I can only think of 3 cases in as many years lol.
- KDE patch at beginning of the week made it so scrolling the start menu crashed the desktop, fixed in ~3 days
- LY changed the service to call it so I got booted into the TTY next time I started my PC
- There was a wifi card update which stopped my wifi from working, fixed with a power cycle.
Don’t know where arch got its reputation of being held together by hopes and prayers, maybe it was more unstable in the past?
So you’re going on a diet then?
genuinely what’s up with all those arch update memes? arch user of 5 years with no reinstalls, it “broke” on me exactly once lately when Lua switched versions and borked AwesomeWM. the fix was looking at the output to understand the problem and running “pacman -S lua54” or whatever version. like, that’s it
I’ve literally had more problems with Ubuntu and Rocky upgrades (tho as with most things Linux, its mostly user fault with custom repositories and all but that’s a moot point because I use AUR on Arch too and that’s been fine)
Arch is a do it yourself distro, which includes some maintenance - all of which is explained in the wiki during the installation process and mostly comes down to checking the news for required manual actions and looking through pacdiffs. if you skipped that part of required reading, arch might just not be for you and yea it’s Gonna break
It’s the same reason that all Windows users are music producing, Valorant pros who side hustle as Mechanical Engineers so obviously they can’t just switch to Linux.
Memes are easier than thinking
I dont read unless something breaks. Then I read and learn more about my system then before. I’ve had 3 breakdowns. 2 of them were me fucking with things until they broke. All were fixable by looking it up and working on the terminal. Took 30 minutes tops each time. What I am diligent on is back ups.
I’d have 2 snacks, over 10 years…
:( and that was my fault both times because I didn’t read the announcement of required actions before I ran the update
meanwhile I update NixOS like once a month and it always seems some maintainer has pushed a broken dependency for something and thus borks my entire rebuild. Last month it was some dependency for Krita, This month it’s some dependency for Lutris.
I need to get off NixOS. while it makes doing hard things easy, it’s infuriating when the easy things break and break often. But It’s like some abusive relationship, I want to leave NixOS but i’m so god damn addicted/in love with it and I always end up going back.
Read the what now?
The homepage of archlinux.org hosts announcements for required manual interventions
Arch has a news feed where it describes things that require manual intervention when upgrading: https://archlinux.org/ (You are informed at arch install that you have to read it before upgrading.)
What an awesome and amazing and definitely not annoying system. Automating that to show you only what you need based on the packages you have installed when you do the update would be so ridiculous. I’m glad it’s just a blog.
It’s actually helpful that it’s not filtered, because otherwise, I would only see a new post maybe once every 2 years, and would therefore not know if it still works, and feel lonely.
There are messages with generic recommendations and post upgrade/post install scripts. They are rarely used because it goes against arch’s principles to run some (maybe fragile) script on your system. Reading news once a week/month before upgrade isn’t that inconvenient.
Arch isn’t for normal people.
we dont talk about normies here
You’re not the first to be annoyed by that: https://github.com/bradford-smith94/informant
Welcome to Gentoo.
Notes with recommended user actions are provided per package after every update. Mostly to let you know about optional packages and tell you how to enable optional auto start for some things.
For things that need even more attention, there is a system that tracks read/unread news that also only show up when your system needs it.
I get the building the system from scratch is good for learning the system and I’ve done it myself but this just feels like bad development, why not make it a simple script that you can choose to run or you know just make it part of the update itself like literally everyone else in the world.
99% of the time it is just automatic and part of the update. Usually it’s only an issue if you are updating from a specific older version of something or have made a particular customization that breaks with the update.
Like others, I’ve got at least one system running Arch for 10+ years and I’ve only had to manually do something a handful of times. Usually it’s just that I have to update the keyring first before the rest of the update.
the announcement of required actions. it’s the update news you get when you update.
I’ve been using arch (Cachyos) for almost a year and the single time I had to roll back was because I didn’t read the notes, just ran the update. Totally my fault. Used the btrfs snapshot roll back and everything was fine.
it doesnt break, go get a meal
I’d starve this way
Arch skill is stored in the belly.
