Comment by nextlevelwizard | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nextlevelwizard | Hacker News Reader

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nextlevelwizard

>Your anecdotal failures

First of all how are these MY failures and not failures of the Arch ecosystem? Running `pacman -Syu` on any given Friday should NOT leave you with a machine that no longer boots. Installing a very stable software such as fucking python3 shouldn't break litereally everything else that is linked to same lib. Everything is anecdotal, but trying to use that to dimiss literally OS breaking incidents feels silly.

If I type in `apt update && apt update -y` I can be sure that my computer will be usable after a reboot. I've once ran into an issue where the next kernel update didn't boot, so Ubuntu booted me back into the previous version and told me the issue. This is exactly the kind of thing I want my OS to protect me from. I am not a kernel developer and don't have sufficient knowledge or interest to get into that. I also don't want to be afraid to update my software.

I have nothing against Arch or its users, but I wouldn't recommend it to anyone who actually needs to use their computer and isn't willing to spend a day every now and then fixing their OS.

Just as a side note on this rant: My experience is by no means unique. The whole reason I even gave Arch a second try (after the python3 library ordeal) was that my colleagues are using Arch as their daily driver, but even with them every now and then I hear how they have to fiddle with their packages to make things work/compile or that they updated something and something broke (often it is audio).

> Running `pacman -Syu` on any given Friday should NOT leave you with a machine that no longer boots

Says who? That's pretty much not what Arch tries to guarantee at all. You're at the very least supposed to read the announcements and you should upgrade often, as otherwise the end result is undefined. Some distros like Debian support partial updates, Arch very explicitly does not.

If you use Arch the way it's intended to be used, you're not going to have to spend a day every now and then to fix your OS, but if you don't, you will. I use it as my work system for years and every time I broke it was my own fault.

And if you don't want to use it the way it's intended, then just use another OS that better matches your expectations. I don't use Arch on my server after all.

Sorry what? So you have to go read a news site if it is OK to update your packages? What the hell is the point of having "rolling distro with all the new shit" if you have to be constantly afraid if you can update your packages or not?

>you should upgrade often

But you litereally started by saying that upgrading any given Friday is not quranteed to leave you with working OS

> So you have to go read a news site if it is OK to update your packages?

Not "if it's ok to update", but "whether there's manual intervention required". See https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/General_recommendations#Pac.... Not reading that before upgrade seems to be the main reason for post-upgrade failures.

> But you litereally started by saying that upgrading any given Friday

The point was that you should rather upgrade "every Friday" than "any given Friday".

This is literally intended. Arch is a rolling release distribution, and more than that, it's a distribution which sticks very closely to upstream and tries to have a single correct way to do things. To have all those things at once, you have to have competent users who are willing and able to make changes to their system to keep up with the distribution.

To give a practical example. In 2013 Arch Linux merged all binaries into /usr/bin. This architectural improvement was obviously a major change, and the way Arch is designed as a rolling distro meant that you couldn't leave users behind on the old way of doing things. After the change, everyone needed to be using the merged /usr/bin.

This is a designed lack of backwards compatibility that means you're guaranteed to be using the latest system architecture at all times, reducing the maintenance burden for the maintainers and making sure everything just works most of the time. But it also means that you have to be willing to do system maintenance to get your local system in line with what the Arch devs use. In the case of the /usr/bin merge, manual steps to perform the upgrade were required. [1] They weren't hard, but Arch requires this kind of oversight as part of its design.

If you're not willing to perform that kind of maintenance, then Do Not Use Arch! It's designed for people who are - although in practice this kind of intervention is required only about once a year.

[1]https://archlinux.org/news/binaries-move-to-usrbin-requiring...

> If I type in `apt update && apt update -y` I can be sure that my computer will be usable after a reboot

As from my other replies, that's awesome - you're looking for a usage paradigm that is not what Arch is for; it requires attention and regular maintenance, and "keeping up" on a regular basis. You've hit the nail on the head with the followup sentence, you have to be willing to spend a day every now and then keeping up.

Arch is not for people who want to ignore their system and hope it all just keeps working, then update 700 packages all at once and have it come crashing down. There is an agreement (the social kind, not the legal kind) you enter into when using Arch that you actually engage with it on a regular basis because you like doing that and like to tinker. It's build for experienced Linux techs who like to engage on a regular basis with the plumbing.

I like how you Arch guys seem to paint rest of us as some old folks who upate once a year our packages. I was literally running pacman -Suy weekly, but none of that should matter. It is the distribution maintainers and the package managers literal job to keep the OS running and runnable. It shouldn't matter how often I update my packages they should be migrated from one version to the next like any sane package manager does.

>It's build for experienced Linux techs who like to engage on a regular basis with the plumbing.

Yeah, sure. This is where the "Linux is only free if your time has no value" saying comes from. I think I've said this in all comments in the thread, but if it isn't abundantly clear anyone is free to use any distro they want or any OS for that matter (I use all major 3 almost daily), but I would not recommend anyone to use Arch unless they are willing to spend a lot of time fiddling with their machine and I wouldn't install it on anything that I might have to use at a moments notice since as I've been told part of Arch is that updating your packages just breaks your OS.

> I would not recommend anyone to use Arch unless they are willing to spend a lot of time fiddling with their machine and I wouldn't install it on anything that I might have to use at a moments notice since as I've been told part of Arch is that updating your packages just breaks your OS.

Yes, exactly right. As an Arch user, I endorse this.

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