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Comment by bbv-if | Hacker News Reader

And he didn't mention that in Arch a routine upgrade can break everything which rather doesn't happen in the release-based distros. It has happened to me more that once over the last 8 years. I still use it nevertheless, but it's definitely not for everyone.

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This Never happened to me in 5 years of arch. I always considered this a hoax. How did Arch break?

To name a few: when systemd was introduced; when there were changes made to the file structure (moving everything to /usr); when kde4 was replaced with kde5. And there were more issues, I just don't remember all of them. Reading the news before the update could have helped sometimes but I don't do that every time I execute `pacman -Syu` for various reasons; and sometimes problems are unexpected or just bugs fixed on the next update.

I will second this, I faced these exact same issues, for the same reasons.

If you don't subscribe to the Arch news feed, you're taking a chance on every upgrade, that your system will not boot correctly.

Yeah but that's the point of Arch: teaching new blood to RTFM when it's patchday.

You can trivially fubar an arch install by updating your base install+user additions if you're not in the loop with the releases of whatever you installed.

That also makes it a bad distro to choose unless you want to be a hardcore sysadmin and micromanage your personal system.

That's generally what distro maintainers are supposed to minimize for the end users.

I see people recommending Arch for newbies, who maybe just want to dip their toes. They're figuratively thrown into the deep end, and I just don't think that's a particularly good idea for most people.

Yeah if you're looking for easy and risk free, yiu should stay with windows or mac. OTOH, if you want linux to stop being a black box, install arch. Just don't expect it to be your stable day to day workhorse with no effort.

I used Arch for ~9 years. I like it, but it absolutely isn't a good beginner distro, nor a good distro for people who just want to get on with life.

Mint (or Ubuntu) is a perfectly good alternative to Windows or Mac OS for an easy and "risk free" experience. Most people are perfectly satisfied with a black box OS.

Not that Mint has to be a black box at all. There's plenty of room for hacking around, if you're into that.

For me, a simple alert "Hey, this update can break things, do you know what you're doing?" in case of a risky update would be enough.

Which is what Mint does by default. It shows the update, but doesn't select it automatically.

I used Arch Linux around 4 years back. I did a routine upgrade and it broke my system.

What is this rolling release fiasco? Even Ubuntu, which I use now has a "release" (technically an pt-get upgrade), almost every other day. But I've never had it break my system. If you keep your Ubuntu updated a dist-upgrade works just fine.

I might try Arch again, but for now I'm sticking to Ubuntu.

No judgement, I've been in the same place.

What you describe sounds like the consequence of installing a lot of packages. Arch "prefers" when you strip it down to what you need, if only because that way you don't need to worry about too many version mismatches.

So if you actually try to use the system for more than a handful of things, it tends to break? That's not very reassuring.

You put it well in another thread with "it absolutely isn't [...] a good distro for people who just want to get on with life."

If you're looking for your computer to Just Work(tm) look elsewhere. However I stand by my comment about it being an outstanding learning tool for the curious & future sysadmins.

In years I might have had 3 breakage, it didn't feel like a specific issue because for instance ubuntu upgrade install didn't work well enough either.

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