Remix.run Logo
bobajeff 4 days ago

I wish them the best of luck. I never used Neon since it was a rolling release distro. This one I also won't be using because it immutable and relies on Flatpaks which are very buggy. Standalone binaries or AppImages are fine with me but Flatpaks and Snaps are garbage.

jorvi 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

Not only is Arch also a rolling distro (despite them saying "not Arch!"), Arch is one of the most horrible rolling distros in terms of stability. Their general principle for package breakage is "you should have checked it on our (site) release log". They don't throw an error or a warning, if something is a breaking change and you pull it into your system, you basically get a "hehe should have checked the release log", and you're hosed.

If you want a good, actually professional rolling release, use SUSE Tumbleweed. They test packages more thoroughly, and they actually hold back breaking or buggy changes instead of the "lol read log and get fucked" policy.

unsungNovelty 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

This is a misunderstanding from users POV. Something that a lot of people have.

Arch is a DO IT YOURSELF distro. They write that thing everywhere they can. The stability of the installation is literally ON YOU! Your responsibility as a DO IT YOURSELF distro user. They didn't trick you into it or something.

Expecting Arch linux to spoon feed is like expecting IKEA to give you assembled furniture.

You should use openSUSE or other "managed" rolling release distros. Arch IS NOT A "managed" rolling release distro.

https://www.unsungnovelty.org/posts/01/2024/a-linux-distro-r...

mouse_ 3 days ago | parent [-]

Then they probably shouldn't ship it with a package manager.

yjftsjthsd-h 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

That doesn't follow; DIY is a spectrum. It can be perfectly reasonable for a DIY distro to ship a package manager, just as it can be reasonable for it to run on existing hardware instead of expecting you to break out the soldering iron.

unsungNovelty 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

My installation is now 6 years old. Never had any point release distros that long. Stability is subjective to hardware for starters. And secondly, Arch is a DIY. Do not use it if you can't get it to work for your use cases. We have 300+ distros to choose from. I am just politely telling you that your expectation of you wanting Arch to take care of your installation was never a promise from the project.

It's software. It will work the way it is written. As simple as that.

sevensor 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Anecdote: 12 years with Arch, including a laptop with 9 years on one install. Zero issues. But yeah, there’s a low volume mailing list. Get on it. Read it, it’s very short and to the point, and it’s only a few times per year.

secret-noun 3 days ago | parent [-]

Are you talking about Arch-announce? (https://lists.archlinux.org/archives/list/arch-announce@list...)

I am new to Arch and would like the notifications that you are talking about.

prirai 3 days ago | parent [-]

Yes, and also https://archlinux.org/feeds/news/

mariusor 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Very uncharitable perspective on people that do the work for free. I can understand not wanting to use a distribution where breakages can happen, but being a dick about it less so.

Lex-2008 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

To be fair to Arch, you can always subscribe to their RSS or mailing list if you want to be notified about breaking changes

TiredOfLife 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> SUSE Tumbleweed > They test packages more thoroughly, and they actually hold back breaking or buggy changes instead of the "lol read log and get fucked" policy.

I am currently on Arch specifically because Tumbleweed shipped a broken Firefox build and refused to ship the fixed version for a month.

As a workaround I uninstalled the bundled firefox and replaced it with flatpak. And on next system update the bundled Firefox was back because for some strange reason packages on suse are bundled.

thangalin 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Arch is one of the most horrible rolling distros

We've had different experiences. I've been using Arch for about 8 years and have had to scour the forums no more than thrice to find the magic incantations to fix a broken package manager. In all cases, the system was saved without a reinstall. However, it is certainly painful when pacman breaks.

    $ cat /etc/issue
    Antergos Linux \r (\l)
;-)
AuthAuth 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

Thats a very different experience from me. I've had quite a few broken packages easily over 10 in the last year and a half. It was easy enough to find them and roll them back but I dont know how people can say arch is stable. Do you update regularly?

thangalin 3 days ago | parent [-]

> Do you update regularly?

Sometimes once a month, sometimes once a week, sometimes more if there's a critical CVE.

jorvi 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I don't want to manually have to scroll through all the release logs on every single upgrade, in case their might be a landmine in there this time. Nor does any rational person that values their time or their system stability.

It is a million times more sane to have a package manager throw a warning or an error when a breaking change is about to be applied, rather than just YOLO the breaking change and pray people read the release log.

It is one of the most stupid policies ever, and the main reason why I will steer everyone away from Arch forever. Once bitten, twice shy.

sltkr 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

I've been using Arch Linux for over a decade and have literally never once consulted release logs, and never got into any serious trouble.

I do subscribe to the arch-announce mailing list which warns of breaking changes, but that receives around 10 messages per year, and the vast majority aren't actually all that important.

I've also gone multiple months between updates and didn't have any problems there either.

The idea that Arch Linux breaks all the time is just complete nonsense.

imp0cat 4 days ago | parent [-]

His point is that Arch will break the system without any warning during package upgrade.

s_ting765 3 days ago | parent [-]

A warning will dissuade users from upgrading their system instead of doing the manual intervention.

yjftsjthsd-h 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

By way of example, Gentoo's `eselect news` is pretty good https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Eselect#News

snvzz 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Actual Arch on two machines, no issues. The older one I've been using for 15 years now.

mynegation 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

That’s three times too many. I have been running an Ubuntu server at home for 10 years and went through probably 4 LTS releases and the number of times apt flaked out on me - exactly zero.

TheAceOfHearts 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

I'm running Ubuntu 24.10 and they broke the upgrade to 25.04 if you're using ZFS on the boot drive. Their solution was to prevent the upgrade from running, and basically leave behind anyone stuck on 24.10 to figure it out for themselves.

skeledrew 4 days ago | parent [-]

TBF, they can't be expected to support every potential configuration users may think of.

TheAceOfHearts 4 days ago | parent [-]

If they weren't going to support the feature why did they provide it as an option on the installer without any warnings or disclaimers? This isn't some bespoke feature that I hacked together, it's part of the official installer. If I had known it wasn't fully supported then I wouldn't have used it.

OJFord 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

So not rolling? I too have never had to open Windows Task Manager on macOS.

glitchc 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

YMMV. Manjaro's broken on me multiple times. I leave a machine alone for two years and it's next upgrade is almost guaranteed to break something.

LambdaComplex 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

Manjaro is not Arch, and its maintainers have repeatedly shown that they aren't very good at maintaining a distro: https://github.com/arindas/manjarno

glitchc 3 days ago | parent [-]

This is revisionist at best. Manjaro has always been portrayed as Arch with a GUI by both sets of maintainers.

LambdaComplex 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Maybe by Manjaro's maintainers, but certainly not by Arch's. I've been using Arch for a little over a decade. The position that I've always seen in the official IRC channel is that forks such as Manjaro are explicitly not Arch.

Here's one of the oldest versions of the "Arch-based distributions" page on the wiki. It has a notice at the top that says that forks are not supported by the community or developers: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php?title=Arch-based_distri...

3 days ago | parent | prev [-]
[deleted]
whatevaa 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Two years with no uptes on rolling release is not a good idea. Two years with no updates for anything not connected to the internet is not a good idea.

glitchc 3 days ago | parent [-]

I didn't say anything about the machine being on the internet persistently. It's a laptop sitting in storage mostly. The updates are for when it comes out of hiding.

bmicraft 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Arch doesn't support more than 6(?) months between upgrades, maybe Manjaro is the same.

glitchc 3 days ago | parent [-]

I guess my only option is to switch to a more stable distro such as Debian or SUSE. Manjaro has always been touted as a very light distro, good for old machines, but its instability makes it a no-go.

bmicraft 3 days ago | parent [-]

The choice of distro makes almost no difference w.r.t. performance on old hardware, as long as it's still supported.

The only (real but small) difference is between desktop environments and their choice of default apps (eg. file manager).

globular-toast 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Gentoo is very stable in my experience and you get to choose exactly which packages you want to be unstable vs stable (the default).

Perz1val 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You know you don't have to update it daily?

temp0826 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I swore off arch when an update surprised me by switching to systemd (years ago obviously) and trashing my system in the process

pkulak 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Why is a comment trashing a different project, in the most lazy way possible, at the top of the page?

EDIT: wow, all the comments are like that. I guess something has to come first.

ofalkaed 4 days ago | parent [-]

There has been an increasing trend in the use of up votes as likes instead of user moderation which results in worthwhile discussion sinking to the bottom and stuff like this being at the top and setting the general tone of the discussion.

spooneybarger 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I never got neon to work in a way that wasn't unpleasant.

pharrington 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

Neon is explicitly a bleeding edge KDE testbed (but I'll agree that their website undersells this fact)

mcosta 3 days ago | parent [-]

Neon has 2 flavors, developer and user. The user one is stable.

mcosta 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I love neon, so it is a tie.

flanked-evergl 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Flatpak is the new systemd I guess.