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Comment by ASalazarMX | Hacker News Reader

The only thing I've seen Arch exploding in popularity has been memes. It's a fun distro for hobbyists, but too inconvenient as a daily driver.

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This is just ignorant. I've been daily driving Linux since 2005. The majority of that time has been with Arch. Despite the memes, I've found it to be MORE stable than your typical Debian derivatives. It's funny to me that it took over a decade for people to come to the same realization.

You know? I did drive Arch daily for a few years, coming from NetBSD.

Then had to use something 'officially' supported for a while, then did some Debian derivative live-distro running from USB/in RAM because of HW-problems, and settled for CachyOS when new (old) HW arrived.

I update maybe once a month at the most, more likely every two monts, because I don't give a shit. With the exception of FF, or maybe some nicer Kernel, for eBPF and scheduler-stuff.

That's reviewing changes in a few config files, after having read up about them at Archs & CachyOS sites. Maybe five minutes max, opening a few relevant tabs. (If necessary at all, which often isn't the case.)

Starting Pacman. Downloads instantly, even if several GB. Decompresses and installs stuff. Maybe two to three minutes. Reboot. 20 seconds. Plasma is back.

Clicking FF. Back with all its tabs. Maybe two to three seconds. Maybe uBO blocks a few more secs sometimes, while updating lists.

After intentionally having killed it with -9 in preparation before reboot.

Cleaning Pacman's package-cache and btrfs-snapshots because The only way is Fooorwaaard!

( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_tVzx_PIH8 Daxon ft. Numa - The Only Way (Extended Mix) [COLDHARBOUR RECORDINGS] 7mins, 7secs )

Letting btrfs rebalance in the background.

Opening other stuff, on other virtual desktops, being exactly where and how I left it, thanks to working session-mgmt.

Feels very convenient to me, in opposition to most of the other 'mainstream stuff'.

Maybe the memes have a core of truth to them? For ppl who know what they do?

Cachy, Cachy, Caramba, Yay, Yay!

Can you elaborate why you think this?

Personally I've been running Arch on my work machine for a few years now with very few issues. I'm not even very consistent with updates, and probably run them about once every 3 weeks on average. I have only had to manually intervene on a handful of occasions.

I like it a lot because everything is always up-to-date. I don't face any issues with unsupported versions for tools like I have with Debian in the past. The rolling release model also saves me the pain of doing a "hard" OS upgrade, which often come with issues.

I'm hesitant to comment further seeing I've attracted the ire of some people with my comment, but anyway. I too used Arch out of curiosity about like ten years ago, during the first "Arch, BTW" memes, and found it too unstable, but that's expected from a rolling release: update too soon or too late, and something could break. I didn't mind, as it was a hobby.

Eventually, I got more busy and had less time to tinker, so I migrated to Ubuntu LTS, which has some small warts, but has needed practically null babysitting compared to Arch. I was surprised when the Arch memes resurfaced this year, but that's the only growth I've seen. None of my Linux-savvy peers use Arch, BTW.

FWIW, the only breakage I've seen over the past 5 years is amdgpu bugging out on latest kernel releases, which is easily solved by running linux-lts.

I've had way more problems with Ubuntu trying to be convenient and bringing in lots of Windows-style automation that breaks more often than it works (and when that happens, you're really on your own since you have no idea how it's put together — just like in Windows).

Or even just bugs that were solved upstream ages ago (and have been available in every rolling-release distribution, including Debian testing/sid).

The current Arch installer suggests btrfs with snapper, so you get automatic snapshots pretty much out of the box (need to check one flag in installer), and can easily rollback if something breaks. Not something I needed, but it's there.

I can't imagine what kind of a problem I would personally have to encounter to make me utter such a sweeping generalization with this much confidence. :)

At least this guy has been using it as a daily driver (at home and at work) for at least fifteen years.

I've been using Arch as my daily driver for over fifteen years. I'm not a fanatic, it just works really well.

If Arch is too "inconvenient" as a daily driver, you might find yourself more at "home" on a Windows install instead.

Well, Arch has (historically) been rather difficult to install from scratch, and requires a lot of Linux knowledge to get up-and-running as a daily driver. If one is installing it for the first time and misses something (which audio backend?), it can be rather frustrating down the line.

There is a reason Ubuntu is usually the first distro new Linux users go to. For almost a decade now, installing a feature-complete Ubuntu setup is not much more difficult than reimaging Windows.

It this recent? I thought “I use arch btw” was more of a thing… 5 or so years ago.

I switched away from Arch (to Ubuntu) as a sort of side effect of switching computers a couple years ago (desktop->laptop, though Ubuntu would “bring the batteries along” more conveniently). Ubuntu is fine I guess, but I really miss the stability of rolling release and the user-friendliness of not having too many built in programs.

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