this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2024
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Arch Stability (lemmy.world)
submitted 6 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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I have always been afraid to install Arch because they tell you it is difficult to install and unstable. I want a simple system following the KISS philosophy and install only what I need, which is little. I don't need anything from the aur repository, for now. Just a year ago I installed Arch and there it is, no problems and doing every day pacman -Syu. It has been a real discovery for me, it's the only distribution I've had this last year that hasn't crashed. I didn't expect it, but Arch has made me change my opinion and pay less attention to the opinions of "youtubers" and more to my own experience. In your experience of use, has Arch been stable in its operation?

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 6 months ago

I had so many problems and had to constantly manage other distros before Arch that it was a lot of anxiety. Everytime new release of popular linux distro I knew it was gonna break if I tried to upgrade. Almost centrainly. For fear of that I had frankstein monster distro for work using lts version full of weird ppas with a more recent kernel and some more recent software that I need because everything was always old all the time. It was horrible to maintain and keep working.

Arch is just simpler, easier and much more stable. It's just pacman -Syu all the time, have fresh software, recent kernels for the hardware improvements which is extremely important for when you buy new laptop and overall never crashes. It's just a matter of reading the news, sometimes change a config that got deprecated, or replace some software that got abandoned or now there's better alternative, etc. Sometimes things get some regressions for some weeks until things are bug reported and fixed upstream and eventually reach the system, but that's waiting some weeks or rarely months. There's always alternative to get involved in helping fix the problems with bug reports and patches if needed, but that's extremely rare and only if you really are desperate.

Anyway, those problems were much worse on other "stable" distros, because if there's something seriously wrong on the system you are only lucky to get fixes after a major release which may happen only once a year.

If the system is really critical and cannot fail me during work week I delay updating to the weekend sometimes. Even if I need to it's just a matter of evaluating the risk. You do pacman -syu and see what's comming. If it's just some apps updating then it's ok to do it. If it's core system stuff like kernel, systemd, dbus, graphics drivers, maybe I'll avoid it.

Overall it's simpler and easier because there's really only 1 or 2 things to keep in mind and all the rest just falls into place.

Using archlinux for more than 15 years on personal machines and maybe 5+ years on work computers.