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Comment by bjoli | Hacker News Reader

I have been happily running tumbleweed for a long time, whereas my arch Linux for arm has required hand on healing many times.

Arch really scared me away from running rolling release distros. Services suddenly changing configuration formats leading to failure to start at boot. Breaking package changes that was my fault since I didn't keep up with the forums.

I did have one breaking change with tumbleweed, but then it warmed me and wouldn't let me proceed with the update until I had acknowledged that I would have to fix my openvpn (I think it was) config.

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> Breaking package changes that was my fault since I didn't keep up with the forums.

That's explicitly part of the contract between users and maintainers you accept when running Arch and it has nothing to do with it being a rolling release. Many other rolling releases like Debian or OpenSUSE set completely different expectations to their users.

Yes of course. But that is not the picture painted by many online. How often haven't you read "Arch has been rock solid"?

This is not what the arch homepage says, which explicitly says that it is not the job of the distro to ensure compatibility between updates.

In my experience Arch has been pretty solid indeed (not as solid as, say, Debian sid, but close enough), but that assumes that you do read the news pages before upgrading and that you know how to deal with AUR well. Otherwise it's not Arch's fault when it breaks :P

Indeed. "You should just run Arch" is giving "just rewrite everything in Rust" a run for it's money, especially since the "Mill will solve all of those pesky CS problems" folks have gone quiet.

Just a for-the-record counterpoint:

I have a laptop that is running an Arch install that was first installed in 2011. It runs great. It has, to my memory, twice required manual intervention. (to be fair, it once required manual intervention when I moved the hard drive into an entirely new chassis, and once again when I migrated it from 32bit to 64bit, so 4 times total.)

And I have several other arch boxes that are less old but have had no trouble.

In fact, the distro that's given me the most trouble has been Fedora, but at least when its upgrades fail they now just roll back and make you try again...

Arch really wants you to keep up to date. Run those - Syu's. Often. Never more than a week. If you let it sit for months and months that's when things can get hairy.

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