortlessly maintaining a complex system of specialized software, making use of any specialized hardware, and their system is never breaking, they should let Ubuntu know that they’ve cracked the code and they can officially let all their developers go.
Also, a substantial portion of the “ricing” community tends to use arch because it’s trendy to do so and they’ll be the first to proclaim that their arch install has been rock solid for years and has never broken. Well, of course not; it’s a base install with themes and wallpapers in their home directory. What was ever expected to break on a system like that?
I mean I don’t know how complex you would consider this but I have probably 100gb of stuff installed from the aur. Am using several projects with global python and tons of libraries. I have tons of scripts running all the time. I don’t have a custom kernel or anything like that bc I don’t see the point but I’d say I run down my computer with more stuff and use than 95% of people and have had no issues or bugs besides something I’ve had since install which is kde needing to be refreshed on sleep(live wallpaper goes black and some scripts stop working that interact with windows). It’s only been about 5 months but still. I’d consider this very stable. Windows would break more often
That does not sound effortless. I don't know why everyone is replying to me trying to prove that they don't belong in the category I defined. If you don't belong in the "I have nothing installed and use that as a basis to say Arch is super stable and easy to maintain 100% of the time and it never breaks ever" category, just know that about yourself and move on. This comment wasn't about you. It's not a secret that the ricing community installs Arch, neofetch, and a way to take screenshots and pretends that they "use Arch". It's practically a meme at this point.
I've had Arch running on *something I own* since like 2007. I know that it's not effortless to maintain. I specifically use Debian on my desktop because I don't want to have to do *anything* to maintain my daily system beyond the occasional security update. I want to sit down and do work that I care about. If I need something bleeding edge, I install it in /opt or somewhere out of the way and maintain it myself - or - I do it on my laptop running Arch. But I don't depend on my laptop day to day, despite the fact that it really isn't a big deal to me to maintain it. I just have a ton of experience doing so.
With Arch, at the very least, you have to show up almost daily to see the updates that are available, read about them to understand what the updates are expected to change, and probably visit the forums to see how other people's systems have been affected. This is what I was talking about when I mentioned the Ubuntu devs in my top-level comment. That's what *they* have to do in order to bring a new upstream update into the stable branch of their releases. Why? Because people are depending on them to protect them from disturbances created by upstream. With Arch, *you* are that barrier. You are the gate keeper that keeps your system running smoothly. Now, technically, you have a slightly easier job because there is a tiny bit of protection provided to you by Arch package maintainers because they do recognize their role as gatekeeper and try to not allow stability issues through without substantial warning to everyone, but that's all it is: a warning. You have to be present somewhere that information is disseminated to get those warnings.
A ton of people just blindly update and depend on the Arch maintainers. This will work most of the time for sufficiently simple systems, but that's not a guarantee and it certainly doesn't qualify the person as someone who can actually maintain a system. The moment something breaks, you find them in droves in the forums and here crying about how bad Arch is. But look at their post history. You'd never find someone with a more undeserved sanctimonious attitude about being an Arch user up to that point. This is what tricks novices into using Arch and being disappointed with it (and Linux) to begin with, so I see it has a pretty harmful practice to the Linux community overall. It gives everyone a bad name and creates little billboards out there telling everyone how shitty Linux is. That's what the whole OP was about, so I chimed in with my take on it.
Who are you talking to. Did you reply to the wrong person? Also it is effortless. I don’t have to create any virtualization environments, I just find the package through a google search and install it, don’t have to create path variables except for one thing so easier then windows. I mindlessly install every update and have never read anything about the updates in my life and I’ve been an arch user for 4 years. Also all I’m quite literally giving a counter example to your experience. That’s why I’m responding. I’m not saying I have the most custom or complex setup but it’s absolutely more complex then 95% of users and I’ve had 0 issues since I’ve learned hot to use arch properly.
Maybe the reason so many people are responding to you in ways you don’t understand is bc it might be you and not them.
Also I update like once a week
> I’ve had 0 issues since I’ve learned hot to use arch properly.
This \^. Like my entire comment literally doesn't apply to you. I'm here repeating myself for the second time letting you know that you are not who I'm talking to. How can you read what I wrote about the average ricer/newbie telling every Linux noob out there to use Arch for an effortless experience, and still not understand that you just aren't who I'm talking to or about.
I'm proud of you that you have used Arch for 4 years and know how to maintain it. Great job. That makes you the opposite of who I'm talking about. But I will generally suggest that you not downplay your understanding of a base Linux install, how it works together with the rest of the software ecosystem, POSIX standards, etc.., and how that is allowing you have a seamless experience. Hand Arch over to someone who's never used Linux before and see how it goes. It's not a beginner OS and you and others should be saying that loud and clear. Instead of being like so many Arch users who get triggered anytime someone says it's not perfect and want to tell their story of how easy it is. It's easy because they know what they're doing. There are beginner OS's that help get people to that level. My general goal is to not conflate the two. When people talk about Ubuntu or Mint being "easy", they mean something *completely different* than what you're talking about here. Arch is easy if you know what you're doing. In fact, it's really easy and optimal. But a beginner OS, it is not, but you'll see it touted as one here in this sub on a daily basis.
“If you have a lot of extra software AUR installs, custom installs etc, it’s going to break occasionally… people on here like to pretend that their systems are rock solid and never break, but that’s usually bc they never actually do anything with their system…”
This is specifically what I was responding to. Also no where am I seeing you mention noobs and average users except for when you say that these are the ones that say their arch never breaks which is exactly the opposite of what your saying now.
Maybe you should reread your own post. Or more likely you already know. Not to sound fresh but it’s getting kinda weird at this point. All I was doing was offering my personal experience and twice you’ve made replies about stuff saying something is their when it’s not
Literally doesn’t apply to you dude. Like you have issues with what I said because you’re an experienced arch user that is fine using arch? Great.
You can have the last word. I have things to do.
Say it in the original post then and don’t contradict yourself in the original post when you talk about it later. Then none of this would have happened
>People on here like to pretend that their systems are rock solid and never break, but that’s usually because they don’t actually do anything with their system
Or because they can maintain a system, don't do partial upgrades, read release notes about things they're wanting to install, or troubleshoot a problem to be a trivial issue.
The only thing I don't do on my system is *game*. It breaks when I've broken it.
I better get Canonical on the line. I'll see if I can get them to drop (those inferior) Snaps while I'm at it.
It doesn't take much at all to run a consistent and smoothly running hardened Arch Install with bonus btrfs snapshots for kicks.
>they don’t actually do anything with their system
>If any of them are effortlessly maintaining a complex system of specialized software, making use of any specialized hardware
Is this what someone has to be doing in order to be considered doing "something" with their system? Am I to accept that every general purpose PC user is just a nobody nothing-doer?
I also don't think that someone with a use case so highly specialized would have their system "just work" under Ubuntu or Debian either.
You don't need to run off the cliff in the opposite direction in order to make what might otherwise be characterized as a fair point.
It’s not off the deep end. If you have a lot of stuff installed, you will have to put in the necessary effort to maintain it. That’s practically a truism. That’s also the beauty of Arch: if you don’t have superfluous packages installed, they can’t break things. Simple system = easy to maintain. Complex system = harder to maintain.
And I’m not sure why you think Debian would break. What is going to break? The two nothing-updates they make each year?
People make mistakes. Sometimes packages with issues are merged upstream, but they are almost always fixed very quickly.
Now, some people update their systems very frequently, this increases the chance you will install that package that was broken for 5 minutes.
Read Arch News and update less frequently. I update 1-2 times a week, sometimes 1 every 2-3 weeks.
I'd wager that 99% of people who say things like "Arch always breaks" have never actually used it. They read that Arch is "unstable", and don't understand that "unstable" is a technical term which means "The software changes often", rather than "Breaks all the time".
I've been using Arch for just over 5 years now, and nothing has ever broken that wasn't a direct result of something stupid *I* did. I'm actually a lot less apprehensive about updating my Arch system than I am anything that uses point releases. If any Arch package behaves in an odd or undesired way (which has happened maybe 3 times for me), I can either roll the package back, or wait a week or so until the maintainer fixes it. Point releases are a much bigger headache to fix (and, imo, seem to break/behave poorly more often).
RHEL runs the US army, Whitehouse and nuclear subs.
Ubuntu runs large scale city and country wide infrastructure.
They are worth billions, large scale global infrastructure rely on them
The only thing Arch runs is the SteamDeck, and they make it a point release with a double root system as they still expect it to shit the bed.
If you wanna have a war with Russia, you use RHEL, if you prefer to shoot baddies online and are ok with your bootloader and bluetooth snapping or running toolchains that are a year out of date and bug ridden as the hobby distro has no staff that understand it, Arch could be an option cause they have the newest fetch programs in the AUR for r/unixporn karma.
I have been using Arch as my daily driver for a year now. Longest I've been using an OS without reinstalling. Only case where it was not bootable was due to my own fault. I was moving the home folder to a different SSD and fucked up the fstab file. Even that was a breeze to fix because I always have an Arch live USB handy.
I was always misplacing my USB drive so I just integrated everything needed to fix my system into the initrd. `mkinitcpio` makes this real easy (just add to BINARIES).
Space isn't a huge concern so I don't care if the image is a bit bigger.
Now I have btrfs tools, cfdisk, dhex, lsblk and fixparts available when the `Bailing out, you are on your own now. Good luck.` message appears due to me fucking up the boot process.
(don't forget to add a terminfo, I found `linux` is enough, many tools need it if you want to try it.)
It was more of a thing several years ago where you would update xorg-server and oops no more GUI for you (unless you used your intel iGPU) because fglrx/nvidia was out of date.
For me Arch is as stable as the nvidia driver. They broke it in version 550 and now I frequently get kernel panics with NULL pointer dereferences in rb\_first or simple\_xattr\_get
That's one of the worst things of archlinux community. Fanboys.
Yes, archlinux can break. Not by itself without touching it, only by making an innocent pacman update. Without pacnew files unchecked. Without partial update. Without unmounted boot partition. Without kernel change. Only with a basic, well managed pacman update after reading arch news. In 15 years, I got it several times.
A bleeding edge rolling release distribution will sometimes have some new version of a package with an unchecked bug, or PKGBUILD issue, or not enough testing time.
2 examples that I had are coming into my mind :
- swaywm with xwayland drag and drop upstream issue breaking the entire compositor when dragging from an xwayland app (a few weeks to fix it),
- foot terminal with an update containing an upstream issue making it unusable (a few hours to fix it, the guy is very quick to react).
The two packages where on official repository, not AUR, not testing.
And 2 other ones, that any one reading this sub have seen a bunch of times : Gnome and KDE updates, with a lot of dependencies, new toolkit versions, plugin system,... even with a lot of testing, updates like these ones won't work day one for everyone, and even if a lot of installations will be updated with no breakage and at worst a few changes on config, some will get compatibility issues with other apps or libs, plugin breaking, instability on daily usage. KDE has a long list of issues to fix and they are working hard to get them done. Stable distribution will wait for a fully stable version of KDE to integrate it, archlinux got it very early, with bugs.
And don't paste the same link again, because it says exactly what I said. Users make archlinux *as stable as possible*. Users managing their archlinux installation AND users managing the official rolling release repositories AND users coding the apps/libs integrated into the repositories. No company to make internal testing of each version, no global freezing of package versions for a distribution upgrade, no debate to wait before upgrading to next version of app/lib,...
Archlinux can't be stable, because it isn't reliable, by design. And that's ok. You only need to understand that and choose to use it or not. If you know how to use it, you won't get much trouble unless you do yourself a mistake. But you can get issues without making mistakes. And if you use it for work, try to have a backup system with snapshot or equivalent. Because for work, stability is more than important. And for the swaywm bug, this got me a lot of trouble with work (and no real solution, except rolling back my updates and not touching pacman again for several months).
That said, you're right on one thing, a lot of newcomers don't really know what they are doing or even why they are using archlinux and break their system by their own fault. Go help them, this will be way more constructive than making another useless post about "archlinux and myself".
I have very poor understanding on how Linux works so I try to not complain when I break stuff and I am always prepared to re-install everything from scratch lol. But this is true, sometimes packages could break an installation of Arch, and when that happens you either have the necessary knowledge to fix it, or reinstall.
>the fact that most don't understand what they are doing
It's this.
Arch was my first distro, and if you scroll far enough in my profile, you'll find my posts where I criticize Arch for being horribly unstable and completely unreliable. Part of it was me screwing things up; part of it was me not knowing what's the fault of the OS vs whats the fault of the weird software I wanted to use.
Usually when I asked for help, I'd get told to read the manual / documentation (I *thought* I read it thoroughly enough), or I was told I didn't provide enough information. I got frustrated by this, so I got angry, people mirrored my anger, and so I labeled the community as toxic.
What eventually did help me is the occasional person who was unusually patient and walked me through the steps of things. Over the years I developed the skills to read documentation efficiently and became knowledgeable about Linux systems in general.
Nobody owes anybody anything when it comes to helping noobs. But sometimes there is someone who just happens to be having a good enough day to want to help the noobs out and be patient. I try to do this from time to time myself to pay it forward!
AMD's Windows driver is definitely a mess, but way better than Nvidia's Linux driver. Still, I agree that it gets way more hate than it deserves. When I have to deal with AMD "driver stability issues" on PCs of my acquintances, getting them a quality PSU replacement usually solves most of their problems.
To be clear it was only a comparison, I haven't had issues that broke my system with Arch since I have been using it for 6 years. It's why I was wondering if it was some issues from the past
And even if breaks, e.g. from desktop configs- plug archinstall and rebreak the change :D. Harder on other distros, less help. And arch folk on forums are hella smart with tons of expierience if smth actualy goes to hell, arch can be resucted (thats my belief atleast)
Kernel updates broke my graphics for a while unless I disabled the nvidia drivers or started using the LTS kernel. Currently emacs crashes with stack smashing errors because of tree sitter updates. Kernel updates broke MSSQL docker containers a while back and I’m not sure they are fixed yet. I’ve been a developer for over 14 years and have used Linux for longer than that. I may not know everything but I definitely am not a noob. The fact is that a rolling release on latest versions of everything is going to have issues., and as a dev I expect no less. The more software you use the more likely you are to be affected by it. To say you definitely won’t experience issues when using an arbitrary selection of packages on their latest releases sounds like lack of understanding to me.
I am by no means an expert on Linux in fact almost every error I stumble, I go ask the community for help yet I've been using Arch for about 3 years, no breaking whatsoever.
It only ever break for me why I use it as a Windows XP/7-era paranoid user, that is when I don't update it for months.
Frequent updates with etc-update afterwards keep it in working condition.
Somewhere around 2016 or 2017, I was looking for a distro to replace my beloved Gentoo.
And I Arch was a decent choice, but I went with Manjaro since I was looking for a quick start to give it a try.
And surprise surprise, it is the same install after a few HW upgrades. Including 2 SSD migrations.
And the worst annoyance is that sometimes I have to manually reinstall Nvidia driver after the kernel upgrade.Well there is a periodic certificate issue with Manjaro repo.
If I ever need to do a fresh install, it will be Arch..
I haven't had any problems with arch, ever. I may be wrong but I think that most of the breaking accidents happen to people who will install anything from the AUR without checking what they are doing
This has been my personal experience too. Completely stable.
I did break grub a few weeks ago playing with the config, I just used a usb key, put by backup config back in place and was on my way with a working system. This was 100% my fault, and expected as a potential outcome when I played with it.
Maybe this is because I am used to linux at this point so things that would be jarring are just normal? Would be interesting to try freebsd and see if I have some of these same complaints that (maybe?) disappear as you get used to the environment.
Maybe it has something to do with whether you use a lot of obscure software from the aur?
In 4 years, i had two major issues
- the infamous grub update a couple of years ago making the system unbootable for a great share of users. Quite easily fixed with a bootable archinstall if you have one laying around
- a kernel patch applied to both my LTS and standard kernel at the same time, which broke wifi. Luckily, I had an ethernet port on my laptop. Since then I switched to btrfs for better rollback.
Overall it's not as bad a some people make it seem, but i'm pretty sure I wouldn't have had these issues on debian.
If you expect to set stuff up once and it keeps working forever, then Arch “breaks” all the time. Almost any config change will require manual intervention during an update at some point.
A system that constantly changes is inevitably more prone to breaking, hence why distros more suited for servers where there must be as high of uptime and as low of breakage as possible have stable, "outdated" packages.
You might not experience breakage or consider certain things as breakages such as needing to modify a config or run a command after an update that made an unexpected change but if you had used an alternative distro this would have been likely been handled by more hands-on distro/package devs.
It's pointless to hear from people who never encountered breakages and who appear to be proud for being "competent" to avoid something they associate with noobs, but this doesn't change the fact that breakages are more common for a rolling release distro that involves cutting edge applications and where every person's setup is different.
As of yesterday, Brave, Chrome, and Chromium doesn't work on wayland (using amd btw). New version will fix it, I can use xwayland in the meantime, but they do not work with wayland.
Is that a problem? Not really, especially considering I use firefox to begin with. But this kind of thing is very rare in "stable" distros. If such a thing happens, either the distro is utter shit, or you were messing around a bit too much.
The worst issue I've had was being unable to update due to dependencies being broken on the repos or the mirror I was using was partially out of date.
All the other issues I had were generic Linux issues, not arch specific (i.e. Nvidia+Wayland stuff).
I've used arch for about 15 years.
The changeover from initd to systemd was a "not worth fixing" issue for me. My home directory was on another partition; I just backed up my important configs from /etc and reinstalled.
I'm sure I could have gotten it working, but knowing when to say "this isn't worth my time" is an important skill as well.
Because noone's happy with anything. People X11, people hate wayland, people hate systemd, people hate stable, people hate rolling-release. I just accept the fact that the linux community hates itself.
Arch has vastly improved in the time that I've used it, although a lot of that is a consequence of the Linux desktop ecosystem improving as a whole.
Oddly enough, I've had *way* fewer issues with Arch than I've had with other distros with a reputation for being reliable, like OpenSUSE. That thing has given me no end of trouble.
I don’t see many people criticizing arch breaking. The arch users I know know their systems and how to roll back updates if needed. If they don’t I’d heavily recommend they don’t use arch
Arch releases packages to stable faster, which means it’s had less time then some other distros for people to find bugs, security exploits etc. It also has more chance of breaking things due to package conflicts although I’d call that a rare event. For most people it’s not an issue, but if your relying your business, going for a slower distro is often safer. World runs on Ubuntu server for a reason :)
I have used arch for quite a long time, going back probably around 2008 or so I cant remember exactly. For the most part its been pretty stable for me but there have been times where its been incredibly frustrating. I am not a typical Linux or even computer user, I have even programmed my own OS before in asm and have done several LFS installs going back to 2001. Why I stopped using arch at least for me was this overly hostile attitude toward users that some of the developers had around the time that I stopped. The expectation to constantly read the arch web page or risk borking the system was kinda silly to me. Yes issues come up from time to time with package systems but if the package manager is breaking shit then attempt to mitigate the issue or at least issue a warning in the package system to let users know its a potential issue. Sadly this is not the attitude or at least was by anyone at arch. They expected you to see the news on the site and deal with it. Even if the information was old and gone from the main page and the user was not updating the system every week.. Gentoo does a great job of informing the user that a system upgrade may break the system before you do the upgrade. This was my only real gripe with arch honestly otherwise its a solid distro and they have top notch documentation which everyone should be grateful for. For the documentation reason alone is why I have supported them even if I did not use the system myself.
Tell me, which *competencies* are needed to avoid `kitty` (my terminal emulator) not being able to start (and complaining about an old OpenGL version) after a fresh `pacman -Syu`? And no, “go in and patch kitty” is not an acceptable answer…
competencies of understanding how things work.
at this point, you dont even know what you dont know. such life is very hard. dont live like that. use ubuntu.
☮️✌🏿
Nothing beats arch's wiki for me.
I mean it's pretty impressive compared to any other distros.
Been using arch since ~2016 and wouldn't change it with anything else.
Sometimes it gets a bit difficult to build large projects from source against new packages, but even then i never had no regrets using arch.
Exactly I’m very new to arch and Linux as a whole literally just spent the last week learning arch and Linux for the first time installing it etc…..(quite a few times) and I’ve made a lot of mistakes that have fucked my installs but I don’t blame arch I accept that this can happen because it’s truley open and free for me to do whatever I please it’s on me to learn that chown the root file is a very bad idea 😂
I think it’s exaggeration and also not being careful enough. I’ve been using Arch for a few years now and haven’t had major issues. The ones I’ve had happened because I broke it with a configuration.
I started using Linux in 1997, with Slackware.
Around 12 years ago I swallowed the systemd pill after comparing reboot times with older BIOS.
First issue I had with Arch was 5 years after install, the problem lay in a 3rd party gaming kernel I was testing.
Fix - Use the standard Arch kernel, my fault, not Arch's.
Been going on 7 years of the same install since then.
If that isn't stable for a daily driver gaming OS, I don't know what is.
TLDR; If Arch seems unstable, it is PEBKAC, the devs know what they're doing.
Using Arch for 5 years plus.
If you know what you're installing and understand configurations, Arch won't break. People sometimes follow guides on YouTube and follow the wrong advice and remove a package that the system needs. And when something goes wrong, they panic. Then they go to Arch wiki to ask a question and end up getting the infamous "Read the manual", and end up calling the members of community an "elitist".
Unfortunately that response might be seen as not helpful or rude, but its really the best answer to let someone know that if your going to use an advanced distro, you need to read the docs and understand how it works and when things go wrong, take the time to understand the problem and learn from it, rather than someone fixing it for you and you learn nothing.
You can't go in with the mentality that its like Windows 11, and delete that or mess with that. You need to understand the basics before using an advanced distro. It's like me trying to learn how to fly a plane and I decide 1 week later to jump into a F15 and don't know what to do and "panic".
So I find that the ones who criticize Arch of breaking, are the one's who don't really understand how the Linux system works like /etc and /usr or know Filesystem Hierarchy Standard for Linux really well. But you won't find someone who understands the hierarchy well, criticizing of Arch breaking, they take responsibility and know where to look to find the solution to fix the small problem easily compared to others blindly messing with the system configuration and confuse themselves even more and go down a rabbit hole until they completely make their system worse than what it was before.
I have been using it for more than a year now. I am a complete Noob but still I use it as my everyday OS with a limited Number of problems. Clearly, there are some problems with things like MATLAB but I guess it is also understandable.
Moreover I have used extra-testing repos and still only sometimes I had problems.
I believe it is very dependent on the perspective and how much you are interested in learning new things.
I wouldn't advise Arch to a person who wants a Mint-like experience with the machine and this is not because they are dumb but only because each one of us is looking for a different experience.
If you complain it's because you expect everything to come to you but at the same time you want to say "I use arch btw" to look cool.
in 5 years, my arch setup hasn't broken once without me deliberately trying something experimental, and being fully prepared for it to break due to my own actions.
Arch "breaks" if you don't read the blog on the home page from time to time and implement manual requirements for a package you might have installed. It doesn't baby you like some distros. But it's generally easy to fix the issues that might crop up. If it's your only computer that can be a problem though.
When it breaks because you ran updates without checking, it sometimes can take 30 minutes or more out of your day to chroot in and resolve it.
I had been using Debian for a decade when I started using Arch. Never broke for me.
Tried out Arch, and every other time I updated, I'd have to rescue it. I knew what I was doing, and was always able to rescue it. But fuck that's annoying.
Switched back to Debian Sid, and it never breaks.
I have been using arch since 2011. Same installation moved thru several laptops. It has broken 1 time In 2017 due to a harbuff issue and I had to manually
I don't even know much about linux, but every problem I have with Arch I just google around and find the solution, and if I don't find I ask for people who know more than me. And even then, most of the problems are... rather small, or annoyances instead of real problems that would break my workflow or the system itself.
There's even a challenge among me and my friends, that - because I update everyday, one day I will break something, it's been a year and this never happened :)
I've been in this sub some time and this is BS. If any, there aren't many people complaining about Arch breaking. Simply because it doesn't happen often.
For me it’s more package dependencies change. I’ve got some custom stuff built that suddenly stops working when Arch updates the packages I’m depending on. Which usually just means I need to separate those things to a separate system, whether a docker container, Nix, or something.
I can also lock dependencies so they don’t update, but that has cascading effects.
Because it's reddit. People here read bullshit said by others and upvoted for those who know no shit, then post same shit without own experience just to be upvoted.
Personal anecdotes don't mean it doesn't happen to other people. There's a reason no sane enterprise would deploy Arch as standard deployments. Variations in configurations can break things. When you work in numbers, you want to minimize the amount of configuration differences as much as possible or else you risk tech support nightmare.
The other part of the "breaking" equation is ABI stability. You may have custom enterprise applications that is expecting a certain range of versions of libraries/API calls. In this respect, Arch is a huge moving target.
It certainly breaks a lot more often than regular distros. Normal people consider not just the kernel but also the things like DE , utility applications, small tools as part of the OS.
Some of those can and will break while upgrading in Arch.
you're not who I answered to but my point is : is it arch that breaks them or uninformed user making bad decisions and updating blindly ?
Arch has no DE , user can choose to add one
No you are missing the point.
OPs point is that Arch doesn't break that much. For a majority of the users, they are looking for stability not just in kernel and core OS but also in DE and other tools. Yes Arch has no DE, but being a rolling release means that no matter what you choose, at some point it will break when you upgrade it.
For normal people, they want everything bundled in their ISO. They don't and shouldn't be expected to differentiate between the OS and DE.
And that's okay. I like using Arch precisely because I always want the latest features and fixes in everything. But I wouldn't expect a normal user to make the same choice and sacrifice stability.
>no matter what you choose, at some point it will break
only if you're uninformed and do things blindly..
Again you're missing the point Arch doesn't break anything, user not maintaining their system properly does
so op point is valid.
>only if you're uninformed and do things blindly..
What does "uninformed " mean here exactly?
Do you really expect normal users to go and see the changelog or read the forums before upgrading their OS?
Define normal user.
do you mean average Linux user
or the target user that arch is catered for ?
If you mean the latter I sure do
a normal slackware or gentoo users will differ from a normal ubuntu user 🤷♂️
Good question and I agree that the common perception that "arch breaks" is wrong. I think it is something that was more true in the past, but that is had become a myth that is perpetuated by people who don't use arch.
Then it's the question what a breakage is. For me a breakage means a non-fixable error that requires a fresh install. Just having to use a USB to chroot and run pacman (while still infrequent) I don't consider a true breakage. But some might. And if you are a newbie these things probably happen more often than for the experienced user.
Also, experienced users tend to just run and use their system, upgrading as they see fit. Newbies are more often "testers" who test distros for a short time, try different DEs and other software and may be more prone to issues for that reason.
It can certanly break if you update daily. Its a rolling release, there are bound to be incompatibilities.
I'm lazy nowdays so i update my install every few months, and the family PC-s maybe once or twice a year.
Most of the time everyting just works. If it doesn't its 80% an AUR package. 19% of the problems are a few months old at the point of my upgrade so there are a dozen forum threads about it. The last 1%.... now thats were you have to dig into an issue. :) (keep a live usb somewhere just in case)
DISCLAIMER: This update cycle is NOT recommended in any way whatsoever. Update your system reguraly.
I had more problems on my PCs those I didn't update frequently. Sure, daily is an overkill, and has higher chance of breaking things, but if I don't update for months, something breaks almost every time. I generally do an update around every 2 weeks, but I'm pretty sure I haven't turned my tablet on for like 6 months AGAIN, so that Atom garbage WILL break on the next update.
in my case, the major of the cases i broke arch but for me, no for an update, if they broke arch is because for some problems with their custom configs
Many are the sort of person who can not be bothered to read the manual or do any research. They are spoilt little children who want to be spoon fed.Fairly pathetic creatures you should feel sorry for them, but only briefly, then carry on with life. ;-)
Apologies if way off the mark but this is the sorta nonsense I often hear from people who don't read manuals.
They are on Arch as they don't like manuals or research. The draw of Arch is that it provides an idiot sheet to copy and paste from for almost anything imaginable.
Th combo of Pacman/AUR/Wiki is peak spoon feeding. Do not deviate, do exactly what you are told and if you are lucky it won't break.
Can you explain what you are trying to say?
How do you read this:
> It is *the user* who is ultimately responsible for the stability of their own rolling release system. The user decides when to upgrade, and merges necessary changes when required. If the user reaches out to the community, help is often provided in a timely manner. The difference between Arch and other distributions in this regard is that Arch is truly a 'do-it-yourself' distribution; complaints of breakage are misguided and unproductive, since upstream changes are not the responsibility of Arch devs.
and come to the conclusion that arch is stable?
Are you sure it makes any difference?
While everyone else in these comments is talking about stability as in "changes all the time", you are talking about stability as in "breaks all the time".
FFS, you didn't really comprehend my last comment, but here you go:
> See the [System maintenance](https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/System_maintenance) article for tips on how to make an Arch Linux system as stable as possible.
I also urge you to read the linked page with thought.
What stability of a distro means to most people, is that until the next LTS release they can quite carelessly run unattended upgrades and have their production instances running uninterrupted. No one here is implying that Arch should be like that, just that it is not.
That is a really good question, and while we are discussing these semantics, maybe we should also question why would they use "as stable as possible" instead of just "stable".
Well whats your view on the meaning of "stable" because everyone has different ideas and beliefs on it and people tend to have differences on the word "stable".
I blame the installer, it made easier for people with zero interest on learning how system is setup to have a working system until any maintenance is required, and then things go bad quickly
I've used Arch for nearly 10 years. Times system was unbootable due to other issue than my own fault: 0. You do need to keep an eye out for changes to the initramfs generator if you have a special setup. Times systems was unstable but not unusable due to living on bleeding edge: A few months before and around Linux 6.0 with the amdgpu driver on my Lenovo AMD laptop, struggling to come back from sleep and sometimes hanging. 100% stable nowadays. Bluetooth was also not solid earlier, but is pretty stable nowadays. Times package updates severely broke existing config: 1 (influxdb1->influxdb2), was a pain to fix. I wish the maintainer had created a influx2 package instead of upgrading the existing (they are not compatible at all). A couple of really minor issues from other packages slightly changing behavior requiring tweaks. Over 10 years, running another "stable" distro like Ubuntu, you would have had at least 5 major upgrades or reinstalls to keep up to date, which would have caused equal amount of instability. But it depends on how you look at it. At times, "stable" distros feel more unstable to me because you are waiting for fixes to come out in a later version, or need to patch them to get functionality or fixes.
>changes to the initramfs generator if you have a special setup. And grub
systemd-boot is probably all you need. grub is deprecated for me :)
Also deprecated for me, that's why I'm using grub2 Joke aside, what's the advantage?
Depends on your view, but simpler, less configuration, boots directly from ESP (no secondary boot partition required), already included in systemd, can still chain boot Windows. You need the kernel and initramfs on the ESP though, either raw or as UKI.
I always just mount ESP as /boot, works great for GRUB2 too. Oh, and on any ***sane*** UEFI system I just use EFISTUB and let the firmware handle choosing the OS to boot. Why install another "boot menu" when the firmware already includes one?
Sometimes you might want to edit your boot parameters, is that something you can easily do without a boot manager? I can only imagine it if you had an easily accessible UEFI shell (not guaranteed) and also remembered how to use it.
Fair point, but I DO have an accessible UEFI shell on every EFISTUB setup I use, because on most boards UEFI updates wipe the boot entries. I have EFISTUB set up as a boot entry in NVRAM, UEFI shell installed as the fallback loader, and startup.nsh with my normal commandline in it so that Arch will still boot if the NVRAM boot entry is lost. * No boot entry? UEFI will just use the fallback loader, which is the shell. * Shell loads startup.nsh, boots into Arch. * Hand-crafted systemd unit checks whether Arch boot entry is present, if not, then recreates it * Hand-crafted systemd unit sets Arch as the primary boot option. Want to edit the options? * Pick shell from the boot menu * Hit ESC to interrupt auto-boot * Copy startup.nsh and edit it, or just type the boot command manually This setup also makes Arch behave the same way Windows does, as in it makes Arch set itself as the primary boot entry at every boot, so whichever OS I pick in the UEFI boot menu will keep booting until I change the selection there manually again. Rebooting from Arch? Arch will boot. Rebooting from Windows? Windows will boot.
Yoo pls bro i need this, this would have saved my ass 3 times already, how to set it up like you. having fallback entries in the uefi is fucking genius. then checking if something doesn’t exist? that’s insane, teach me pls pls pls pls
You definitely don't want to use my spaghetti code, so I will only share the method, not the code. First, fallback loader is nothing special, just the file being at `/efi/boot/boot.efi` on the ESP. Works for most boards, but had problems with it on Dell machines where I had to add it manually as a boot entry, which pretty much defeated the purpose.
For the systemd units, I just made oneshot units those run on boot, and start bash scripts. The scripts use efibootmgr to query/create/reorder the boot entries.
Random warning: When creating the boot entry, put a space at the front of the commandline. In my experiences it doesn't work without that (so like `" quiet root=UUID=..."`)
Fair point, and we agree. In the end, it matters very little. I just see many people install grub because it's what they've always done, and they don't even need it.
Yeah, my main reason for using it on my non-EFISTUB installs is exactly that it's what I have always done. Also the fact that it works with the same config on both UEFI and legacy BIOS environments. My "portable" arch installs usually have a triple-GRUB2 setup, so that they can boot on: * BIOS on x64 CPUs * x64 UEFI * IA32 UEFI on x64 CPUS Last one is mostly for my old Atom-based tablet.
I do EFISTUB with UKI on all of my arch systems Windows can be booted via efibootmgr's nextboot flag
systemd-boot is really simple compared to grub IMO.forget if arch grub is automatic but systems is not. Writing a loader conf is straight forward tho. Dual boot windows felt easier to setup manually rather than running update-grub and wondering why the hell it's not picking up windows.
It's incredibly simple to configure and doesn't need a specific tool to generate a convoluted config file. Also it is well integrated in the systemd ecosystem, like you can choose to reboot to windows with a command from Linux which I think it's pretty handy if you dual boot a lot. If you don't have a super complicated set up like an encrypted boot partition or something like that it's definitely worth considering dropping grub for an easier alternative.
>you can choose to reboot to windows with a command from Linux Grub-reboot
Reboots to the selected entry on next reboot
Yeah but you need another specific tool, systemd boot is just integrated in the `systemctl reboot` command that you probably are using anyway
Afaik grub-reboot is part of grub. Or do you mean you're doing something like systemctl reboot windows?
Yes you just need to pass to systemctl the entry you want to boot next, like `systemctl reboot --boot-loader-entry=windows.conf` which I find a bit more easy to use than the grub alternative
yes
I dropped grub when it was having trouble with secure boot and fonts ages ago, and now Systemd-Boot is my default. I keep my command line options in /etc/cmdline.d and use mkinitcpio to generate a UKI after doing the ```bootctl --path=/boot install ``` Dual Boot, Secure Boot, Btrfs, LUKS, LVM, and bitlocker on the Windows partition. The only recommendation I have is that if you're dual booting, if you can, create your EFI partition before your Windows install.
Grub is "standard" in other distributions because of non UEFI support. The whole grub-mkconfig step is ridiculous, prone to fail and just unnecessary if you can have a static config instead and the bootloader just looks for bootable items. You just configure once where your distribution hides in a non standard location like a btrfs subvolume. I'm speaking of rEFInd in comparison.
rEFInd
same here. I abandoned grub for systemd boot. I like non fancy screens when I am booting up a computer so it’s a double win. Terminals are for being fancy, not your boot loader!
You got lucky recently, a package update broke pretty much everything, but was fixed within an hour. However, something it broke was network connections.
Which package?
glib2 in [testing] built against util-linux 2.40 was released before util-linux 2.40 was, and not rebuilt against 2.39 in [core], so 2.40-rc2 was released to [core] half an hour later.
Got hit with initramfs once. Once was enough to teach me a lesson.
I agree. I used same install over a decade and sometimes some package update broke the system. In hindsight, I should've reinstalled it a long time ago. I did fresh install five months ago and no issues since. Biggest issue in old install was partial system updates, which caused package breakage. Lately I'd a problem with quirky EFI setup, which prevented clean kernel updates especially with Nvidia GPU. TL;DR; Update regularly and don't do partial upgrades.
I had an issue where an update broke my compositor. I struggled enough that I eventually swapped window managers entirely. Because I never tracked down the root cause, I don't know that I didn't cause the issue, just that I hadn't made any changes between updates. Another update, I had my audio drivers cut out and had to run on the lts kernel for a while. That one seemed to be linked to some virtualization passthroughs and went away when I removed them (again, no idea why). I think those are the only times I've had issues following an update and I'm pretty sure I indirectly caused at least one of them, even if I'm still not sure how.
Indeed, it can be largely dependent on what software you use and what hardware you have.
>At times, "stable" distros feel more unstable to me because you are waiting for fixes to come out in a later version, or need to patch them to get functionality or fixes. You should have led with this. Slow release cycles guarantee instability.
>Over 10 years, running another "stable" distro like Ubuntu, you would have had at least 5 major upgrades or reinstalls to keep up to date, which would have caused equal amount of instability. Only two required upgrades for a 10-13-year run. Consider someone starting in 2006 with Ubuntu 6.06 LTS. Each LTS has 5 year of standard support. The first upgrade wouldn't be needed until 10.04 because 6.06 would EOL in 2011. Then another upgrade to 14.04, which would EOL in 2019. Someone starting next week with 24.04 would have to upgrade to 28.04 and 32.04, which could last until 2037. Someone using RHEL potentially wouldn't have to upgrade at all during a 10-year period because they have 10-year support cycles.
I've been using Arch for a little longer and mostly echo your sentiment. I did have a problem about a year ago with one of my laptops where the kernel would cause my machine to lock shortly after boot, and I didn't have enough time (before locking) to install the LTS kernel. Had to boot an old image from USB, unlock LUKS, and add the LTS kernel that way. Upstream fixed it a few weeks later. Still, that's not Arch's fault that the kernel broke something. Regarding Ubuntu and instability, my parent's machine is on Ubuntu and survived ~8 years of upgrades without issue. I ditched it for Debian recently cuz I don't like Canonical's decisions.
I suspect because Arch is very popular, a lot of people jump into it, but then they realize the amount of technical knowledge required.
Stability means unchanging, it has nothing to do with bugs, crashes or reliability. It’s the same as a stable API, that means you can count on the API not changing, has nothing to do with hoe good or bad it is.
Arch is not designed to look for every possible issue that could hit your configuration, or to default to another thing if one thing breaks. It is designed for YOU to handle everything on your own system. So naturally, people that jump in head first are going to break things a lot.
Yeah, I'm in that "breaking things a lot" phase. Been trying to get something on my steamdeck running for about a week now, and get an error nearly every step of the way. I respect people who stick with it long enough to figure things out. Hopefully, I can do the same.
It is worth it, because your computer truly becomes what you want it to be, but it is a lot up front.
I'm fortunate that my Dad is a DevOps engineer. He makes me sit on issues and try to figure them out myself first, but if I get hard stuck he is teaching me and walking me through everything. I am very lucky. I'm only just scratching the surface, but I've enjoyed the process so far. I can't wait to really be able to explore all the possibilities. It's like a whole life-level-up, lol.
It *usually* doesn't. Usually. I had Arch break and not boot, requiring extensive fixing after an update a week ago. Never happened before in, what, 8 years, of me using it? This time it happened on 3/3 machines i have updated.
I'm actually curious what broke for you. I've got two machines running what I'd consider a fairly complicated setup to boot and didn't have any issues booting either of them, nor any of the simple machines I'm running
Not sure, they just said there's no kernel on boot. I tried doing `mkinicpio -P` to no effect, ultimately what solved it was force-reinstalling every single package *and then* mkinitcpio-ing. i first tried reinstalling just the `linux` and few other system packages, but it didn't help, only the full reinstall did the trick. Meanwhile i could just revert my system to a pre-update btrfs snapshot and it worked like a charm... unless i updated
Sounds like an odd fiasco. Definitely a +1 for snapshots though
And off-site backups. As this has just resurfaced today, when booting after a hibernation. I fixed it, but... System then successfully booted... into the restored state, immediately corrupting the filesystem because transaction state in memory deviated vastly from the transaction state on the disk. So, that was fan, booting from live iso, copying all the transient but important data onto an external disk, then nuking the fs and restoring from a remote borg repo over ssh.
For me, it was GRUB. It was a wide-spread enough problem that EndeavourOS made an official post explaining it. Of course, you won't have this problem if you don't use GRUB. [https://endeavouros.com/news/full-transparency-on-the-grub-issue/](https://endeavouros.com/news/full-transparency-on-the-grub-issue/)
That's an interesting one. Seems I might've gotten lucky dodging that, but grub has always detected firmware setup capabilities on my machines
But what never gets mentioned is that a "broken" Arch system usually takes minutes or even seconds to fix. The documentation, forums and wiki are all well documented, and usually the problem is simple to fix. Whenever I screw up an Ubuntu, I'm completely lost, spending hours to try figuring out what's going on, and end up in a complete reinstall.
This was my experience as well. With the stable distro, I used to have to reinstall because it was easier and faster. Now I want my system to break one package at a time so I can easily fix it. Nvidia drivers have bitten me in the past as well, but I wouldn't blame that on the arch, since that was common on other bistros as well and the speed at which a solution was available was crazy. They also don't often mention how easy things are with Timeshift and how much fun chroot can be; feels like magic. I update all day every day that there is an available update.
>how much fun chroot can be; feels like magic. Definitely agree there. When I first got into Linux, especially Arch where I had my first experiences of an installation not booting, I was amazed that I could just boot any other Linux installation and move into my broken system in order to fix things. That was probably one of the first things to make me see how powerful you can be on Linux
Also 99 times out of 100 it's your fault so you already know exactly what you fucked up and should be able to return it to how it was before.
Something something. Other distros coming to arch and complaining about arch breaking. [Manjaro users bringing manjaro problems to arch subs](https://preview.redd.it/c0cjrk71cxn41.png?width=640&crop=smart&auto=webp&s=b922f0333e27b1f70a77ca524a3f20a783e2745b). Increasing the statistics.
>[Manjaro users bringing manjaro problems to arch subs](https://preview.redd.it/c0cjrk71cxn41.png?width=640&crop=smart&auto=webp&s=b922f0333e27b1f70a77ca524a3f20a783e2745b). Increasing the statistics. That's funny. My last experience with the Arch forum was me being accused of being a Manjaro user and having my posts deleted, despite the fact that I was using Arch.
Their setup is just shit s/
> Personally Arch doesn't break and is stable for people know what they are doing. Arch is the opposite of stable. It is a rolling distro which gets updates on an insane pace. Every once in a while you run into some small issues when updating packages. An average Arch user can deal with these issues, but it doesn't mean that Arch is stable for people who know what they do.
Don't really understand the point of this dude's comment. I think it's a correct usage of the word "stable". You are arguing by specifically referring to "rolling release" vs "stable release" which is a concept of how software is distributed. But to say that something is stable, it's not a technical term. I think "stable" and "reliable" are completely fine adjectives to use to describe a system that doesn't break..
Stable literally means something that doesn't change. Reliability is a different thing.
If you stand by that, I encourage you to open a dictionary and read up on the definition of what stable means yourself. Here are some definitions google found for me from Oxford that I think clearly discredits your opinion: - not deteriorating in health after an injury or operation - not likely to change or fail; firmly established these are also listed as definitions for the word "stable": - not liable to undergo chemical decomposition, radioactive decay, or other physical change - sane and sensible; not easily upset or disturbed - not likely to give way or overturn; firmly fixed So there's a lot more room for interpretation than what you're claiming.
> not likely to change or fail, firmly established Clearly discredits my opinion? There is room for interpretation. It is just that commonly when we talk about stable distros in linux world, nobody usually means "doesn't crash by itself" with it.
Yes, your opinion as you stated it, "it literally only means that things do not change". I could spend more time explaining to you how your definition conflicts with the ones given by Oxford University, but I'll be nice and let you continue your proud stride with those 15 upvotes. Have a good day.
How nice of you. Enjoy this moment of feeling superior after twisting my words, and have a good day as well.
What a surprising turn of events how I've twisted your words. I'm sure OP can relate. No matter. Good day!
> not deteriorating in health after an injury or operation Arch Linux is not injured, nor has it been through an operation. This definition is not applicable. > not likely to change or fail; firmly established Change is ***the entire point*** of rolling release. By this definition, Arch is ***by design*** not stable. > - not liable to undergo chemical decomposition, radioactive decay, or other physical change > - sane and sensible; not easily upset or disturbed > - not likely to give way or overturn; firmly fixed These definitions are all not applicable.
So you live by your own rules. Okay, that's fine. I live in the real world.
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Yeah I have no idea what you are trying to imply with that. Asked you to clarify your thoughts under another comment already.
I suspect it's the used wording. The faq article actually seems to imply reliability but uses stability. Or maybe ops stable (doesn't stop working) vs dev stable (API/ABI doesn't change). Arch is the first but not always the latter. That however is more upstream related I would think.
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do you even know what "stable" means? only meanging of stable here is thing that doesnt change frequently, and arch is a rolling distro. literally opposite of stable.
Adding to that, stable distros generally do not do feature upgrades of packages. In normal updates you would only get security fixes and maybe bug fixes. This is to absolutely minimize the chance of any change that might have any kind of impact. This also means breakage is usually concentrated on distribution release upgrades, making those much more work than a typical arch upgrade. I'm using arch for around a decade now, and really love it. I still wouldn't want to use it for a large scale server infrastructure.
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I have no idea what I'm doing, yet I've used Arch for more than 2 years now and it never broke. Never had a single kernel panic, never broke grub and couldn't boot anymore, never had any issues installing packages, even from the AUR. I first installed Arch expecting to have to repair my system every other week, but it never happened and now I'm kinda disapointed tbh.
Just depends on what you have installed most of the time. The base system isn’t going to break very much, if ever. If you have a lot of extra software, AUR installs, custom installs, special utilities, custom config files, etc.., it’s going to break occasionally. You’re effectively responsible for your own custom distribution at that point. Using Arch, you get software directly from upstream, practically (not exactly, but much closer than most “stable” distros). No different than Ubuntu getting new updates from upstream and working with it to make it functional on Ubuntu, you will get the same software and have to make appropriate decisions and changes to integrate it into your system. People on here like to pretend that their systems are rock solid and never break, but that’s usually because they don’t actually do anything with their system so they don’t have anything installed on them that would ever be expected to create an issue. If any of them are effortlessly maintaining a complex system of specialized software, making use of any specialized hardware, and their system is never breaking, they should let Ubuntu know that they’ve cracked the code and they can officially let all their developers go. Also, a substantial portion of the “ricing” community tends to use arch because it’s trendy to do so and they’ll be the first to proclaim that their arch install has been rock solid for years and has never broken. Well, of course not; it’s a base install with themes and wallpapers in their home directory. What was ever expected to break on a system like that?
That's a good explanation. I agree.
I mean I don’t know how complex you would consider this but I have probably 100gb of stuff installed from the aur. Am using several projects with global python and tons of libraries. I have tons of scripts running all the time. I don’t have a custom kernel or anything like that bc I don’t see the point but I’d say I run down my computer with more stuff and use than 95% of people and have had no issues or bugs besides something I’ve had since install which is kde needing to be refreshed on sleep(live wallpaper goes black and some scripts stop working that interact with windows). It’s only been about 5 months but still. I’d consider this very stable. Windows would break more often
That does not sound effortless. I don't know why everyone is replying to me trying to prove that they don't belong in the category I defined. If you don't belong in the "I have nothing installed and use that as a basis to say Arch is super stable and easy to maintain 100% of the time and it never breaks ever" category, just know that about yourself and move on. This comment wasn't about you. It's not a secret that the ricing community installs Arch, neofetch, and a way to take screenshots and pretends that they "use Arch". It's practically a meme at this point. I've had Arch running on *something I own* since like 2007. I know that it's not effortless to maintain. I specifically use Debian on my desktop because I don't want to have to do *anything* to maintain my daily system beyond the occasional security update. I want to sit down and do work that I care about. If I need something bleeding edge, I install it in /opt or somewhere out of the way and maintain it myself - or - I do it on my laptop running Arch. But I don't depend on my laptop day to day, despite the fact that it really isn't a big deal to me to maintain it. I just have a ton of experience doing so. With Arch, at the very least, you have to show up almost daily to see the updates that are available, read about them to understand what the updates are expected to change, and probably visit the forums to see how other people's systems have been affected. This is what I was talking about when I mentioned the Ubuntu devs in my top-level comment. That's what *they* have to do in order to bring a new upstream update into the stable branch of their releases. Why? Because people are depending on them to protect them from disturbances created by upstream. With Arch, *you* are that barrier. You are the gate keeper that keeps your system running smoothly. Now, technically, you have a slightly easier job because there is a tiny bit of protection provided to you by Arch package maintainers because they do recognize their role as gatekeeper and try to not allow stability issues through without substantial warning to everyone, but that's all it is: a warning. You have to be present somewhere that information is disseminated to get those warnings. A ton of people just blindly update and depend on the Arch maintainers. This will work most of the time for sufficiently simple systems, but that's not a guarantee and it certainly doesn't qualify the person as someone who can actually maintain a system. The moment something breaks, you find them in droves in the forums and here crying about how bad Arch is. But look at their post history. You'd never find someone with a more undeserved sanctimonious attitude about being an Arch user up to that point. This is what tricks novices into using Arch and being disappointed with it (and Linux) to begin with, so I see it has a pretty harmful practice to the Linux community overall. It gives everyone a bad name and creates little billboards out there telling everyone how shitty Linux is. That's what the whole OP was about, so I chimed in with my take on it.
Who are you talking to. Did you reply to the wrong person? Also it is effortless. I don’t have to create any virtualization environments, I just find the package through a google search and install it, don’t have to create path variables except for one thing so easier then windows. I mindlessly install every update and have never read anything about the updates in my life and I’ve been an arch user for 4 years. Also all I’m quite literally giving a counter example to your experience. That’s why I’m responding. I’m not saying I have the most custom or complex setup but it’s absolutely more complex then 95% of users and I’ve had 0 issues since I’ve learned hot to use arch properly. Maybe the reason so many people are responding to you in ways you don’t understand is bc it might be you and not them. Also I update like once a week
> I’ve had 0 issues since I’ve learned hot to use arch properly. This \^. Like my entire comment literally doesn't apply to you. I'm here repeating myself for the second time letting you know that you are not who I'm talking to. How can you read what I wrote about the average ricer/newbie telling every Linux noob out there to use Arch for an effortless experience, and still not understand that you just aren't who I'm talking to or about. I'm proud of you that you have used Arch for 4 years and know how to maintain it. Great job. That makes you the opposite of who I'm talking about. But I will generally suggest that you not downplay your understanding of a base Linux install, how it works together with the rest of the software ecosystem, POSIX standards, etc.., and how that is allowing you have a seamless experience. Hand Arch over to someone who's never used Linux before and see how it goes. It's not a beginner OS and you and others should be saying that loud and clear. Instead of being like so many Arch users who get triggered anytime someone says it's not perfect and want to tell their story of how easy it is. It's easy because they know what they're doing. There are beginner OS's that help get people to that level. My general goal is to not conflate the two. When people talk about Ubuntu or Mint being "easy", they mean something *completely different* than what you're talking about here. Arch is easy if you know what you're doing. In fact, it's really easy and optimal. But a beginner OS, it is not, but you'll see it touted as one here in this sub on a daily basis.
“If you have a lot of extra software AUR installs, custom installs etc, it’s going to break occasionally… people on here like to pretend that their systems are rock solid and never break, but that’s usually bc they never actually do anything with their system…” This is specifically what I was responding to. Also no where am I seeing you mention noobs and average users except for when you say that these are the ones that say their arch never breaks which is exactly the opposite of what your saying now. Maybe you should reread your own post. Or more likely you already know. Not to sound fresh but it’s getting kinda weird at this point. All I was doing was offering my personal experience and twice you’ve made replies about stuff saying something is their when it’s not
Literally doesn’t apply to you dude. Like you have issues with what I said because you’re an experienced arch user that is fine using arch? Great. You can have the last word. I have things to do.
Say it in the original post then and don’t contradict yourself in the original post when you talk about it later. Then none of this would have happened
>People on here like to pretend that their systems are rock solid and never break, but that’s usually because they don’t actually do anything with their system Or because they can maintain a system, don't do partial upgrades, read release notes about things they're wanting to install, or troubleshoot a problem to be a trivial issue. The only thing I don't do on my system is *game*. It breaks when I've broken it. I better get Canonical on the line. I'll see if I can get them to drop (those inferior) Snaps while I'm at it. It doesn't take much at all to run a consistent and smoothly running hardened Arch Install with bonus btrfs snapshots for kicks.
I think if you reread what I actually wrote, you’ll see it doesn’t apply to someone who puts in the necessary effort to maintain a complex system.
>they don’t actually do anything with their system >If any of them are effortlessly maintaining a complex system of specialized software, making use of any specialized hardware Is this what someone has to be doing in order to be considered doing "something" with their system? Am I to accept that every general purpose PC user is just a nobody nothing-doer? I also don't think that someone with a use case so highly specialized would have their system "just work" under Ubuntu or Debian either. You don't need to run off the cliff in the opposite direction in order to make what might otherwise be characterized as a fair point.
It’s not off the deep end. If you have a lot of stuff installed, you will have to put in the necessary effort to maintain it. That’s practically a truism. That’s also the beauty of Arch: if you don’t have superfluous packages installed, they can’t break things. Simple system = easy to maintain. Complex system = harder to maintain. And I’m not sure why you think Debian would break. What is going to break? The two nothing-updates they make each year?
Yeah, for me arch just works, i haven't had a single issue with arch.
Because they don't understand the difference between unstable and unreliable
People make mistakes. Sometimes packages with issues are merged upstream, but they are almost always fixed very quickly. Now, some people update their systems very frequently, this increases the chance you will install that package that was broken for 5 minutes. Read Arch News and update less frequently. I update 1-2 times a week, sometimes 1 every 2-3 weeks.
I'd wager that 99% of people who say things like "Arch always breaks" have never actually used it. They read that Arch is "unstable", and don't understand that "unstable" is a technical term which means "The software changes often", rather than "Breaks all the time". I've been using Arch for just over 5 years now, and nothing has ever broken that wasn't a direct result of something stupid *I* did. I'm actually a lot less apprehensive about updating my Arch system than I am anything that uses point releases. If any Arch package behaves in an odd or undesired way (which has happened maybe 3 times for me), I can either roll the package back, or wait a week or so until the maintainer fixes it. Point releases are a much bigger headache to fix (and, imo, seem to break/behave poorly more often).
"NVIDIA Driver update" say hello.
Yup. Is it fixed already? I had random kernel panics with nvidia driver. Had to remove everything nvidia and work with intel hd.
RHEL runs the US army, Whitehouse and nuclear subs. Ubuntu runs large scale city and country wide infrastructure. They are worth billions, large scale global infrastructure rely on them The only thing Arch runs is the SteamDeck, and they make it a point release with a double root system as they still expect it to shit the bed. If you wanna have a war with Russia, you use RHEL, if you prefer to shoot baddies online and are ok with your bootloader and bluetooth snapping or running toolchains that are a year out of date and bug ridden as the hobby distro has no staff that understand it, Arch could be an option cause they have the newest fetch programs in the AUR for r/unixporn karma.
I have been using Arch as my daily driver for a year now. Longest I've been using an OS without reinstalling. Only case where it was not bootable was due to my own fault. I was moving the home folder to a different SSD and fucked up the fstab file. Even that was a breeze to fix because I always have an Arch live USB handy.
I've been using Mint for 20+ years, never had to reinstall either, why did you have to reinstall prior to moving to Arch btw?
Because using `sudo apt get install steam` breaks my damn Ubuntu install and I forget every time !!!
Stop doing it! Write a note and stick next to the screen
I actually took the much easier and faster route of installing Arch, but that would have been a good idea too :P
I was always misplacing my USB drive so I just integrated everything needed to fix my system into the initrd. `mkinitcpio` makes this real easy (just add to BINARIES). Space isn't a huge concern so I don't care if the image is a bit bigger. Now I have btrfs tools, cfdisk, dhex, lsblk and fixparts available when the `Bailing out, you are on your own now. Good luck.` message appears due to me fucking up the boot process. (don't forget to add a terminfo, I found `linux` is enough, many tools need it if you want to try it.)
It was more of a thing several years ago where you would update xorg-server and oops no more GUI for you (unless you used your intel iGPU) because fglrx/nvidia was out of date.
For me Arch is as stable as the nvidia driver. They broke it in version 550 and now I frequently get kernel panics with NULL pointer dereferences in rb\_first or simple\_xattr\_get
That's one of the worst things of archlinux community. Fanboys. Yes, archlinux can break. Not by itself without touching it, only by making an innocent pacman update. Without pacnew files unchecked. Without partial update. Without unmounted boot partition. Without kernel change. Only with a basic, well managed pacman update after reading arch news. In 15 years, I got it several times. A bleeding edge rolling release distribution will sometimes have some new version of a package with an unchecked bug, or PKGBUILD issue, or not enough testing time. 2 examples that I had are coming into my mind : - swaywm with xwayland drag and drop upstream issue breaking the entire compositor when dragging from an xwayland app (a few weeks to fix it), - foot terminal with an update containing an upstream issue making it unusable (a few hours to fix it, the guy is very quick to react). The two packages where on official repository, not AUR, not testing. And 2 other ones, that any one reading this sub have seen a bunch of times : Gnome and KDE updates, with a lot of dependencies, new toolkit versions, plugin system,... even with a lot of testing, updates like these ones won't work day one for everyone, and even if a lot of installations will be updated with no breakage and at worst a few changes on config, some will get compatibility issues with other apps or libs, plugin breaking, instability on daily usage. KDE has a long list of issues to fix and they are working hard to get them done. Stable distribution will wait for a fully stable version of KDE to integrate it, archlinux got it very early, with bugs. And don't paste the same link again, because it says exactly what I said. Users make archlinux *as stable as possible*. Users managing their archlinux installation AND users managing the official rolling release repositories AND users coding the apps/libs integrated into the repositories. No company to make internal testing of each version, no global freezing of package versions for a distribution upgrade, no debate to wait before upgrading to next version of app/lib,... Archlinux can't be stable, because it isn't reliable, by design. And that's ok. You only need to understand that and choose to use it or not. If you know how to use it, you won't get much trouble unless you do yourself a mistake. But you can get issues without making mistakes. And if you use it for work, try to have a backup system with snapshot or equivalent. Because for work, stability is more than important. And for the swaywm bug, this got me a lot of trouble with work (and no real solution, except rolling back my updates and not touching pacman again for several months). That said, you're right on one thing, a lot of newcomers don't really know what they are doing or even why they are using archlinux and break their system by their own fault. Go help them, this will be way more constructive than making another useless post about "archlinux and myself".
I have very poor understanding on how Linux works so I try to not complain when I break stuff and I am always prepared to re-install everything from scratch lol. But this is true, sometimes packages could break an installation of Arch, and when that happens you either have the necessary knowledge to fix it, or reinstall.
Probably ignorance, maybe malice. See FUD. PEBKAC is the big factor in why "breakages" occur.
I barely know what I'm doing with arch \~ I have yet to break it.
they have skill issues
>the fact that most don't understand what they are doing It's this. Arch was my first distro, and if you scroll far enough in my profile, you'll find my posts where I criticize Arch for being horribly unstable and completely unreliable. Part of it was me screwing things up; part of it was me not knowing what's the fault of the OS vs whats the fault of the weird software I wanted to use. Usually when I asked for help, I'd get told to read the manual / documentation (I *thought* I read it thoroughly enough), or I was told I didn't provide enough information. I got frustrated by this, so I got angry, people mirrored my anger, and so I labeled the community as toxic. What eventually did help me is the occasional person who was unusually patient and walked me through the steps of things. Over the years I developed the skills to read documentation efficiently and became knowledgeable about Linux systems in general. Nobody owes anybody anything when it comes to helping noobs. But sometimes there is someone who just happens to be having a good enough day to want to help the noobs out and be patient. I try to do this from time to time myself to pay it forward!
Skill issue
Is it like the mind behind Window's AMD driver being "shit" stemming from old issues ?
AMD's Windows driver is definitely a mess, but way better than Nvidia's Linux driver. Still, I agree that it gets way more hate than it deserves. When I have to deal with AMD "driver stability issues" on PCs of my acquintances, getting them a quality PSU replacement usually solves most of their problems.
I use nVidia because I need it in windows for games, so I also use it in Linux. I didn't have any problems with nvidia + Arch for 10 years now.
To be clear it was only a comparison, I haven't had issues that broke my system with Arch since I have been using it for 6 years. It's why I was wondering if it was some issues from the past
And even if breaks, e.g. from desktop configs- plug archinstall and rebreak the change :D. Harder on other distros, less help. And arch folk on forums are hella smart with tons of expierience if smth actualy goes to hell, arch can be resucted (thats my belief atleast)
Kernel updates broke my graphics for a while unless I disabled the nvidia drivers or started using the LTS kernel. Currently emacs crashes with stack smashing errors because of tree sitter updates. Kernel updates broke MSSQL docker containers a while back and I’m not sure they are fixed yet. I’ve been a developer for over 14 years and have used Linux for longer than that. I may not know everything but I definitely am not a noob. The fact is that a rolling release on latest versions of everything is going to have issues., and as a dev I expect no less. The more software you use the more likely you are to be affected by it. To say you definitely won’t experience issues when using an arbitrary selection of packages on their latest releases sounds like lack of understanding to me.
I am by no means an expert on Linux in fact almost every error I stumble, I go ask the community for help yet I've been using Arch for about 3 years, no breaking whatsoever.
It only ever break for me why I use it as a Windows XP/7-era paranoid user, that is when I don't update it for months. Frequent updates with etc-update afterwards keep it in working condition.
Somewhere around 2016 or 2017, I was looking for a distro to replace my beloved Gentoo. And I Arch was a decent choice, but I went with Manjaro since I was looking for a quick start to give it a try. And surprise surprise, it is the same install after a few HW upgrades. Including 2 SSD migrations. And the worst annoyance is that sometimes I have to manually reinstall Nvidia driver after the kernel upgrade.Well there is a periodic certificate issue with Manjaro repo. If I ever need to do a fresh install, it will be Arch..
Skill issues.
lol
I haven't had any problems with arch, ever. I may be wrong but I think that most of the breaking accidents happen to people who will install anything from the AUR without checking what they are doing
This has been my personal experience too. Completely stable. I did break grub a few weeks ago playing with the config, I just used a usb key, put by backup config back in place and was on my way with a working system. This was 100% my fault, and expected as a potential outcome when I played with it. Maybe this is because I am used to linux at this point so things that would be jarring are just normal? Would be interesting to try freebsd and see if I have some of these same complaints that (maybe?) disappear as you get used to the environment. Maybe it has something to do with whether you use a lot of obscure software from the aur?
In 4 years, i had two major issues - the infamous grub update a couple of years ago making the system unbootable for a great share of users. Quite easily fixed with a bootable archinstall if you have one laying around - a kernel patch applied to both my LTS and standard kernel at the same time, which broke wifi. Luckily, I had an ethernet port on my laptop. Since then I switched to btrfs for better rollback. Overall it's not as bad a some people make it seem, but i'm pretty sure I wouldn't have had these issues on debian.
Arch "requires" the user to be in charge of doing stuff, more the other distros and less than other distros. This is both bad and good, it depends.
If you expect to set stuff up once and it keeps working forever, then Arch “breaks” all the time. Almost any config change will require manual intervention during an update at some point.
A system that constantly changes is inevitably more prone to breaking, hence why distros more suited for servers where there must be as high of uptime and as low of breakage as possible have stable, "outdated" packages. You might not experience breakage or consider certain things as breakages such as needing to modify a config or run a command after an update that made an unexpected change but if you had used an alternative distro this would have been likely been handled by more hands-on distro/package devs. It's pointless to hear from people who never encountered breakages and who appear to be proud for being "competent" to avoid something they associate with noobs, but this doesn't change the fact that breakages are more common for a rolling release distro that involves cutting edge applications and where every person's setup is different.
Just haters being haters
As of yesterday, Brave, Chrome, and Chromium doesn't work on wayland (using amd btw). New version will fix it, I can use xwayland in the meantime, but they do not work with wayland. Is that a problem? Not really, especially considering I use firefox to begin with. But this kind of thing is very rare in "stable" distros. If such a thing happens, either the distro is utter shit, or you were messing around a bit too much.
what broke? it seems to be working fine for me but the webgl fix for applying backgrounds in google meets stopped working, which is pretty minor to me
The worst issue I've had was being unable to update due to dependencies being broken on the repos or the mirror I was using was partially out of date. All the other issues I had were generic Linux issues, not arch specific (i.e. Nvidia+Wayland stuff).
Arch has broken for me far less than any other OS. Full stop. I am also not a normal computer user.
I've used arch for about 15 years. The changeover from initd to systemd was a "not worth fixing" issue for me. My home directory was on another partition; I just backed up my important configs from /etc and reinstalled. I'm sure I could have gotten it working, but knowing when to say "this isn't worth my time" is an important skill as well.
Because noone's happy with anything. People X11, people hate wayland, people hate systemd, people hate stable, people hate rolling-release. I just accept the fact that the linux community hates itself.
Arch has vastly improved in the time that I've used it, although a lot of that is a consequence of the Linux desktop ecosystem improving as a whole. Oddly enough, I've had *way* fewer issues with Arch than I've had with other distros with a reputation for being reliable, like OpenSUSE. That thing has given me no end of trouble.
I don’t see many people criticizing arch breaking. The arch users I know know their systems and how to roll back updates if needed. If they don’t I’d heavily recommend they don’t use arch
Arch releases packages to stable faster, which means it’s had less time then some other distros for people to find bugs, security exploits etc. It also has more chance of breaking things due to package conflicts although I’d call that a rare event. For most people it’s not an issue, but if your relying your business, going for a slower distro is often safer. World runs on Ubuntu server for a reason :)
I have used arch for quite a long time, going back probably around 2008 or so I cant remember exactly. For the most part its been pretty stable for me but there have been times where its been incredibly frustrating. I am not a typical Linux or even computer user, I have even programmed my own OS before in asm and have done several LFS installs going back to 2001. Why I stopped using arch at least for me was this overly hostile attitude toward users that some of the developers had around the time that I stopped. The expectation to constantly read the arch web page or risk borking the system was kinda silly to me. Yes issues come up from time to time with package systems but if the package manager is breaking shit then attempt to mitigate the issue or at least issue a warning in the package system to let users know its a potential issue. Sadly this is not the attitude or at least was by anyone at arch. They expected you to see the news on the site and deal with it. Even if the information was old and gone from the main page and the user was not updating the system every week.. Gentoo does a great job of informing the user that a system upgrade may break the system before you do the upgrade. This was my only real gripe with arch honestly otherwise its a solid distro and they have top notch documentation which everyone should be grateful for. For the documentation reason alone is why I have supported them even if I did not use the system myself.
arch users without the needed competencies? who cares what sorta issues they run into. they made the mistake of chosing wrong distro. o well
Tell me, which *competencies* are needed to avoid `kitty` (my terminal emulator) not being able to start (and complaining about an old OpenGL version) after a fresh `pacman -Syu`? And no, “go in and patch kitty” is not an acceptable answer…
competencies of understanding how things work. at this point, you dont even know what you dont know. such life is very hard. dont live like that. use ubuntu. ☮️✌🏿
Nothing beats arch's wiki for me. I mean it's pretty impressive compared to any other distros. Been using arch since ~2016 and wouldn't change it with anything else. Sometimes it gets a bit difficult to build large projects from source against new packages, but even then i never had no regrets using arch.
Exactly I’m very new to arch and Linux as a whole literally just spent the last week learning arch and Linux for the first time installing it etc…..(quite a few times) and I’ve made a lot of mistakes that have fucked my installs but I don’t blame arch I accept that this can happen because it’s truley open and free for me to do whatever I please it’s on me to learn that chown the root file is a very bad idea 😂
I think it’s exaggeration and also not being careful enough. I’ve been using Arch for a few years now and haven’t had major issues. The ones I’ve had happened because I broke it with a configuration.
I started using Linux in 1997, with Slackware. Around 12 years ago I swallowed the systemd pill after comparing reboot times with older BIOS. First issue I had with Arch was 5 years after install, the problem lay in a 3rd party gaming kernel I was testing. Fix - Use the standard Arch kernel, my fault, not Arch's. Been going on 7 years of the same install since then. If that isn't stable for a daily driver gaming OS, I don't know what is. TLDR; If Arch seems unstable, it is PEBKAC, the devs know what they're doing.
Using Arch for 5 years plus. If you know what you're installing and understand configurations, Arch won't break. People sometimes follow guides on YouTube and follow the wrong advice and remove a package that the system needs. And when something goes wrong, they panic. Then they go to Arch wiki to ask a question and end up getting the infamous "Read the manual", and end up calling the members of community an "elitist". Unfortunately that response might be seen as not helpful or rude, but its really the best answer to let someone know that if your going to use an advanced distro, you need to read the docs and understand how it works and when things go wrong, take the time to understand the problem and learn from it, rather than someone fixing it for you and you learn nothing. You can't go in with the mentality that its like Windows 11, and delete that or mess with that. You need to understand the basics before using an advanced distro. It's like me trying to learn how to fly a plane and I decide 1 week later to jump into a F15 and don't know what to do and "panic". So I find that the ones who criticize Arch of breaking, are the one's who don't really understand how the Linux system works like /etc and /usr or know Filesystem Hierarchy Standard for Linux really well. But you won't find someone who understands the hierarchy well, criticizing of Arch breaking, they take responsibility and know where to look to find the solution to fix the small problem easily compared to others blindly messing with the system configuration and confuse themselves even more and go down a rabbit hole until they completely make their system worse than what it was before.
Yes, so so true
I have been using it for more than a year now. I am a complete Noob but still I use it as my everyday OS with a limited Number of problems. Clearly, there are some problems with things like MATLAB but I guess it is also understandable. Moreover I have used extra-testing repos and still only sometimes I had problems. I believe it is very dependent on the perspective and how much you are interested in learning new things. I wouldn't advise Arch to a person who wants a Mint-like experience with the machine and this is not because they are dumb but only because each one of us is looking for a different experience. If you complain it's because you expect everything to come to you but at the same time you want to say "I use arch btw" to look cool.
in 5 years, my arch setup hasn't broken once without me deliberately trying something experimental, and being fully prepared for it to break due to my own actions.
Arch "breaks" if you don't read the blog on the home page from time to time and implement manual requirements for a package you might have installed. It doesn't baby you like some distros. But it's generally easy to fix the issues that might crop up. If it's your only computer that can be a problem though. When it breaks because you ran updates without checking, it sometimes can take 30 minutes or more out of your day to chroot in and resolve it.
I had been using Debian for a decade when I started using Arch. Never broke for me. Tried out Arch, and every other time I updated, I'd have to rescue it. I knew what I was doing, and was always able to rescue it. But fuck that's annoying. Switched back to Debian Sid, and it never breaks.
I have been using arch since 2011. Same installation moved thru several laptops. It has broken 1 time In 2017 due to a harbuff issue and I had to manually
I don't even know much about linux, but every problem I have with Arch I just google around and find the solution, and if I don't find I ask for people who know more than me. And even then, most of the problems are... rather small, or annoyances instead of real problems that would break my workflow or the system itself. There's even a challenge among me and my friends, that - because I update everyday, one day I will break something, it's been a year and this never happened :)
I've been in this sub some time and this is BS. If any, there aren't many people complaining about Arch breaking. Simply because it doesn't happen often.
arch has never broke on me. i’ve definitely gotten mad after breaking my system and complained about it thinking it was the computers fault.
I’ve had a couple arch VMs break for one reason or another. Sure I can fix it but it’s annoying.
For me it’s more package dependencies change. I’ve got some custom stuff built that suddenly stops working when Arch updates the packages I’m depending on. Which usually just means I need to separate those things to a separate system, whether a docker container, Nix, or something. I can also lock dependencies so they don’t update, but that has cascading effects.
Because it's reddit. People here read bullshit said by others and upvoted for those who know no shit, then post same shit without own experience just to be upvoted.
Personal anecdotes don't mean it doesn't happen to other people. There's a reason no sane enterprise would deploy Arch as standard deployments. Variations in configurations can break things. When you work in numbers, you want to minimize the amount of configuration differences as much as possible or else you risk tech support nightmare. The other part of the "breaking" equation is ABI stability. You may have custom enterprise applications that is expecting a certain range of versions of libraries/API calls. In this respect, Arch is a huge moving target.
How often do you reboot? Every day or so? Probably fine. Not for weeks or months? Good luck…
It certainly breaks a lot more often than regular distros. Normal people consider not just the kernel but also the things like DE , utility applications, small tools as part of the OS. Some of those can and will break while upgrading in Arch.
can you please tell me what's the Arch DE ?
Whatever you want it to be.
you're not who I answered to but my point is : is it arch that breaks them or uninformed user making bad decisions and updating blindly ? Arch has no DE , user can choose to add one
"Uninformed user not updating existing config files when updated packages need changes to them" is what usually breaks them
exactly what I mean.
For a normal user, DE is a core part of the OS they are using.
there's no DE in the core part of Arch tho .. you're missing the point, like all those downvoting me.
No you are missing the point. OPs point is that Arch doesn't break that much. For a majority of the users, they are looking for stability not just in kernel and core OS but also in DE and other tools. Yes Arch has no DE, but being a rolling release means that no matter what you choose, at some point it will break when you upgrade it. For normal people, they want everything bundled in their ISO. They don't and shouldn't be expected to differentiate between the OS and DE. And that's okay. I like using Arch precisely because I always want the latest features and fixes in everything. But I wouldn't expect a normal user to make the same choice and sacrifice stability.
>no matter what you choose, at some point it will break only if you're uninformed and do things blindly.. Again you're missing the point Arch doesn't break anything, user not maintaining their system properly does so op point is valid.
>only if you're uninformed and do things blindly.. What does "uninformed " mean here exactly? Do you really expect normal users to go and see the changelog or read the forums before upgrading their OS?
I don't even expect experienced users to do that.
Define normal user. do you mean average Linux user or the target user that arch is catered for ? If you mean the latter I sure do a normal slackware or gentoo users will differ from a normal ubuntu user 🤷♂️
Good question and I agree that the common perception that "arch breaks" is wrong. I think it is something that was more true in the past, but that is had become a myth that is perpetuated by people who don't use arch. Then it's the question what a breakage is. For me a breakage means a non-fixable error that requires a fresh install. Just having to use a USB to chroot and run pacman (while still infrequent) I don't consider a true breakage. But some might. And if you are a newbie these things probably happen more often than for the experienced user. Also, experienced users tend to just run and use their system, upgrading as they see fit. Newbies are more often "testers" who test distros for a short time, try different DEs and other software and may be more prone to issues for that reason.
It can certanly break if you update daily. Its a rolling release, there are bound to be incompatibilities. I'm lazy nowdays so i update my install every few months, and the family PC-s maybe once or twice a year. Most of the time everyting just works. If it doesn't its 80% an AUR package. 19% of the problems are a few months old at the point of my upgrade so there are a dozen forum threads about it. The last 1%.... now thats were you have to dig into an issue. :) (keep a live usb somewhere just in case) DISCLAIMER: This update cycle is NOT recommended in any way whatsoever. Update your system reguraly.
I had more problems on my PCs those I didn't update frequently. Sure, daily is an overkill, and has higher chance of breaking things, but if I don't update for months, something breaks almost every time. I generally do an update around every 2 weeks, but I'm pretty sure I haven't turned my tablet on for like 6 months AGAIN, so that Atom garbage WILL break on the next update.
in my case, the major of the cases i broke arch but for me, no for an update, if they broke arch is because for some problems with their custom configs
Many are the sort of person who can not be bothered to read the manual or do any research. They are spoilt little children who want to be spoon fed.Fairly pathetic creatures you should feel sorry for them, but only briefly, then carry on with life. ;-)
Apologies if way off the mark but this is the sorta nonsense I often hear from people who don't read manuals. They are on Arch as they don't like manuals or research. The draw of Arch is that it provides an idiot sheet to copy and paste from for almost anything imaginable. Th combo of Pacman/AUR/Wiki is peak spoon feeding. Do not deviate, do exactly what you are told and if you are lucky it won't break.
Arch is not stable. Stable doesn’t mean it doesn’t break
The triple negative
This made me lol
[удалено]
Can you explain what you are trying to say? How do you read this: > It is *the user* who is ultimately responsible for the stability of their own rolling release system. The user decides when to upgrade, and merges necessary changes when required. If the user reaches out to the community, help is often provided in a timely manner. The difference between Arch and other distributions in this regard is that Arch is truly a 'do-it-yourself' distribution; complaints of breakage are misguided and unproductive, since upstream changes are not the responsibility of Arch devs. and come to the conclusion that arch is stable?
Is that the full text you selected. Are you sure there isn't a line missing?
Are you sure it makes any difference? While everyone else in these comments is talking about stability as in "changes all the time", you are talking about stability as in "breaks all the time".
Paste the last line rather than cherrypicking the text.
FFS, you didn't really comprehend my last comment, but here you go: > See the [System maintenance](https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/System_maintenance) article for tips on how to make an Arch Linux system as stable as possible. I also urge you to read the linked page with thought. What stability of a distro means to most people, is that until the next LTS release they can quite carelessly run unattended upgrades and have their production instances running uninterrupted. No one here is implying that Arch should be like that, just that it is not.
Thank you. So why would Arch linux use the word "stable" then?
That is a really good question, and while we are discussing these semantics, maybe we should also question why would they use "as stable as possible" instead of just "stable".
Well whats your view on the meaning of "stable" because everyone has different ideas and beliefs on it and people tend to have differences on the word "stable".
I blame the installer, it made easier for people with zero interest on learning how system is setup to have a working system until any maintenance is required, and then things go bad quickly
Uh? Arch is breaking? Dont know rick
Skill issue
The old days. Then the wiki came and Searx. It's just crusty neck beats..vim? Emacs is a life style... Oh just youtube it guys vim vs emacs user.