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?
What’s your point of comparison, Ubuntu LTS? Arch does not require nearly as much upkeep or attention as you’re claiming. Try setting up a Gentoo or NixOS system, or better yet just do Linux From Scratch, and come back to us.
I have been on Arch , and I’m now running NixOS as my daily driver… IMO NixOS is less of a hassle to set up, and nearly maintenance free compared to Arch… Twice a year when the channel updates there’s a bit of stuff, but every change I need to make is usually explained in the output of my
nixos-rebuild… If something suddenly breaks in an update, I just boot into my previous generation, roll back myflake.lockand wait a few days for a fix to be available…Having dailied both as well, I only agree once you’re over the very significant learning curve. And even then, I’d say initial setup is pretty similar, if not a bit easier on Arch.
Arch and NixOS are kind of like C and Rust. Arch/C give you the power and flexibility to do pretty much whatever you want, but also will let you do it in very stupid ways that will come back to bite you. NixOS and Rust give you the same amount of power, but with a higher barrier to entry that ensures you have a pretty good idea of what you’re doing, which results in a much more stable experience.
debian
fedora
opensuse tumbleweed (which happens to also be rolling release)
gentoo and lfs make it very clear they’re demanding distros. arch is just a little easier, but it’s closer to gentoo than to debian
I have dailied Arch and Debian unstable and they both took about as much effort. Arch is really not that complex, it just gives you access to some potential footguns. Also, Arch absolutely makes it clear that it’s a more advanced distro – that’s the entire reason for the meme, although these days it’s a lot simpler thanks mostly to the installers.