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Comment by StavrosK | Hacker News Reader

What is it that you like about Arch? Maybe I should give it a shot, although with Ubuntu you know you'll have both the solutions and the software available somewhere.

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Almost everything is most up to date, in ubuntu you get versions that can be years old. And no, that doesn't really mean it breaks things. I have antergos for a couple of months now. I have about 1500 packages installed, never got anything broken like I had the `sudo apt -f install` every few weeks in ubuntu.

And ubuntu comes a bit bloated out of the box. At least for a "normal" power user that knows how to install the things he/she needs.

I'm also impressed from the support in the packages. For example, you need a new fancy editor? latest version? Atom, VS Code? sure, just install it from the package manager. Maybe need the latest of node.js? or vivaldi browser? It has them. It's much more complete than I thought. No need to look for .deb packages on anything.

And last, I won't have to change anything in 6-12 months when a new version comes out. There are no scheduled releases from what I understand. You can always be up to date.

Personally, I don't see any single reason to install ubuntu again.

I don't want to sound rude, but Arch and Antergos aren't exactly the same. I think if you intall Arch you'll set yourself up with a much better understanding of your system for when something goes wrong.

From what I've read, it's a "light installer on top of it". For now it works pretty well for what I need. And coming from OSX and ubuntu it's a good step I guess. I'll try just arch on a VM to see what the differences are.

They are essentially the same, it is the same repos. In fact once you have installed antergos you can remove the antergos repo and you essentially have an arch system.

Many arch users often say "you must go through our annoying installation process to understand linux better!" - but that's only true if the person migrating to arch is a linux newbie.

Frankly I've been using linux for 20 years and now that I am older and a parent I have much better uses of my very limited time than going through an obnoxious chroot install and configuring some files in /etc. Antergos is great.

Hmm, that's interesting, thanks. I currently have provisioning scripts for Ubuntu that will set up any machine just the way I want it from scratch with one command, so moving all that state is not trivial, but Arch sounds very interesting. I'll give it a try, thank you!

No problem.

Yeah, setting up the environment is a hassle. Happy to help if I can.

Thank you for your offer! I'm sure it'll be straightforward, it's just work that has to be done :)

For personal use its the most up to date and because its rolling release i never have to actually upgrade or wait for releases. Also newer kernels for newer hardware.

Doesn't that break things too often? I always run across at least one breaking change on each new Ubuntu version, and I'd imagine this happens much more often with a rollling release OS, is that not the case?

Also, how is packaging? With Ubuntu, someone always has a PPA for everything.

Not based on arch, but in places where I've worked that have adopted continuous deployment models, there are a lot less breaking changes and those breaks are usually smaller and more manageable.

What I'd like is a stable base system with cutting edge apps, but I don't know if any distro offers this.

I've been using Arch for ~2 years now and haven't had anything break, I do a pacman -Syu (updates everything) every week or so.

Arch has AUR (http://aur.archlinux.org/) which has probably way more things than PPA have

I'm away and not on my main machine at the moment, but I've heard of problems for people who have installed Infinality fonts in the last few days.. So I'm looking forward to fixing tht when I get home.

The thing with the rolling release is, that you get a few small updates each day/week, so if something breaks, you generally know where, which makes it easier to pinpoint the problem and fix it, then after a full distro upgrade.

However, in the one year I have been using Arch as my main distro, I had only two small breakages.

The first was a recent upgrade of openvpn, which required you to move some folder from one place to the other. however this was a known breaking change, so it was announced on the Arch-announce mailing list. :)

The second happened this weekend. I had been using the infinality-font-bundle, which provides a patched fonts set that is beautifully rendered. However it seems that the developer hadn't been keeping up with the new versions of fontconfig and the had been some new options added, and after an update gdk-bixbuf2 needed one of them to function. (which resultet in missing icons) This was fixed after 5 minutes of googleing.

So not something very dramatic.

Packaging:

The package manager is pacman and the standard repos already have a lot of software. And then there is the AUR, where everybody can upload build-scripts for stuff that is not in the official repositories. Most of the time they work great, there hasn't been any software at all that I had to download from a browser.

I've been running a full system upgrade (now in https://github.com/l0b0/tilde/blob/69f7997f77f1a380be89d36e2...) just about daily on my desktop and two different laptops for years, which even Arch people seem to consider too bleeding edge. As long as that keeps working infinitely more often than an Ubunto upgrade I'll keep doing it. Nobody was more surprised than me, but rolling distros (or at least Arch) are fantastic.

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