• Blaad
    1·
    1 hour ago

    Since architectural is a thing, arch really isn’t that hard to install or use, but these days I favor nixos for the reproducibility.

  • atopi@piefed.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    6·
    15 hours ago

    I have never touched arch because i heard it was hard and i just wanted a distro that works without too much effort put in

    I use nixos btw

  • Mac@mander.xyzEnglish
    6·
    16 hours ago

    Project car vs daily driver.
    Just different purposes and people have different tolerances for tinkering.

    Also, when you want the car to behave in a specific way, you’re willing to tune it to do so.

  • 1984@lemmy.today
    43·
    11 hours ago

    Arch is boring. It just works, has all the latest software, runs all the games, has the latest kernel…

    My latest install is from 2019 I think…its exactly as fast as when I installed it, despite new versions of massive desktop environments like plasma and cosmic in this time, and hundred of new kernels and drivers.

    Where is the excitement… Arch is like a rock in the sea. It doesnt change, it just is perfect the way it is.

    :)

    • x0x7@lemmy.world
      2·
      10 hours ago

      Arch is one of the most vanilla of Linuxes. Everyone wanted to run an opinionated distro. But what we needed was the opinions of developers and fewer opinions from people who think creating a distro is a sensible way to distribute art.

      Arch - every package is just the software the original developer shipped, kept up to date.

      “I have art work I want to share. I know. I’ll make myself responsible for the reliability of a thousand people’s operating systems. I hope my cooky ideas never come into conflict with that.” <- Not who you want indirectly changing files on your system when you use the package manager.

  • Jo Miran@lemmy.ml
    1122·
    1 day ago

    I’ve been working on Linux since '96. As time goes by I keep drifting more and more towards boring and stable distributions. I just don’t want to be bothered with a system that needs me to groom it constantly.

    • Feyd@programming.dev
      732·
      1 day ago

      I use arch because it is the boring but stable system. Rolling release means you just keep updating it and it works forever rather than having to do big bang upgrades between LTS versions that always break something

      • devfuuu@lemmy.world
        2·
        4 hours ago

        I have installations reaching 10 years. It just works when you don’t have to worry about “upgrades”. Best choice of my life.

      • urandom@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        6 hours ago

        Also, pkgbuildis by far the simplest package build system I’ve ever encountered. That’s why aur is so prolific, though troublesome

      • OwOarchist@pawb.socialEnglish
        232·
        22 hours ago

        Nah. It just means that the breaking updates could surprise you at any time.

        With a LTS version upgrade, I can plan for the potentially breaking updates. I can set aside time when my schedule is free to do the big update and work through any potential bullshit. It won’t interrupt my work.

        But in a rolling release, you’re still going to get that same breaking update … but with no warning this time. It might come at a crucial time when you’re trying to get other work done, forcing you to stop your more important work and fix your computer first.

        And that’s not even counting the number of breaking updates. A relatively ‘bleeding edge’ rolling release distro like Arch is going to include much newer software versions that haven’t gone through as much real-world testing and bug reporting as the stale old packages in a LTS release. The price you pay for more updated software is that it’s less thoroughly tested software and more likely to include undiscovered, unfixed bugs.

        By the time the same package update finally makes it to some stable LTS distro, more of the bugs have been discovered, reported, and hopefully fixed … before you ever even see it.

        (Not to say that nobody should run cutting-edge rolling release distros. I’m glad you guys are out there. You’re the ones reporting those bugs that end up getting fixed before it makes it into the LTS version. If everybody was running LTS stuff, it would lose that advantage because nobody would be testing things before they make it to the LTS.)

        Overall, I think cutting-edge rolling release is fine for a computer that doesn’t really matter, like a gaming PC. (And you’ll probably get a gaming performance boost from having the latest and greatest versions of things.)

        But for an essential computer that you need for doing important things, a LTS stable release is the way to go 100%.

        • somenonewho@feddit.org
          4·
          16 hours ago

          The thing is … I kind of agree with both takes.

          I have been using Arch since ~2013 back when I still had time to mess around with it and learn the ins and outs, these days I work as a sysadmin so I want my systems at home to mostly “just work”, however Arch also is that Distro for me for the most part. Most of the times I actually encountered breaking changes it was because of my process not breeing quite refined. For example I didn’t regularly update my config files, so when there were changes in the PAM config syntax my login was borked, so now I check for .pacnew files on every update and sometimes I have to move over some changes. I also don’t update as often but just when I have a few minutes while I’m using my machines.

          So in short I consider Arch to be a valid option for a Stable Desktop OS (if you take some precautions and don’t mess with it too much).

          However for servers etc. I do usually go with Debian because the packages are usually simply a bit more matured and I do major version updates as you described (explicitly setting aside some time to possibly fix arising issues).

        • Feyd@programming.dev
          9·
          21 hours ago

          You can write a whole essay of theory, but my experience is running several arch devices for years and years with no problems and having ubuntu distro upgrades break so badly I just reinstall completely every single time.

          Another hiccup is that LTS are not actually running stable packages. They are running Frankenstein versions of packages with backports that are not supported by the project maintainers, because the software has to be maintained for security if nothing else.

          • Miaou@jlai.lu
            1·
            19 hours ago

            Ubuntu doesn’t even let you upgrade LTS version on release, they take 3 months to fix upgrade bugs.

            My experience is the same as yours. Plus the problem of looking for a fix to some issue, only to find out upstream fixed this 5 years ago

        • treadful@lemmy.zipEnglish
          2·
          21 hours ago

          It just means that the breaking updates could surprise you at any time.

          I keep hearing this but in my roughly 20 years of running Arch that’s happened no more than a handful of times. And usually because I missed an announcement. I don’t know what y’all are doing to your systems but Arch has been incredibly solid for me.

          And complete distro version upgrades like with CentOS/Debian have always been such a fucking massive hassle. And CentOS often deprecates hardware shit I need which of course I never find out until after I run the update and the shit won’t ever boot again.

      • festnt@sh.itjust.works
        27·
        1 day ago

        this

        you can just choose to use software that isn’t dev/nightly versions, and you’re fine

        unless you want to see stuff break… then you install all of the nightly versions and have stuff break sometimes!

    • pmk@piefed.caEnglish
      17·
      1 day ago

      Polishing dotfiles is a valid hobby, and can be fun now and then, but when I need to do actual work I reach for my debian laptop.

    • grue@lemmy.world
      111·
      1 day ago

      Yep.

      In 2002, I used Gentoo.

      In 2026, I use Kubuntu.

      (I should probably switch since Canonical’s policies are increasingly bothering me, but meh, I can’t be bothered to reinstall more than once a decade.)

      • TheHound@lemmy.world
        3·
        17 hours ago

        24.04 will be my last ubuntu lts. 26 doubling down on snap for system level packages, yea no that’s enough of that. I too was a gentoo lunatic in the early 2000s and will likely head back in that direction.

        • grue@lemmy.world
          1·
          15 hours ago

          Ah, thanks for the warning. My install has been badgering me to upgrade because my (non-LTS) version just stopped getting security updates. I ought to get off my ass and switch distros.

      • OwOarchist@pawb.socialEnglish
        3·
        22 hours ago

        I should probably switch since Canonical’s policies are increasingly bothering me, but meh, I can’t be bothered to reinstall more than once a decade.

        Just like me, for real!

      • bus_factor@lemmy.world
        3·
        1 day ago

        I’ve used Debian since 2001 or so. I reinstall whenever I have a new computer, unless I’m decommissioning another computer at the same time.

        • Caedarai@reddthat.com
          2·
          19 hours ago

          Debian since the year after you, but I reinstall with every new version. Mostly just cuz it’s a great excuse to ‘start fresh’ with just the applications I want and to get the ‘new computer experience’. Totally unnecessary, but nice anyways.

    • flandish@lemmy.world
      31·
      1 day ago

      imho that’s kinda why i went ios for my phone. i dev in linux, deal with robotics, hardware, signals, “security” and whatnot to get paid. i just want something that works.

      • kuerbiskernoel@feddit.org
        2·
        1 day ago

        Nowadays you dont even have to use iOS/android to get something that just works, GrapheneOS for example also is fully there already (apart from NFC payment but that’s really the only thing)

        • Crozekiel@lemmy.zipEnglish
          3·
          22 hours ago

          Eh. You already can’t pair it with your Volkswagen (or was it Volvo? one of those car brands), a lot of Banks won’t fuck with it and just won’t let you use their app or website, and Google is actively trying to kill it off (whether they’ve said it out loud yet or not, it’s happening). I’ll be interested to see where it is in the next few years, hope it manages to keep going and all, but I am much more personally invested in a properly working Linux mobile option that works on a modern phone with all of the modern amenities.

        • Feyd@programming.dev
          3·
          24 hours ago

          GrapheneOS for example also is fully there already

          There are some caveats to that. You do have to jump through some hoops to for instance get RCS working. I think it is worth it to feel like I’m actually in control of my device, and I would even recommend it to friends and family that I’m willing to play tech support for, but I can’t truthfully say I would recommend it to an arbitrary non technical person

          • will@piefed.zipEnglish
            3·
            23 hours ago

            You used to have to jump through hoops for RCS, now it’s a toggle, they’ve come a long way with that

            • Feyd@programming.dev
              2·
              22 hours ago

              That is true. The fact you have to even do that is a lot for some people though. There are other things as well such as wifi calling and visual voicemail not working out of the box for all carriers.

    • rbos@lemmy.caEnglish
      1·
      1 day ago

      Same. I settled on Debian around 1999 and stayed there. A brief side trip to the ope source Solaris.

  • Lovable Sidekick@lemmy.worldEnglish
    15·
    21 hours ago

    Went to a family-run Indian place in Cornwall looking for vindaloo, but the guy talked me down to a madras. Good thing cuz it was right on the edge of my tolerance level. I couldn’t have eaten their vindaloo.

    • [object Object]@lemmy.ca
      22·
      23 hours ago

      Unironically, I don’t get how anyone lives with something like Arch.

      Do you guys have to reinstall the OS every few months? How do you deal with the accumulation of crap and weird settings over years?

      I tried Fedora and I found even that was annoying because you’ve got 50 different serviced and servicectl things to manage, which all have their own implicitly managed state, and some require committing changes through custom CLIs to update them (I have more than once forgot to push my boot settings — whatever that’s called, I’m a noob and was following guides).

      I don’t think I can go back from NixOS and immutable distros. I really like that it’s hard to forget my firewall has an open port for service xyz, because the port is defined in a nix file with the service configuration.

      I’m not saying the arch way or standard Linux way is wrong, not at all. It’s just incredibly not something I enjoy and it makes me feel not confident about the state of my computer.

      • fushuan@piefed.blahaj.zoneEnglish
        41·
        19 hours ago

        Do you guys have to reinstall the OS every few months? How do you deal with the accumulation of crap and weird settings over years?

        ???

        I switch on the computer after work, play some games, browse some stuff, maybe configure some program or whatever. Switch computer off and sleep.

        Maybe once every month or so I run the update and it just works.

        What breaking and crap accumulation fantasy do you live in? Do you not throw the trash at home or something? Just use your daily driver as you would use something normal and no weird stuff happens.

        Oh, oooooh, you use Nix. You are the kind of person that can’t live with their computer without tweaking it nonstop. It’s people like you that break non immutable systems lmao.

      • Sanctus@anarchist.nexusEnglish
        71·
        23 hours ago

        Did this comment come from 2002? Everything literally just works. My arch box feels as stable as my Debian servers. Computers are fun again. I can’t choose my player color on Spellmasons, thats the one issue I have run into.

        • tenekev@lemmy.world
          13·
          18 hours ago

          Same. Debian servers, CachyOS work laptop. Stuff just works and whatever doesn’t work, i can ask gemini to find, summarise and help solve in minutes.