I realized my VLC was broke some point in the week after updating Arch. I spend time troubleshooting then find a forum post with replies from an Arch moderator saying they knew it would happen and it’s my fault for not wanting to read through pages of changelogs. Another mod post says they won’t announce that on the RSS feed either. I thought I was doing good by following the RSS but I guess that’s not enough.
I’ve been happily using Arch for 5 years but after reading those posts I’ve decided to look for a different distro. Does anyone have recommendations for the closest I can get to Arch but with a different attitude around updating?
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If you don’t want to get into the rabbit hole that is NixOS (which is a distro i also like), then i would say void linux, if you still want that arch minimalism. Void is a rolling release, but it’s more like a slow roll if that makes sense and focuses on stability. It’s package manager is also rock solid, fast, and can update even when the system hasn’t been updated in ages. If you’ve done a manual install of arch before, you’ll probably breeze through the install process as well, since it is a guided ncurses installer.
I’ve been an Arch user for more than a decade and I’ll usually be first in line to defend it from dodgy claims about unreliability.
But that forum response is bizarre. Literally the last two RSS items right now are about how splitting packages will require intervention for some users (plasma and Linux firmware). VLC is an officially supported package, and surely this change would impact almost every VLC user?
New opt-depends is a nice pacman feature, but it hardly implies that things have been removed from the base package.
After having a similar feeling as yours I went for NixOS.
My thoughts then : if it breaks I can rollback, and the unstable channel is quite comparable to what arch offers.
Now : I’ve moved to stable channel, because it’s updated enough and allows me to only deal with breaking changes twice a year. Moving to NixOS was time consuming (but fun) because it required to rewrite all my dotfiles and learn something new.
What issues did you have? One of the many awesome things about NixOS is that you can write overrides for any particular package if you need an older version, or even to change some options.
https://endeavouros.com/ https://garudalinux.org/ both arch based maybe you will like the forum style better and they will probably also give you this information.
I doubt the forum style is really the issue.
EndeacourOS, one of my favourite distros, uses the same packages (the real Arch ones). So everything he says here applies.
I like Garuda community.
Based on what you describe, I would strongly recommend going with OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. It’s just as bleeding-edge as Arch, but all packages go through automatic testing to ensure they won’t break anything, and if some manual actions are required, it will offer options right before update. Moreover, snapper in enabled by default on btrfs partitions, and it makes snapshots automatically before updates, so even if something breaks somehow, reverting takes a few seconds.
One small footnote is that you’ll need to add separate VLC repo or Packman for VLC to have full functionality - proprietary codecs are one of the rare things official repos don’t feature for legal reasons.
On Arch rant: I’ve always been weirded out by this “Arch is actually stable, you just have to watch every news post for manual interventions before every update, oh, and you better update very often” attitude.
Like, no, this is not called stable or even usable for general audience. Updating your system and praying for it not to break while studying everything you need to know is antithetical to stability and makes for an awful daily driver.
you just have to watch every news post for manual interventions before every update, oh, and you better update very often
You have to watch the factory mailing list and make any manual interventions for Tumbleweed, and frankly, you should be watching the news and taking any action required no matter the os.
Well… not really. My current installation of Tumbleweed is three and a half years old, and back in 2022 the only reason I re-installed it was changing the NVMe drive. I’ve never read factory mailing list and don’t ever recall having made manual interventions. I’ve just booted it, updated (zypper ref; zypper dup), rebooted and continued working.
You can do this on Arch too and it will work great until it doesn’t. Manual interventions are rare and usually don’t affect everyone.
A decent daily driver distro for regular user should not break on blind update - at most, it should warn the user automatically before applying updates. If user is expected to check news every time they want to update their system - it is not a good fit for anyone but enthusiasts.
Where did you get the idea that Arch is a daily driver for regular user? The very distro that tells in big letters: stuff can break, you better watch out on updates? The very distro that has command-line install process with chroot-like commands as official one?
There are distros based on Arch that are proclaimed to be user friendly and ready for general desktop/gaming use. Plus plenty of people online tell others to use Arch as a daily driver.
Regardless I don’t think an update should happen if it’s going to break something, unless you manually over ride the warnings it should be showing.
Plenty of people seriously propose it as such.
It is not - at least if you’re not an enthusiast happy to tinker with your system all the time.
Yup, it really is not. Those plenty of people are doing a big disservice to others with such proposing. I am sad to hear it
Anyone who is not curious enough to type
yay -Pwbefore typingyayshould probably stick with something like Windows. And even then, you should watch out for the rare manual intervention.Edit: Tone.
I have been using Arch, EndouvourOS, and Chimera Linux now for years.
I never do this.
As I have been a Linux user since the early 90’s, I don’t think Windows is really the right fall-back for me.
I don’t think it makes sense to gatekeep Linux only to those who has time, energy, and dedication to continuously check for necessary interventions and to familiarize themselves with all the terminal utilities in the first place.
That is a sort of elitism we need to carefully avoid - one, because otherwise it would halven the desktop Linux community, and two, because there’s a huge group of people out there who need what Linux offers, but cannot dedicate themselves to it in the way enthusiasts do.
For them, there must be an option to push the button and get a smooth update, with everything resolved automatically or prompted in a user-friendly way. Arch is not that.
You feel comfy doing this - alright, no one stops you, Arch is great and has a purpose. But we should never put blame on users for not using their system The Arch Way™, because it’s too technical, too engaged, and is just a poor fit for most. People will not and should not accommodate for this just to use their system. There’s no need to.
If someone chose Arch and complains that it breaks things, it could be useful to point out Arch doesn’t have required guardrails to make it operable in a way they expect, and direct the user to other distributions that have them and potentially least painful ways to migrate.
Having tried Arch and its derivatives, and recognizing their strong points, I can absolutely tell the person needs another distribution, and that’s alright! Whatever fits anybody is up to them. And for stable rolling release experience without the need for manual checking (but also without some of the power features of Arch mainly geared toward enthusiasts) there’s OpenSUSE Tumbleweed.
Edit: Tone.
I don’t use Arch, I use Endeavour because they took Arch and made it better. As to why I used yay as my example, there are two reasons:
- It’s what I use
- It’s nice to show how easy and simple it is when it’s done properly and it normally takes 5 seconds, more when you have to do something. No wading through busy mailing lists hoping to spot an issue. I’m looking at you Debian and Tumbleweed!
I see!
I do, in fact, use Endeavour on my desktop as well, simply because I like snappiness and choice of Arch and similarly don’t wanna bother with the pure one (and also EndeavourOS forums are more friendly in my experience). I run OpenSUSE Slowroll (an experimental Tumbleweed build, same idea as Manjaro, but actually done right) on my other laptop, so can speak from the experience on both ends.
With Slowroll (and my gf’s Tumbleweed) I’ve only once faced the need for manual intervention, and it was simply to resolve a dependency change by choosing which package to leave - literally enter one number, and then it went on peacefully and correctly installing 1460 updates (yeah, they pushed a big Tumbleweed dump, 3.5 gigs total). On Arch and EndeavourOS, the last intervention was just recently, that’s the one OP talks about, and they do happen more often and are more complicated than I’d like.
I used Tumbleweed for eight or so years before switching to Endeavour and it only really bit me hard once. Update, reboot, and sudo no longer worked! If I had spent a bit more time going through the mailing list, I could have made a simple configuration change before rebooting and saved a lot of stress! It affected nearly everybody who installed that particular image.
FFS dude. It’s not lazy want updates to be as simple and pain free as possible. The entire point of these universal machines is to automate shit so we don’t have to think about it so much. We have different distros to run them because people prefer different ways of doing things. The one you pick doesn’t make you better or worse in any way. OP found out Arch is more work than they want to put up with for their daily driver and the benefits aren’t worth the cost. That’s a pretty big fucking club to be calling everyone in it lazy.
This kind of elitism is the most unnecessary, useless, vacuous, tedious horseshit and hurts Linux by pushing people away for nothing. Stop it.
taking any action required no matter the os
This is not really true for fixed release distros. I can’t remember when was the last time I had to read through the release note before Ubuntu version upgrade, or upgrading any package.
Ubuntu was by far the worst experience I have had in terms of updates destroying things. The number of times my post update reboot brought me back to a GRUB prompt, I’ll never go back.
Wayland or X11?
I used to think that, then I learnt the truth. Now-a-days, I say that you may as well use a rolling release because it’s not really any more work that a fixed release and you have up to date software.
Just to reiterate the same point - in fixed release, a package version is not released until all known issues are resolved.
At no point, it is end user responsibility to bother checking anything before installing a new version.
in fixed release, a package version is not released until all known issues are resolved.
That’s not really true. It’s more important that the issues are known. Sometimes they actually wait longer to fix issues since it would introduce changes
My bad, I meant “known major issues”. If minor issues are not fixed, they document it on release note. But, at no point any fixed release distro ever released breaking changes “knowingly”.
Oh yes, the most mythical of software. Bug free.
Bugs are of two types - known (found during testing by Distro maintainer) and unknown.
Fixed release fixes known bugs before pushing packages.
It is following the standard development life cycle.
Fixed release fixes known bugs before pushing packages.
So do rolling releases. What’s your point?
I’d recommend opensuse tumbleweed. It’s still a rolling distribution, it still has more bleeding edge software, but its package manager, zypper, does atomic updates, so if something doesn’t install right it rolls it back.
That’s the real thing for me: how painless is it to live with long term? After I’ve installed a couple of weird things, and configured some stuff custom - is this a distro that keeps rolling into the future, or is it one that makes me wish I had the time to re-install from scratch every 6 months?
I’ve run tumbleweed for quite a while with no issues. I’ve never had to reinstall it.
I also noticed vlc has broken (installed last week apparently)
Using the pacman syntax:
pacman -Q -i -d vlc
showed a conflict with the vlc-plugin (which appeared to be uninstalled already) and no vlc-plugin-#### installed.
The dependencies were fully explained in the list, including the vlc-plugins-all dependency. I’m lazy so that’s the dependency I installed on my EndeavourOS.
The same thing happened to me. The package was split into separate packages. Install the package vlc-plugins-all.
sudo pacman -S vlc-plugins-allProblem solved
I’m curious as to why the package manager doesn’t fix this automatically?
They will probably get to there. It’s just not that important for the developers rn. They are working on a pacman rust rewrite and hopefully we can see more contributions to the project. I already considered contributing but C deterred me.
Thanks for this. My VLC broke similarly, but I use it rarely enough that I hadn’t looked into it yet.
Happy to help!
I don’t want to fault people for avoiding Arch’s instability in general but this is a very minor issue.
VLC is not a system critical package. I absolutely understand the mods choice to not put it in the RSS. At most they could put a notice in the pacman logs when it updates.
I like Arch because of the AUR and Pacman. Debian and Ubuntu had me adding a bunch of PPA’s which I found way more annoying. Debian probably would be my second choice though. As for the VLC thing, it took me less than 5 minutes from noticing there was a problem, to finding the solution online. Then I was watching The Whitest Kids U’ Know in VLC.
Fedora, great blend of bleeding edge and stability. Plus Linus uses it, so what better praise could you get.
I hope we’re talking about that Linus, and not that Linus. You know, the one that works with computers, and not the other one that works with computers.
My favorite Linus moment ever.
Can definitely recommend Fedora too. Software updates are at a good pace, and the system has a lot of polish all around. For example, all you need to do for updates is to press “update” in Discover and it’ll do everything for you, applying on reboot for stability. Most things “just work”.
that’s exactly how updates should work in every desktop distro. as an option of course.
systemd made it possible to install updates on shutdown.
packagekit enabled kde software to automatically obtain and prepare the updates.
plasma does the final touch nowadays to ask you on the reboot/shutdown dialog whether you want to install them.Basically all the system is in place, with code from widely used parties. packagekit can even integrate with your filesystem to make a snapshot before install. It’s wonderful. yet, it seems as if only fedora supports this full setup right now? or is there anything else?
I’ve tried quite a few distros (openSUSE, Ubuntu, Solus, Arch, so on) and none seem to offer this feature. It’s a shame, as it’s quite useful to have since updating a live system can sometimes cause some trouble. Even just the updating from Discover can be broken on some systems (I know openSUSE at the very least acts a bit funny when it comes to PackageKit, I think Arch as well).
Fedora and Bazzite both do it.
The only issue is that you provide free testing for IBM, so it’s a no go if you try to boycott/avoid US companies. If you don’t it’s indeed a great choice.
How are you providing free testing by using something if you don’t actively file bug reports and such?
Turn off telemetry?
And don’t report bugs when you find one ?
As long as they’re not for the core Fedora projects why not? Bugs for those should be scarce and there are many other users to report them anyway.
Using and contributing to FOSS is hardly scabbing regardless. Unless you’re donating to the project I wouldn’t consider even bug reporting as directly supporting IBM. The tangible profit to them is pennies if that.
I can totally understand that. In case you still want to give it a chance, I can highly recommend EndeavorOS. It’s basically pre-styled, pure Arch. But it has a welcome dialog, where you have a warning banner at the top if you need to be careful regarding an update. This directly links you to their Gitlab and forum with the steps you’d need to take to not break anything. This saved me multiple times already and I never broke my system, despite not even reading the Arch RSS feed or changelogs.
Besides the EndeavorOS forum is waaaay friendlier compared to the Arch one.
Endeavour forums helped when I upgraded during the 24 hours when Arch removed Amdgpu firmware. It did kind of make me wonder how many issues like that were present but that I’ve just dodged by random upgrade timing.
I’ve been an Arch user for about 15 years now, and I’ve never posted to the forums. Not because I’m great at this and don’t break things. I constantly break things and need to fix them. I don’t ask questions there because before you’ll get any help you are going to get sat down and explained (in great detail sometimes) how you are the stupidest piece of shit on Earth.
I posted on the Arch forums ONCE. Didn’t get a single reply, lol. Actually had to open an issue on the upstream git repo to get any info.
I had the same problem, i did start with arch ,but man i remember doing a update after 4 days(4Gb of new updates) and my system faild to boot. From that moment i went debian route.
OpenSUSE TUMBLEWEED, always updating, but they have an OpenQA tool that checks the builds for success, and if for some reason something did go bad you just reboot and pick the previous (automatic) snapshot. Lots of GUI tools to manage the system and packages via the various Yast2-GUI apps.
Plus, their equivalent of the AUR, the open build system, can actually be used to build packages for any system.
Thanks! This wasn’t a distro I knew much about but it’s looking like one I will try out. The way they test packages is exactly the kind of choices around updates I’m looking for.
I like how many options Yast exposes. I enjoyed learning how to do most of what I need in the terminal with Arch but being able to do everything I need through GUI helps when I’m not able to recall a lot in the moment but still need to do a thing.
The repos have a lot of stuff, but if you ever get stuck for q package you can install debs with alien command, or find community repoes here https://software.opensuse.org/ They typically offer 1 click installs, or direct rpm downloads
+1 for Tumbleweed. It’s a rolling release distro without (most of) the hassle and YaST is a fantastic utility which you can use to do many things. Nice graphical stuff to help you configure things like backup. Never had any breakages so far with Tumbleweed :)
Another +1 for Tumbleweed. It’s an simple setup, easy to roll back if needed, and has solid tools like Yast that help manage most aspects of your os.
This is probably the best answer.
Arch is really for those who like to troubleshoot and actively maintain things when they break.
I’m pretty decent with linux and for the most part, I can fix arch when it breaks, but I don’t have the time for that. For that reason, I use Fedora and recommend mint.
I don’t understand this, I’ve been using arch for 3 years, I update every couple of days and I’ve never had anything break, is it an aur thing? I tend to stay away it
I’m sorry, I thought about it more and remember the reason I had trouble with arch the last time.
It was that I could not get hardware decoding to work when playing videos in Firefox.
Everything reported that it should be working, but it didn’t.
I did break my endevaourOS after I was unlucky enough to upgrade when grub got a huge non-bootable bug and probably there may have been some app bugs since which are minor tbh. Like currently I can’t run the bauh app, because it misses “bauh” in the python packages (lol).
I’ve been using arch for almost a decade, and haven’t had the system break.
I also don’t use aur helpers as I don’t like or trust them - I do tend to read PKGBUILDs before using them.
Still shocked that OP thought a new opt-depends was “lost in pages and pages of changelogs”.
Yup, OP has done his time in Arch meaning now competent, probably, time to go to Fedora and relax, close enough to the edge but not bleeding, good QA, For extra chill go atomic, check out uBlue…
The closest to Arch, a rolling cutting edge distro, is probably openSUSE Tumbleweed. openSUSE has excellent snapper integration that takes a snapshot before and after you touch zypper, so it’s easy to undo changes that might ruin your system. CachyOS also has that same great snapper integration, but that’s still Arch.
You can install snapper on normal Arch and it’ll snapshot before and after package installs
The closest to Arch, a rolling cutting edge distro, is probably
openSUSE TumbleweedVoid Linux.
