Hacker News Reader

Comment by qwerty456127 | Hacker News Reader

The problem with Arch is not with the installer. Installing it actually is pretty straightforward thanks to their Wiki (although it may seem intimidating to those who never actually tried reading it). The problem (also a key feature) is they apparently ship totally untested packages immediately as upstream releases (so updates often break something) while Manjaro does some reasonable testing and fitting (so updates almost never break anything) while still managing to ship reasonably fresh. Most of the the other distros ship ancient versions of everything. So to me Manjaro feels the golden point between radically fresh (Arch) and obsolete (others).

View on HN

Funny thing I've found arch the rolling distro with the least breakages. I've tried (and liked) tumbleweed, sidux and others, but ended up with arch because it was just very stable.

This probably is true as long as you don't compare to Manjaro which does additional testing and fitting. I once (this was long ago, but after I have had used Arch already) tried the latest unstable Debian and found it so broken I just couldn't use it at all, let alone rely on it.

This isn't really true last I checked. They merely make their testing repo, what's effectively in line with normal arch release, available for 2 weeks then rely on someone telling them something is wrong in their forum. They don't do much, if any, testing themselves.

> updates often break something

Approx how many times have you observed this in practice over, say, the past 2~5 years?

I used Arch in 2010-2012 (when I was very new to Linux yet had no problem installing Arch thanks to the Wiki) and something broke a number of times (maybe like 3 times a year). It also felt surprisingly slower than Ubuntu despite using XFCE vs Gnome2.

I then switched to Ubuntu and then to Manjaro and had only one break (it just wouldn't boot, but I easily found instructions on how to fix that) in many years straight.

I don't say Arch is bad but to me it seems like it is rather far from perfect while Manjaro is the closest to perfect I have ever seen.

Needless to say I appreciate Arch exists and am very grateful for the amazing job they do. Obviously no Manjaro would exist without Arch in the first place. Arch Wiki deserves a separate mention as it is of great quality and often helps a lot no matter what actual distro are you tweaking (it helped me with Ubuntu).

Arch has matured since 2012. I think you'd have a very different experience today.

I wanted to say this same sentence. I'm on arch since 2010 and it's 2023 now- it's really not the same arch as back then (and I enjoyed 2010 arch too)

>Installing [Arch] [...] may seem intimidating to those who never actually tried reading [the Arch Wiki]

I found reading the installation guide intimidating!

It really isn't hard for technical folks. I've done it maybe 4 times now (I am a chronic distrohopper). The guide is long because it covers a bunch of cases. By the 4th time round I was basically using the guide to remind myself how to use some commands that are rarely used outside of an installation (fdisk gets me every time).

It is worth doing at least once, it teaches you a lot about Linux.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com