I’m using Arch Linux for 2 years. I subscribed to Arch’s mailing lists and I check my mails daily. I use flatpak instead of AUR.
I installed my system with archinstall and I update whenever I want. I didn’t have any issues yet and it’s the only distro that just works for me.
What about your experience? Any “breakage”?
I used Arch for 4-5 years, and I’d say that Arch itself generally doesn’t break (shout out to when they bricked everyone’s GRUB and then took days to make a news post about it.), but user apps (from the normal repos) frequently had minor bugs because they’re bleeding edge. There’s a bit of a difference here, and I’d say it’s important.
Ultimately, when you use Arch Linux you’re knowingly using bleeding edge software and that will always have the potential for bugs. Arch Linux manages this as best as it can, and it does it just about perfectly. If you want slightly more stability you probably want something closer to OpenSUSE Tumbleweed’s approach, with heavy automated testing.
Nowadays with Flatpaks and other non-root package managers (Homebrew, Cargo, Nix, Distrobox, and even bin), I’d say the average user shouldn’t really be using bleeding edge distros anymore. I switched to Debian Stable + Flatpaks/etc and it’s basically the same experience as Arch Linux to me. The problem with Arch Linux is that you have to run your whole system as bleeding edge, and I don’t think that’s very sane for a lot of usecases.
Thanks for the Tumbleweed shout out. I’m always curious about Arch people’s opinion of Tumbleweed. Arch seems to cast a large shadow over it. But man do I swear by Tumbleweed. There is nothing in Tumbleweed that you can’t do in Arch, but I guess my main question is why would you want to? TW has all the benefits of Arch without the problems. Rather than updating each package individually, TW bundles all the new versions into a snapshot and tests that snapshot to ensure everything works within it. This way no random rogue update conflicts with anything else within that specific snapshot. As a user, when you update you just move from snapshot to snapshot. With Arch you can set up snapper rollback, but you better make sure you’ve partitioned everything correctly or you need to reinstall, TW will just enable rollback by default.
Some people can’t seem to live without AUR, but I feel like distrobox is a much safer way to install software that isn’t available on your distro. If you need something that only comes as a .deb, you can do something like:
And now you have a super minimal version of Ubuntu you can run your software inside of using the official packages instead of something someone else has hacked together/compiled. It also makes setting up custom dev environments trivial without littering your install with dependencies. I get the allure of AUR but I’d rather use distrobox or, if I must, flatpak.
The main defense I see of Arch is "it’s not Arch’s fault, I did ". I guess with TW I don’t ever really worry about \ because the OS really just sort of takes care of itself. And even if I did do a stupid \ rollback is there to reverse my boneheaded idea instantly. I say all this after having experimented with Arch for a little bit now. It felt like taking a vacation: everything was new and different and you start thinking about how cool it would be to live here, but then you start to notice the little things, and after a while you just want to go home and sleep in your own bed.
I have nothing against Arch but the constant defense of “Arch broke, but it’s not Arch’s fault” seems like a meme. Just read this comment section and take a shot for every person who says it. Meanwhile I’m over here on TW running the same versions of everything as Arch has and all I ever did was “zypper dup” and maybe 1-2 times a year “snapper rollback”. I don’t know if I sound defensive, maybe I do, but I feel like Tumbleweed is criminally underrated and a large portion of people on Arch would probably be better served by something like Tumbleweed judging by the forums/Reddit.
Ironic. I want to use Distrobox as a way of bringing the AUR to other distros. I have been thinking of setting up Debian Stable with Distrobox / Arch to have a stable base while still having access to the AUR.
I agree with all this. I still think “Arch broke, but it’s not Arch’s fault” is valid in a lot of cases because when you install Arch Linux you implicitly agree to be on the bleeding-edge, and Arch Linux delivers that to you as requested. Arch is working as Arch is expected to work, and you probably shouldn’t be using Arch Linux if you don’t have a usecase that necessitates this downside/risk. If Arch wants to make things more stable it would end up looking like Tumbleweed. If Arch wants to make things even more stable it would end up looking like Debian. Arch wants to be at the level of bleeding-edge that it is, and this is roughly what it looks like when you choose that.
My only complaint with Tumbleweed is that the software repository is smaller compared to Arch and Debian. Other than that I think it’s a top-tier distro, and I especially like how much effort they put into making sure everything works properly via their OBS testing suites. I agree that using distrobox or other methods is much safer than the AUR, and ideally the AUR shouldn’t really even be used at all. Like I said before I strongly believe that with the options we have today, true bleeding-edge distros like Arch Linux have become a small niche, as picking and choosing a couple dozen packages to be on the cutting/bleeding-edge is a lot more stable than running everything fully bloody.
That’s actually a fair point and reading this does change my perspective a little. Tumbleweed gets me 95% to where Arch is, but a lot can go wrong in that last 5%. People who chose that understand that. I think we’re in agreement that those who genuinely need that last 5% bleeding edge are a very small group. Back about 10 years ago I was a massive Gentoo fanboy and I admit that Gentoo was my hobby, rather than simply a tool to get work done. I suspect a lot of Arch users are using it for the hobby aspect rather than necessity too, which is fine, I’ve been there myself. I sometimes wonder if there is a certain type of person who just gets bored when using something stable, and the constant threat/thrill of breakage gives them the drama they crave. I think that describes me fairly well in my Gentoo days.
I still think Tumbleweed is the best compromise between “my grub blew up” and “my kernel is 2 years old”, especially when it comes to laptops and gaming. I’ve not really run into problems with a lack of software, but I do make good use of distrobox environments and flatpak. I’ll use OBS builds when only when necessary, namely Mullvad which can’t be run sandboxed.