Nah, I looked at it and it doesn’t interest me. I like arch because, contrary to popular belief, it is quite stable (as in non crashing, not package versions) if you only install exactly what you need. I had way more stability issues on the more standard distros since they had so much extra stuff. Debian for servers every day though.
Nix looks interesting in theory, but is a lot of work and too opinionated for me. Far from an expert though and have nothing against those that like it or any other distro.
As someone considering getting Arch, what is unstable about the package versions? I thought the rolling release was a selling point, but does it actually make things more unstable?
“unstable” as in changing regularly. Not in any way to do with how reliable it is (as another comment mentioned, that’s a better way to differentiate).
I’ve had far fewer problems updating arch (once I had a clean system anyway) than I ever did trying to move through distribution updates on various other more “standard” ones.
It’s extremely rare. Big breaking updates are normally shown in the arch news. Usually they just require a command or two to remove a conflicting package before the update. I think there’s been a few in the last year, but on the flip side I never got a clean distro update on anything but Debian and they usually took a lot more effort to clean up.
Where it may be “unstable” is if a specific program updates (upstream) with some major change or other, whereas another distro might hold off a while.
Not the same person, but my updates take like 30s (if I don’t go looking at what changed) and happen whenever I want. We’re not talking windows updates here, just sudo pacman -Syu, seeing the list of what’s changing (etc firefox went up a version? Cool), and then saying “sure” if it looks good to me. Don’t even need to restart all the time, although I tend to do updates before turning my pc off anyway so I nearly always do.
Packages tend to use the latest stable version of their software, unless you choose a beta branch instead, so if anything I think I’ve run into less broken software than on Debian-based distros because you don’t get bugs that were fixed a week ago but haven’t made it into the official apt repository version yet. If there is a bug, you can just not upgrade that package if you know about it in advance or just downgrade it until they release a fix (I’ve never had to do this but iirc you can pin a version in pacman).
Not suggesting to jump ship if you’re happy with your current distro, but arch is a great learning experience to set up and once you have a good system running it’s absolutely rock solid. Just don’t expect to install it in fifteen minutes like other distros, if you want a good install you have to do all the reading yourself (arch wiki is priceless) to make informed choices because you’re entirely responsible for piecing together your own OS.
I want to switch to Nix… the idea of Nix is compelling. In practice every time I try and test it out I remember that I’m an idiot with a keyboard and I should stop.
I personally think Nix OS brings some amazing features, very few of which are relevant for me as a regular laptop user without my own server farm. Sure, reproducible builds and dynamic package versions are neat. But if it takes me 1000 hrs to learn how to write a functional config file that I now have to keep updated, if I have to work with some weird repository, there is no documentation and community infighting… Nah, I’ll stick to debian (BTW) for a while.
And I thought all Arch users already switched to Nix OS (BTW)
I want to (and previously tried it out for a bit) but the difficulty curve (more like a difficult brick wall) is hard to deal with
Nah, I looked at it and it doesn’t interest me. I like arch because, contrary to popular belief, it is quite stable (as in non crashing, not package versions) if you only install exactly what you need. I had way more stability issues on the more standard distros since they had so much extra stuff. Debian for servers every day though.
Nix looks interesting in theory, but is a lot of work and too opinionated for me. Far from an expert though and have nothing against those that like it or any other distro.
As someone considering getting Arch, what is unstable about the package versions? I thought the rolling release was a selling point, but does it actually make things more unstable?
“unstable” as in changing regularly. Not in any way to do with how reliable it is (as another comment mentioned, that’s a better way to differentiate).
I’ve had far fewer problems updating arch (once I had a clean system anyway) than I ever did trying to move through distribution updates on various other more “standard” ones.
So the updates don’t tend to break things? Is it just annoying to constantly update?
It’s extremely rare. Big breaking updates are normally shown in the arch news. Usually they just require a command or two to remove a conflicting package before the update. I think there’s been a few in the last year, but on the flip side I never got a clean distro update on anything but Debian and they usually took a lot more effort to clean up.
Where it may be “unstable” is if a specific program updates (upstream) with some major change or other, whereas another distro might hold off a while.
Not the same person, but my updates take like 30s (if I don’t go looking at what changed) and happen whenever I want. We’re not talking windows updates here, just
sudo pacman -Syu, seeing the list of what’s changing (etc firefox went up a version? Cool), and then saying “sure” if it looks good to me. Don’t even need to restart all the time, although I tend to do updates before turning my pc off anyway so I nearly always do.Packages tend to use the latest stable version of their software, unless you choose a beta branch instead, so if anything I think I’ve run into less broken software than on Debian-based distros because you don’t get bugs that were fixed a week ago but haven’t made it into the official apt repository version yet. If there is a bug, you can just not upgrade that package if you know about it in advance or just downgrade it until they release a fix (I’ve never had to do this but iirc you can pin a version in pacman).
Not suggesting to jump ship if you’re happy with your current distro, but arch is a great learning experience to set up and once you have a good system running it’s absolutely rock solid. Just don’t expect to install it in fifteen minutes like other distros, if you want a good install you have to do all the reading yourself (arch wiki is priceless) to make informed choices because you’re entirely responsible for piecing together your own OS.
The words stable and reliable should have formal definitions.
I want to switch to Nix… the idea of Nix is compelling. In practice every time I try and test it out I remember that I’m an idiot with a keyboard and I should stop.
I personally think Nix OS brings some amazing features, very few of which are relevant for me as a regular laptop user without my own server farm. Sure, reproducible builds and dynamic package versions are neat. But if it takes me 1000 hrs to learn how to write a functional config file that I now have to keep updated, if I have to work with some weird repository, there is no documentation and community infighting… Nah, I’ll stick to debian (BTW) for a while.
Naw, archer users either become cachy users OR nix. It’s a pipe line with a y junction.