I’m using Arch Linux for 2 years. I subscribed to Arch’s mailing lists and I check my mails daily. I use flatpak instead of AUR.
I installed my system with archinstall and I update whenever I want. I didn’t have any issues yet and it’s the only distro that just works for me.
What about your experience? Any “breakage”?
I used Arch for 4-5 years, and I’d say that Arch itself generally doesn’t break (shout out to when they bricked everyone’s GRUB and then took days to make a news post about it.), but user apps (from the normal repos) frequently had minor bugs because they’re bleeding edge. There’s a bit of a difference here, and I’d say it’s important.
Ultimately, when you use Arch Linux you’re knowingly using bleeding edge software and that will always have the potential for bugs. Arch Linux manages this as best as it can, and it does it just about perfectly. If you want slightly more stability you probably want something closer to OpenSUSE Tumbleweed’s approach, with heavy automated testing.
Nowadays with Flatpaks and other non-root package managers (Homebrew, Cargo, Nix, Distrobox, and even bin), I’d say the average user shouldn’t really be using bleeding edge distros anymore. I switched to Debian Stable + Flatpaks/etc and it’s basically the same experience as Arch Linux to me. The problem with Arch Linux is that you have to run your whole system as bleeding edge, and I don’t think that’s very sane for a lot of usecases.
Thanks for the Tumbleweed shout out. I’m always curious about Arch people’s opinion of Tumbleweed. Arch seems to cast a large shadow over it. But man do I swear by Tumbleweed. There is nothing in Tumbleweed that you can’t do in Arch, but I guess my main question is why would you want to? TW has all the benefits of Arch without the problems. Rather than updating each package individually, TW bundles all the new versions into a snapshot and tests that snapshot to ensure everything works within it. This way no random rogue update conflicts with anything else within that specific snapshot. As a user, when you update you just move from snapshot to snapshot. With Arch you can set up snapper rollback, but you better make sure you’ve partitioned everything correctly or you need to reinstall, TW will just enable rollback by default.
Some people can’t seem to live without AUR, but I feel like distrobox is a much safer way to install software that isn’t available on your distro. If you need something that only comes as a .deb, you can do something like:
distrobox create --image unbuntu:\
And now you have a super minimal version of Ubuntu you can run your software inside of using the official packages instead of something someone else has hacked together/compiled. It also makes setting up custom dev environments trivial without littering your install with dependencies. I get the allure of AUR but I’d rather use distrobox or, if I must, flatpak.
The main defense I see of Arch is "it’s not Arch’s fault, I did ". I guess with TW I don’t ever really worry about \ because the OS really just sort of takes care of itself. And even if I did do a stupid \ rollback is there to reverse my boneheaded idea instantly. I say all this after having experimented with Arch for a little bit now. It felt like taking a vacation: everything was new and different and you start thinking about how cool it would be to live here, but then you start to notice the little things, and after a while you just want to go home and sleep in your own bed.
I have nothing against Arch but the constant defense of “Arch broke, but it’s not Arch’s fault” seems like a meme. Just read this comment section and take a shot for every person who says it. Meanwhile I’m over here on TW running the same versions of everything as Arch has and all I ever did was “zypper dup” and maybe 1-2 times a year “snapper rollback”. I don’t know if I sound defensive, maybe I do, but I feel like Tumbleweed is criminally underrated and a large portion of people on Arch would probably be better served by something like Tumbleweed judging by the forums/Reddit.
I agree with all this. I still think “Arch broke, but it’s not Arch’s fault” is valid in a lot of cases because when you install Arch Linux you implicitly agree to be on the bleeding-edge, and Arch Linux delivers that to you as requested. Arch is working as Arch is expected to work, and you probably shouldn’t be using Arch Linux if you don’t have a usecase that necessitates this downside/risk. If Arch wants to make things more stable it would end up looking like Tumbleweed. If Arch wants to make things even more stable it would end up looking like Debian. Arch wants to be at the level of bleeding-edge that it is, and this is roughly what it looks like when you choose that.
My only complaint with Tumbleweed is that the software repository is smaller compared to Arch and Debian. Other than that I think it’s a top-tier distro, and I especially like how much effort they put into making sure everything works properly via their OBS testing suites. I agree that using distrobox or other methods is much safer than the AUR, and ideally the AUR shouldn’t really even be used at all. Like I said before I strongly believe that with the options we have today, true bleeding-edge distros like Arch Linux have become a small niche, as picking and choosing a couple dozen packages to be on the cutting/bleeding-edge is a lot more stable than running everything fully bloody.
If Arch wants to make things more stable it would end up looking like Tumbleweed. If Arch wants to make things even more stable it would end up looking like Debian. Arch wants to be at the level of bleeding-edge that it is, and this is roughly what it looks like when you choose that.
That’s actually a fair point and reading this does change my perspective a little. Tumbleweed gets me 95% to where Arch is, but a lot can go wrong in that last 5%. People who chose that understand that. I think we’re in agreement that those who genuinely need that last 5% bleeding edge are a very small group. Back about 10 years ago I was a massive Gentoo fanboy and I admit that Gentoo was my hobby, rather than simply a tool to get work done. I suspect a lot of Arch users are using it for the hobby aspect rather than necessity too, which is fine, I’ve been there myself. I sometimes wonder if there is a certain type of person who just gets bored when using something stable, and the constant threat/thrill of breakage gives them the drama they crave. I think that describes me fairly well in my Gentoo days.
I still think Tumbleweed is the best compromise between “my grub blew up” and “my kernel is 2 years old”, especially when it comes to laptops and gaming. I’ve not really run into problems with a lack of software, but I do make good use of distrobox environments and flatpak. I’ll use OBS builds when only when necessary, namely Mullvad which can’t be run sandboxed.
I’m using Arch on my main machine since it is primarily for gaming where a lot of the focus is on Arch and its derivatives. A lot of guides are made for it and Valve’s SteamOS is Arch based. For software development not having to use Docker’s own repo is really nice to have as the Arch version is up to date to a point where I haven’t noticed any issues with guides or anything
However, Tumbleweed looks very intriguing and I’m seriously considering it for my Framework 16 once I get it as it’ll be a machine to get work done, not mess around and play games
Personally I haven’t had much luck with distrobox, but that was mostly with Pgadmin 4. Its package in the arch community repo has been broken for years
Ironic. I want to use Distrobox as a way of bringing the AUR to other distros. I have been thinking of setting up Debian Stable with Distrobox / Arch to have a stable base while still having access to the AUR.
At one point I had an Arch installation that ran for 6 years! I never had issues, but anytime I was updating I was checking the arch announcements too - some packages need manual intervention sometimes. But this was some time ago, I think that laptop broke 5-6 years ago already.
But no, Arch is not unreliable. Usually the user is.
I suspect a lot of “breakages” were failed pacman updates due to signing issues, before pacman knew to update arch-keyring first. I know one person who moved to another distro when that happened.
Does it know even today? Sometimes I still need to
pacman -Sy archlinux-keyringbefore I can update all packages.It does, but sometimes if the system is really out of date I have to update arch-keyring before the rest of the packages
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What about your experience? Any “breakage”?
I am using Arch since circa 10-15 years now on multiple machines for various things. No real issues.
I used Arch for a longggg time too. It rarely broke, but when it did break oh boy it completely shit the bed :D
All the issues I had were replicable and when a fix or workaround was available I could fix the issues or work around them until a fix was available. No surprises or things I could not trace down to a specific issue.
I never know what those people do to their systems. It never breaks for me and I’ve been using it like 10 years on all my computers, including at work while working as a consultant.
It’s pretty important to have a working computer in that role and i never had any issues with stuff breaking. Smaller things like screen sharing was glitchy and so on, but that happened in all distros and had to do with Nvidia shitty drivers.
I actually had a problem with the latest kernel a few weeks back. Switched to LTS and that fixed it. To be fair, it’s the only real “breakage” I’ve experienced in the past year.
I use LTS for daily things and Zen for gaming. Oh also LTS doesn’t have NTFS support, because it gave me error with my old USB disk. Zen kernel solved everything. It also has good patches that vanilla kernel doesn’t have.
I was on Zen kernel and that broke for me. I could probably update right now to the latest kernel versiom and my issues might be resolved but I think I’ll be sticking to LTS jntil I have a good reason to swith back to Zen.
I have been on Arch a few years now. I switched before the installer was a thing because I wanted to learn more about building my own system. Got hooked and still using it as a daily driver. I normally have to reinstall every 6 months or so. Usually my issues are all self inflicted. I’ll try something new and cause something else to break. I have a laptop that has been running for 18+ months without any issues. But that is web browsing and light text editing.
So the distro is stable just depends on how much you tinker with it, but that’s true for all distros
My experience with Linux is something like 4 years of Ubuntu then 8 years of Arch. What kept me in was stability (in the sense that I don’t need to clean install every 6 months) and the wiki which allowed me to learn, a lot.
Although what I sometime don’t enjoy, is the random maintenance burden : every now and then some package you rely on may change how it works (config format, cli interface). You can fix this later by keeping an outdated version but it will eventually need a bit of work. That’s something I don’t mind on my work computer, but on my personal one … I just don’t want more work coming at me when I get home and want to play games.
I think this is what people mean with it being “unstable”. If you keep the system up to date, things will break at some point, and it’s up to you to sort that out. This is because Arch makes very different promises and tradeoffs than something like Debian. It’s a distro for those who want or need to customize or just like to tinker.
The reason I left Arch was because I carelessly installed a new major version of my WM which took me hours to get working. This made me realize that while learning how things work is fun, I want my OS to be a tool rather than a project.
(If you needed to reinstall Ubuntu every six months I guess you were already using it as if it was Arch ;D)
Only AUR packages break because of either bad maintenance or bad timing when dependencies get updated but not the AUR package. Other than that I never got any reliability issue, I don’t get all the complaints about Arch being unreliable. Sure, I wouldn’t put it on a server or something that needs to always work the same way and that needs lots of uptime (but some people do it anyways because they like to live on the edge,) but it’s not as bad as people say.
I have had issues with every distro I ever used. I really want to stop distro hopping, but I am never quite happy. I think Arch is great, but I’m too lazy to set it up myself. I just installed Garuda the other day, the lite KDE Plasma version the dub “for advanced users only”. Pretty nice so far gotta be honest.
Ever tried OpenSuse? I heard it’s quite good, it’s rolling release but it’s apparently fairly stable and it has Yaast, a tool which gives basically every advanced setting you could ever need a GUI kinda similar to control panel on windows
Tumbleweed is great! It’s close to bleeding edge with an automated testing system preventing most problems from ever getting to you. And if an update does break your system, if you installed withtheir btrfs default, you can just boot to a pre-update snapshot right from the grub menu, and roll back to it.
Suse tumbleweed is kinda bad though. The docs are always outdated with broken links. nothing works out of the box. Yaast is kind of clunky, and looks ancient, looks wise. Updates are slow and I got tired real fast resolving broken dependncies.
Their plasma+firefox patches nice though.
Fork. I was thinking about maining it next
Hey, dont decide based on my comment alone, lol.
Tumbleweed is great! It’s close to bleeding edge with an automated testing system preventing many problems from ever getting to you. And if an update does break your system, if you installed work their btrfs default, you can just boot to a pre-update snapshot right from the grub menu, and roll back to it.
You can use the archinstall script and get it setup in however long it takes to install everything.
I recently went through the process of manually setting up hyprland. Only after finding out it was added to archinstall…
So far, Fedora has been rock solid for me ^^
i’ve used arch as a daily driver on my laptop for maybe a year now. i just update when i remember to without reading anything and nothing important has ever broken afaik. use AUR constantly and everything.
idk, it just works for me. i have now been inspired to subscribe to the mailing list
I been using Arch in a distrobox for a few months now and I’ve broken it several times now, but I assure you that’s it’s my own stupid that did it.
I don’t follow any best practices. AUR, updates without checking the feed, etc. Been on arch for 2 years or so without any major issues.
Two days ago I decided to give hyprland a try just for some excitement. Lol.
I guess it depends on how you define “breakage”. The system being completely b0rked and unsalvageable? No, that has never happened.
Bugs, regressions or other gotchas or annoyances that needed to be dealt with? Yeah, several since I started using Arch in 2014.
- netctl hanging on boot (it was some systemd config issue)
- Very slow throughput issue with the Intel AX wifi driver (needed to rollback kernel and firmware until upstream fixed it)
- Intel NIC disconnecting under high load (was eventually fixed in a firmware update)
- Graphical artifacts in chrome and firefox after certain mesa updates (amdgpu related, eventually fixed)
- Black screen in google maps after a mesa update (amdgpu related, eventually fixed)
- Mesa update breaking high refresh rates in vkQuake (mysteriously fixed after several months)
- Grub introduced an incompatible update last year, so had to boot from USB and re-run grub-install
- An issue with vim syntax highlighting being broken for bash scripts. Was caused by upstream, and quickly fixed.
- A new readline version introducing bracketed paste by default. I’m not counting this as regression or bug, but it’s an instability because a default behavior suddenly changed
- mpv’s pipewire audio output was broken a few weeks ago leading to muted videos. It was an upstream bug that was fixed a couple of days later.
- mpv’s default subtitle handling behavior was changed around the same time as well, had to add
subs-with-matching-audio=yesto the config to revert to previous behavior - Currently still struggling with an issue with virtiofsd: my VMs can’t re-mount virtiofsd filesystems when they are rebooted.
And there were probably several more which I can’t remember.
Mind you, I’m not blaming Arch for this. It’s just what you can expect from a rolling release distribution, and if you are not able or willing to occasionally diagnose/fix things like this, Arch is not for you.
I had some issues with my arch, like no graphics after update and such… 99.9% of my issues so far comes from Not doing something (nvidia kernel module install and such) or doing something badly. Because linux allows you to do almost anything (it’s your macine, not microsoft’s), so you gotta be careful what you’re doing. But, still rocking arch, I won’t leave linux ever :)
