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Comment by WalterGR | Hacker News Reader

    I've always found Arch to be among the easiest
    distros to keep tidy.   There's people that have
    been running the same install for many years.

Is this uncommon for desktop Linux?

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Many linux distros release a new version every 6-12 months, depending on the distro. While ubuntu offers 5 years of support on long-term support (lts) releases, desktop users tend to like the latest version and reinstall or upgrade every 6 months. A lot of the time, upgrading to a new release causes packages to skip forward by several versions. This often breaks packages with kernel dependencies, like graphics drivers, so it's common to advocate a fresh install every release. If you choose to remain on a lts release, you can easily run the same install for many years-- the price you pay is not necessarily having the latest shiny packages in return for a fairly stable system.

Archlinux, as a rolling distribution, does not have new release versions. Packages upgrade continuously-- as long as you pacman -Syu somewhat frequently, you avoid skipping package versions, reducing general breakage. Of course, most frequent maintenance is the cost you pay for a smoothly running archlinux system, but it's nice not to worry about reinstalling while still having the shiniest new packages.

I've used archlinux on my personal laptop for roughly 4 years now, and I've only reinstalled once when I upgrade to an ssd about two years ago. Prior to that, I used to install the latest fedora every 6 months.

Well, if you are on a rolling distro like Gentoo or Arch you are going to run into breakage eventually because you are out on the leading edge. The tools are evolving quite steadily, so it's the price you pay to run the latest and greatest. Package dependency management is the trickiest part of package management, especially the reverse dependencies.

Just for the record: Arch does have testing and staging repositories for testing new versions of packages that may cause major breakage if they have bugs or packaging problems.

AFAIK new versions of glibc, other major libraries, systemd, Linux kernels, etc. are always kept in one of these testing repositories for a while to catch serious problems.

To help make Arch better, consider running one or more systems on [testing] (a chroot or VM will do) and reporting any problems you find.

Yes, both Arch and Gentoo are rock solid IMHO, and I enjoyed many years in both those communities. Breakage was very rare, less than one per year even, and I always ran test releases for my desktops.

It is very uncommon for Ubuntu and derivatives, so I guess the answer's yes.

Had one computer upgraded from ubuntu feisty to trusty before switching it to Arch. Only the dist-upgrade to jaunty was hairy.

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