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?
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.
I upvoted you, I am a fellow openSUSE fan and contributor.
But I need to point out that if you install VLC from a repository outside of Factory, then it’s not auto-tested.
Moreover, Packman is external to the openSUSE project altogether. If you use it, you are supposed to “just trust” that everything will be fine.
You are better off installing VLC through Flatpak.
Fair point! Honestly, that’s exactly what I ultimately went for, I just know there are people around who strongly prefer native packages.
Flatpak contains all codecs etc., and works flawlessly.
In the last three years there’s been a single time I can recall pacman telling me I needed to do a thing.
I copy pasted that warning into google it took me right to the news post. I threw in the commands that the news post said I needed to do.
Nothing broke. So this isn’t like it’s a weekly problem.
Nice to know!
The VLC thing can be solved relatively easily by installing
opiwith zypper, and then runningopi codecs, which will add all the necessary repos and install everything. After that VLC (and h.264 etc) will work like a charm.True!
Although, as another commenter pointed out, this will use Packman repo which is not official and apps there are not going through the same testing as in official repos.
So Flatpak is generally a better option. Still, if you want VLC as a native package, opi is indeed an easy and reliable way of providing it.
I’m running Arch for a very long time. I agree this is not a distro for general audience. I disagree, however, that it is not stable. When I’m doing work I don’t update my system. I enjoy my stable configuration and when I have time, I do update, I curiously watch which amazing foss software had an update. And I try them. I check my new firefox. I check gimp’s new features. etc… or if I have to do something I easily fix it, like in no time because I know my OS. Then I enjoy my stable system again.
Do you want to know what’s unstable? When I had my new AMD GPU that I built my own kernel for, because the driver wasn’t in mainline. And it randomly crashed the system. That’s unstable.
Or when I installed my 3rd DE in ubuntu and apt couldn’t deal with it, it somehow removed X.org. And I couldn’t fix it. That’s also something I don’t want. Arch updates are much better than this.
Guess we simply apply different meaning to the word “stable”. (you do you, though, and if it’s alright with your workflow, yay!)
To me, stable means reliably working without any special maintenance. Arch requires you to update once in a while (otherwise your next update might get borked), and when you update, you may have to resolve conflicts and do manual interventions.
Right now, I run OpenSUSE Slowroll (beta, not released yet) on one of my machines and EndeavourOS on the other. The former recently had to update 1460 elements, and one intervention was required - package manager asked me if I want to hold one package for a while to avoid potential dependency issues. Later, it was fixed, and otherwise it went without a hitch. This is the worst behavior I’ve seen on this distribution, and so to me it renders “acceptably unstable” for general use (although I wouldn’t give that to my grandma).
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.
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.
Well, Arch wiki explicitly tells you are expected to read the page before doing an update. Those distros which claim to be user-friendly as in “we treat you with kids gloves” definitely should take care of this, no questions here
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:
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.
I’d say one issue in 8 years is a stellar track record!
But I agree they should have warned users a better way.
Anyway, I like how btrfs is treated within Tumbleweed - snapper is fully configured and enabled by default, and you can load a snapshot and rollback into it from the boot menu - all that would take you less than a minute, and any faulty update will be gone for good. With ext4, though, you might need Timeshift. But then, all that can be done within Arch with just a few more tweaks!
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.
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.
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.
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.
So do rolling releases. What’s your point?
Are you familiar with the term “Regression testing”?