Made this on a whim, while commenting on that other recent Arch related post… the tamagochi one.
It’s been years since I actually used Arch. I hear much has changed (~ like it has an easy installer now?). Does it still itch to faceplant from time to time, needing rescue or abandon? Does Arch still faceplant itself?
How long have you managed to keep an arch going? How many times needing rescued back to being bootable in that duration?
[And would have posted this from that account, but that lemmy.wtf instance is tempramental, currently 504ing again. Glad I recently made this alt account so I can still post this and carry on with life.]
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My arch install is usually stable, the last issue I ran into was pretty recently, where it decided to build the initramfs without usb drivers, because I have a usb drive as my primary drive it then proceeded to be unable to boot due to that drive not being accessible.
Before that it was running without issues and semi-frequent updates for 1.5 years thoNo recues in two years since I booted it the first time. Shit’s smooth on different hardware without any fiddling. Windows taught me good to be a bit more cautious and curious, so with a system that doesn’t explicitly fight me or wants to do thing behind my back, I feel way safer than before. Like, I started to regularly seek new updates via yay, it’s something you don’t hear from a windows boy. Minus one year on Mint that borked itself on update a couple of times, I had no previous Linux expirience.
The first line of my pacman.log file is from 2015. I’ve not had a need to change or reinstall
Running an update in a background tab, forgetting about it, and closing my laptop lid mid-initramfs generation has caught me out a couple of times. Recoverable with a boot disk. Apart from that, Arch has been rock-solid on multiple machines for years for me. Recommend it to anyone.
I had one Raspberry Pi that needed to be hooked up to a monitor after it failed to reboot after an Arch kernel upgrade. The device name for the Ethernet card changed, and the netctl setup I was using to set up some route or other no longer worked.
In my years of using Arch that was literally the only problem.
I’ve had pain with several Debian upgrades, mostly due to exim4 becoming more strict and me actually having to learn something about my email setup. Also an issue with a Debian upgrade changing Dovecot version. Neither really avoidable by Debian, but it was not less painful somehow than Arch.
Actually this reminds me of why I moved to Arch on Raspberry Pi. I had a SD card go bad, and ext4 just happily used corrupted data. I wanted to switch to btrfs, which I could do with Debian, but any time Debian updated the kernel it wiped my setup and I had to do work to get it booting again. Arch supports btrfs out of the box and has worked smoothly and easily.
I’ve had Fedora break way more on me than Arch ever did. Arch is easy to recover from. It’s fine. And it’s always the same song and dance from people who have clearly never used it. “how do you keep it going? how do you prevent it from breaking? how hard was it to install?” none of the above. Arch isn’t some beast of a distro that you constantly need to feed to keep happy. you can literally update the thing once a month if you so choose. I’m on NixOS now and those updates are more likely to break than anything on Arch. which NixOS it’s pretty much a monthly thing where you’ll update your flake and some random dependency for Krita or like Steam just won’t work anymore therefore those programs won’t work (but that’s easy to circumvent thanks to flake locks) I never had that issue on Arch. I HAD many issues with Fedora just straight up breaking the entire system if I happened to uninstall the the wrong thing.
With the Archinstall it’s even easier than ever to install it. I think the hardest thing is if you’re installing via wifi just remembering the commands for that. now Archinstall walks you through everything, even lets you select a DE/WM and installs sane defaults with it. Arch is fine, it’s easier than ever. Dare I say it’s easier than something like Void or OpenSUSE tumbleweed (dreadful installer)
Agreed. Fedora killed itself with the very first update I did after installation. Arch never had any issues in the 4 years I’ve had it. And Archinstall has gotten really good recently.
Still running since 2020. No face plant, yet. It’s the most vanilla Arch + KDE install though so I don’t know what should be breaking.
been on arch 7y now. I only needed a rescue disk once, and that was totally my fault
I hit upon a lot of pebkac errors.
… Though, in hindsight, maybe some of the determinations of “pebkac error” may have been a bit gaslighty darvo to hide bugs anywhere in the stack including up to ux. “you didn’t read the <obscure thing>, so it’s your fault” type of events. … reminds of the post-it note that’s there to save the world, then eventually it gets ignored, then eventually falls away, gets crumpled, dumped, forgotten…
From the outside, freedom always looks like chaos.
Arch is the most stable Linux I’ve used. The only problem I’ve ever had is not using one for long enough that the keyring and mirrors were stale, and that wasn’t difficult to fix.
Me personally has never been failed by arch in a couple of years. But I’ve recently argued with someone who went “I wanna auto-updates and also no problems ever”, so guess things are wildly different for different folks
Hrmm… that gets me pondering about cron’ing up a cascade of strata fetching (and whatever configuration copying required if any), such that there’d always be fallback… then, conceivably, could have “auto-updates and no problems ever”, and not even need worry about having adequate detection of problems to know when safe to proceed, as it would all just work, with something that just works still present, as bedrock strata. … May seem a mite heavy handed, and very wasteful for hd space though. … And no guarantees all that complexity on the back end (to confer simplicity on the front end) will stay "just work"ing, and not need problems mended. [edit… oh, and almost seems inevitable that some mirror layout change would break fetches too… so I guess it’s not so near to full proof.]
To my best knowledge, it has been solved with filesystems-with-backup (like btrfs) and/or immutable distributions, but I never bothered to use them
I upgraded yesterday and now I get games lock up on my PC.
No, I don’t have an Nvidia GPU
Do you get excessive RAM usage?
I’ve had three hard system crashes because something spawned an endless amount of
winedbgandconhost.exeprocesses until the memory is full and I can’t figure out why.
I’ve been running all my servers and my work computer on Arch since around 2018, ever since Ubuntu started shoving snaps everywhere. Even the instance I’m writing this from is running Arch. Overall, everything is great. The instance has 98-99% uptime. No issues with the work PC either.
UPD: While rereading the post, I remembered that rabbitmq was recently broken in the repositories. But everything was solved with a two-minute rollback and blocking of the version in pacman.
UPD2: I build packages with my hands periodically. It’s not like I haven’t done the same thing on Ubuntu or CentOS. On Arch make PKGBUILD really more easy then spec file for CentOS or deb structure for ubuntu. On Ubuntu this is really awful.
Been on arch on multiple computers for at least 15 years. Personal and work computers. It just works. Although it’s for competent users and that might be the issue most people have with it.
I’ve destroyed whole system by accidentally deleting the var folder and still recovered it without backups.
I’ve also had a computer without updates turned off for more than a year and it also still worked just fine when updating and reading some quick things on the news page.
I’ve used many ubuntus on work laptops and other distros before arch and they just would eventually break or get into a Frankstein state that there was no way out without a full clean reinstall. Never again.
I removed windows after their EOL announcement for windows 10. I chose mint at first and then migrated to endeavor. Endeavor was as easy to install as mint and it better suits my needs.
