Arch is great. It's a local minima. It's the closest thing to LFS with binaries done right. I think minimal binaries are a key thing of Arch. They get rid of a lot of complexity. By avoiding heavy patched packages, I've found Arch much easier to debug and maintain.
But IMHO NixOS/GuixSD are the future as they tackle a big set of issues most distros ignore. Namely making sysadmin transactional and reproducible. Perhaps they're not ready for prime time yet, though.
Well, they are... if you want rolling releases that are very up-to-date.
(That not to say there aren't valid reasons not to want a RR distro.)
> But IMHO NixOS/GuixSD are the future as they tackle a big set of issues most distros ignore. Namely making sysadmin transactional and reproducible. Perhaps they're not ready for prime time yet, though.
Agreed, but it really depends on whether NixOS/GuixSD can get enough packagers (people) to get close enough to Arch Linux in terms of "recentness"... so that people would actually start to adopt these distros.
Ideally, I'd want one of this type of distro, but in practice Arch Linux is just ridiculously more current for everything I care about. (I know that I should probably volunteer as a packager, but I just don't have the time or motiviation to do the "make-work" that most of packager life is.)
It's also much easier to package stuff than in Arch. So easy a user that is savvy enough to use either distribution can commit missing packages with minimal work. But they have plenty of stuff.
Admittedly, a problem they have is that it's hard for them to package things with minimal dependencies, something Arch is particularly good at, but this is being worked out with multiple package outputs.
It's not that they don't have plenty of stuff -- it's that when I last tried they didn't have the stuff that I want.
(Incidentally, I think the Nix approach kind of retards adoption of "new things" because it lets old stuff "just keep working" despite old dependencies. I'm sure what the security implications are, but I think they might be quite severe. However, this is just an aside.)
Frankly if bridges were built like software/firmware is built, they would be blown up and rebuilt every 6 months. Good luck getting that past the planning department, much less the public.
That is basically why people do not update, because they worry that their workflow will be more disrupted by a changes to the tech they use daily than some potential security breach.
It was a terrible experience.
[1] IIRC, for various technical reasons due to having to maintain upgradability between stable versions of Debian. If you don't totally embrace RR as a distro, you are consigned to these bizarre situations where you try to be RR, but can't really because you have a secondary distro which requires release-to-release "upgradability".
Exherbo has this in spades, but with additional configurability and multiarch support.
I am a developer, but why would I want to support such a negative position?
[1] The general messaging seems to have improved. Still source-based, which I now don't tend to like. I want to save some electricity for the benefit of the world.
Now it is at the point where things usually work well and major breakage is exceptionally rare (if ever, now). It's used in production environments, too.
#exherbo on freenode is pretty friendly and active.
(i didn't downvote because of i that. I just found it to be a poor one)
My point being you get good and bad sub-communities within any distro / OS.