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?

  • suburban_hillbilly@lemmy.mlEnglish
    1·
    2 days ago

    the initial state should match the final as closely as possible, in this case by installing the new optional dependencies automatically

    Sometimes. Some of us out there have use cases where we really, really don’t want our systems making choices for us and would rather read the notes every time. One could equally well argue that an OS whose entire purpose is letting the user make the choice suddenly doing something automatically without asking for input is the break in state that users would find astonishing.

    • SheeEttin@lemmy.zipEnglish
      11·
      2 days ago

      I’d say you want Linux from Scratch then, but even then the Linux kernel maintainers are making choices for you.

      But Linus is very firm in that they never break userspace, so you should never see an issue like this when updating the kernel.

      • reddit_sux@lemmy.world
        1·
        2 days ago

        Not necessarily

        Had a kernel update which couldn’t read a specific HDD controller chip. Since then I always install LTS version along with regular just for booting up if the kernel upgrade fails.