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 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.
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.
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 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 :)
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 always have problems with WiFi for some reason.
My Arch broke when they changed to systemd. I couldn’t boot properly. Debian did it better.
I actually just installed Arch on my gaming PC a few days ago. I’ve been testing out many games with it and I’m very happy with it. I was hesitant to switch from Windows because I wasn’t sure if the game support would be an issue, but thanks to Proton, I finally switched.
No issues using an Intel CPU and Radeon GPU as of now, except the archinstall wasn’t working for me so I had to do it the normal way.
I also had issue with archinstall because iso was outdated. U should run this before using archinstall: “sudo pacman -Sy archinstall”
Then it just worked :)
Lol, I did update it and still wasn’t working :(
Shit happens u know xD
I ran Antergos for years before they stopped development, then I converted to vanilla Arch. There were the occasional boot issues after an update, but it worked out after grub reinstallation/reconfiguration. After an update a month ago, my laptop finally stopped booting properly no matter how many troubleshooting steps I did. I couldn’t pinpoint which update crashed it because it wouldn’t boot properly. Switched to other distros to test and they didn’t work either, so I figured my (very old) laptop just finally died.
Right now I’m running Mint on another old laptop as I have no time to maintain a bleeding edge distro and I just need something that works.
Antergos is EndeavourOS now and I find Arch based distros bullshit/bloat.
Grub is shit. I always use systemd-boot. It’s simpler and reliable.
Issue is not Arch, packages that user chose.
Like I said, I didn’t blame Arch, my laptop just finally gave out.
When multiple people report frequent issues, your first instinct shouldn’t be to defend your favourite distro.
I’m not defending anything. I’m trying to understand the issue and from what I saw, it’s not Arch’s fault.
“Arch sucks! My GRUB is boooom!”
I use systemd-boot because Grub always sucks… Nothing to do with Arch, u see?
Ah yes, why are people so silly as to use Grub, the single most widely used bootloader in the Linux universe, we should blame that poor choice when they have problems with arch
You think everyone who claims “Arch is unreliable and breaks” has actually had frequent issues with Arch?
I’m willing to bet that a not-insignificant portion of these people have never actually used Arch for a significant amount of time and just parrot it without thinking. Just like the Nvidia people and the systemd people.
Do you use Arch?
Yes, didn’t u read the post?
They’re joking. It’s the “I use Arch btw” meme
They know you use Arch, they’re joking. The joke is that Arch users tell people they’re using it without anybody asking, hence, the phrase, “I use Arch, btw.”
