Arch is different…

    • diaphragmwp@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      542·
      7 天前

      News from this year:

      • virtualbox-ext-vnc >= 7.2.12-2 requires manual intervention (package won’t install)
      • Active AUR malicious packages incident (the AUR is locked)
      • Arch Linux 2026 Leader Election Results
      • Breaking changes for all users of varnish, which is renamed to vinyl-cache (it’s a proxy, only affects servers)
      • kea >= 1:3.0.3-6 update requires manual intervention (dhcp server, affects routers)
      • iptables now defaults to the nft backend (affects pretty much nothing)

      Repost.

      Also, my Mint install broke, uh, shit I don’t remember, 5 times? Arch broke zero times. Zero times not my own fault for forgetting I was installing something and shutting off the computer, of course. Except for the times I tried the fucking installer python script, but since I never even booted the install it doesn’t count.

      • hirihit640@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        161·
        7 天前

        Mint broke for you? That’s the first I’ve heard of it.

        Also if you have a habit of shutting down the PC during updates, check out atomic/immutable distros. They are almost impossible to break. You can pull the power during an update and it’ll be fine.

        • Holytimes@sh.itjust.works
          5·
          6 天前

          Mint breaks weirdly often but also it’s inconsistent in my experience. It’s a great example of it explodes for some people and others it’s a god like entity of perfection. Never in-between. Lol

          • l3mming@lemmy.world
            1·
            6 小时前

            Let me put it like this: Imagine you’ve won this beautiful pristine house full of potential and it cost you absolutely nothing. You can rennovate and decorate and do anything you want with it. Endless possibilities.

            Instead, the first thing you decide to do is call up Larry Ellison and invite him to personally come and shit on your kitchen floor. And one day you forgot his shit was still on the floor and you stepped in it and now Larry’s shit is all through your house. And then the phone rings and it’s Larry because he’s been monitoring your house and now his lawyers are suing you for stepping in his shit.

            In addition to VirtualBox being a fucking awful piece of software, Oracle is the absolute antithesis of Linux - anti-user, anti-freedom. Why would you put that closed-source, privacy-trampling, proprietary bullshit on your pristine Linux install? . Use KVM virtualization instead, or even a more modern docker-ish like solution.

      • Kabutor@lemmy.dbzer0.com
        61·
        7 天前

        I dont get the bad press arch got. I use arch (btw) and can’t remember last time it wont boot after an update. It maybe happened to me twice in 20 years and at least once was my fault and the other was because i didn’t read the pacman post warning me

        • silasmariner@programming.dev
          1·
          12 小时前

          Once it happened to me because 6 years prior I’d made a change thinking ‘hah. That makes more sense’ and then things changed under me and I had to read journalctl in a tty. Low key enjoyed dealing with it. But here’s the thing: most ppl are dead at that point. No idea what to do. Arch is for nerds.

          Edit: if you also read my other post about iptables, this is a completely different thing. I had two issues.

      • insomniac_lemon@lemmy.cafeEnglish
        2·
        6 天前

        this year

        And one post earlier (2025-12-20) that the image likely could be about:

        NVIDIA 590 driver drops Pascal and lower support

        Install nvidia-580xx-dkms from the AUR

        Impact: Updating the NVIDIA packages [without manually changing to AUR packages] on systems with Pascal, Maxwell, or older cards will fail to load the driver, which may result in a broken graphical environment.

        • Holytimes@sh.itjust.works
          1·
          6 天前

          To be fair, adoption as a concept is the problem not the actual aur.

          The fundamentals of the aur was fine though that entire ordeal. It’s just one optional choice layered on top that wasn’t

          Blaming the aur fundamentally for that choice is like blaming the city planner for when a idiot turns down the wrong way on a one way street.

          We kinda just accepted the risk because the upsides were worth it. But some people are assholes and gotta ruin it for everyone.

          • lemmyvore@feddit.nlEnglish
            2·
            6 天前

            This isn’t the first type of problem that the AUR has had. A few years ago it had problems staying up, because it had no scalability to speak of.

            “Best hopes and wishes” is not an accepted engineering design strategy. If something can be abused, it will be. Not planning for it is just that, poor planning.

            The AUR has been poorly put together and this wave of malware is just another symptom of a deeper problem.

    • kolmaskommentoija@sopuli.xyz
      7·
      7 天前

      Reminds me of my try of Nobara. I do clean install, it installs and starts updating itself for a long while. Afterwards it tells me to reboot, and that the update has failed. I am??? Since I am a noob, so I reboot. And the whole system fully breaks, and no trouble-shooting helps, so I have to re-install. No biggie, just mildly annoying, it was a clean install after all. Then I do some searching to figure out, what went wrong, and find out, that updates failing and the system fully breaking, and having to re-install it if you reboot, is apparently normal behavior for Nobara.

      • sunnyjim@lemmy.zip
        4·
        7 天前

        I’ve had Nobara on my PC for several years and not had a problem, though I know others have

        Having said that, if I could be bothered I would probably just return to regular Fedora again so that I could have a decent package manager and updater…

    • JackbyDev@programming.devEnglish
      2·
      6 天前

      To be honest, I’m a firm believer that if it’s considered required to read the news file for updating then the update tool should be printing that information for you. I used to have a hook that did it, but it was flaky. Also, I saw the creator mention that due to the design of the hooks, it happens too late in the process for some manual intervention to be done properly. But because everyone in Arch has such an obsession with “no bloat” I doubt we’ll ever see pacman have that feature.

  • Miaou@jlai.lu
    277·
    6 天前

    It’s difficult to take people shitting on arch in here seriously. I’ll take 1h per year fixing whatever broke over a whole weekend upgrading Debian.

    Oh and god forbid you need to compile yourself a package and maybe a few of its dependencies from scratch because that 6 years old bug didn’t make it through the freeze last release.

    • vandsjov@feddit.dk
      8·
      6 天前

      Debian can take a week to upgrade? Apparently I’m yolo’ing it and just the upgrade. However I have just done one major update, so u might just be lucky

      • anewfox@lemmy.zip
        21·
        6 天前

        i have often found myself needing to manually update packages on distros like fedora or debian because i need a newer version that hasn’t landed in dnf/apt yet. arch doesn’t have that problem. ymmv, obviously, it’s not going to be an issue for everyone.

        • vandsjov@feddit.dk
          1·
          6 天前

          I probably don’t mess around my system too much and don’t install too many things outside Debian repositories to make issues with the upgrades.

        • raspberriesareyummy@lemmy.world
          11·
          6 天前

          Yes? Same thing… aptitude upgrade, aptitude dist-upgrade, edit /etc/apt/sources.lst to point to the new major version (s/bookworm/trixie), aptitude upgrade, aptitude dist-upgrade Done. Typically takes 1 hourish at most.

    • glibg10b@lemmy.zip
      1·
      6 天前

      Debian isn’t the only alternative to Arch. There are rolling-release distros where being a guinea pig is opt-in, not forced. Like Gentoo, where brave users test packages before they reach the wider audience

    • insomniac_lemon@lemmy.cafeEnglish
      21·
      6 天前

      It’s absolutely true. And that my outdated Arch system is likely still more fresh than Debian.

      That said yeah I would like something that can update itself whenever without breaking*, certainly if it expects me to update frequently. And manual interventions (ideally used for things that actually have a choice/fix, not just what ends up being a pasted command or two) should be a warn-step/update-blocker (depending on situation).

      Though what the image is probably about (2025-12-20, nVidia 10-series turned legacy, legacy driver put onto AUR) is a bad situation in its own right particularly later when the AUR issues started happening. And it is really an update-or-don’t (or get an AMD card somehow) issue.

      Other distros likely do solve the issue of updating, though from what I can see aren’t as good with packaging (dependency handling, lacking optional dependencies) and package availability. Which can be worked around somewhat too, but still needs more trial/input.

      Annoyances are also multiplied for me by having non-fiber internet (also shared).

      * TBC I also mean the act of updating itself (outdated keys etc), not just the outcome

    • jama211@lemmy.world
      39·
      6 天前

      As someone who gave up on linux years ago, this sounds like one person driving a broken old alfa romeo shitting on someone else driving a broken old fiat. Whilst I watch on from a modern EV.

      Hah, here come the downvotes.

  • BetterDev@programming.dev
    6·
    6 天前

    Every hero has a journey.

    Yours has just begun.

    I warn you, this is not the easy path.

    But I urge you to heed the call.

    For though there will be trials and tribulations,

    soon, my friend, you will own new socks.

  • katharta@piefed.socialEnglish
    6·
    6 天前

    Idk, I’ve had installs of Kinoite, Bazzite, and NixOS bork themselves unrecoverably. Arch, if something goofs, more often than not I can work my way back to a working system without wiping.

  • corsicanguppy@lemmy.caEnglish
    8·
    7 天前

    Really? It happens this often?

    In 26 years, I’ve seen this happen in two occasions with enterprise Linux. One of them was my own damned fault for using a marginal config. The other was an update that added a new dependency in the code but not the package.

    That’s it. Twice.

    • Calfpupa [she/her]@lemmy.mlEnglish
      3·
      7 天前

      with enterprise Linux

      I think you already know the difference, but we’re talking about relatively bleeding edge systems here.

    • BunScientist@lemmy.zipEnglish
      2·
      6 天前

      Never had an unbootable system after an update, all not checking news has ever done to me is having a package fail to install (and then I check the news to see how to fix it), I’ve seen plenty of kernel regressions or other software, but that’s a thing with upstream and getting not-as-tested software, not with arch itself

    • porous_grey_matter@lemmy.ml
      2·
      7 天前

      It’s happened twice to me in seven years of using arch (not black screen, just something being broken after an update) and both times would’ve been avoided if I’d just read the fucking blog like you’re meant to, but yolo lmao. Still on the same install, everything still fine after just switching one package for another or whatever.

  • dylanTheDeveloper@lemmy.world
    3·
    6 天前

    Yeah i had this happen with devices that originally came with Windows sometimes, mainly laptops. It must be a combo of BIOS, firmware and hardware that increases the chances of update instability. Its just not feasible for every distro to have the same kind of hardware config testing support that Microsoft has for Windows.

    Windows spying on you is not just for marketing, they grab your current environment and sanitize the result so they can get a nice list of hardware and application configurations for when they need to test.

  • ZombieCyborgFromOuterSpace@piefed.caEnglish
    94·
    6 天前

    Why would anyone want to use a distro that can break at any update unexpectedly or have to read articles first to see if it’s safe is beyond me.

    It’s too much of a hassle.

        • dylanTheDeveloper@lemmy.world
          2·
          6 天前

          Same, at-least everything past Windows Vista era of operating systems. I guess Microsoft has the resources to test and deploy to most types of hardware configurations so the chances of getting a borked update is rarer compared to other OS’s like Arch and Mint which have a smaller user base but more diverse hardware configurations.

        • toddestan@lemmy.world
          1·
          6 天前

          I haven’t had a Windows install completely brick itself, but I have seen Windows go into a try to update->update fails->rollback->updates are available->tries to update again… etc. infinite loop.

          It’s been a while since I’ve had a Linux system brick that wasn’t me doing something stupid, though I’ve gotten a lot better at handling the occasional minor hiccup.

      • Warl0k3@lemmy.world
        3·
        6 天前

        It’s a problem regardless of what OS it happens to. I’ve personally/professionally found it much more frequent that an update breaks something on linux vs. windows, but it’s also much easier to fix those issues & they’re rarely the kind of critical failure you get with a M$ OS.

        (and if you truly crave stability, Debian is always happy to welcome you back into it’s big soft embrace)

    • UnfortunateShort@lemmy.worldEnglish
      8·
      6 天前

      Any distro can break at any update. If you’ve ever done a major upgrade on any fixed-release distro, you have very likely experienced some sort of issue.

      And the solution is very simple (and the same for all distros): Enable Snapshots, roll back if important stuff breaks.

      • hirihit640@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        1·
        6 天前

        Any distro can break at any update.

        Not atomic distros, at least not nearly the same risk. Every update is like a fresh install.

        • Holytimes@sh.itjust.works
          2·
          6 天前

          And that fresh install can also just fuck up. Have you never had a clean install go screwy? I know I sure the fuck have a few times over the years.

          I’ve had bazzite kill it self twice so far on an update.

          • hirihit640@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
            1·
            6 天前

            Well if a fresh install fucks up, then that means the distro itself has an issue. It’s very different from how updates fail on traditional systems, which are failures of the update system and not the distro itself.

            In other words, any distro can be broken, or simply incompatible with your hardware. But atomic distros get rid of an entire class of failures, where the package manager’s update system bugs out and breaks the OS.

            I’ve had bazzite kill it self twice so far on an update.

            I’m very curious how this happened since I’ve never heard of an atomic distros borking on update. I’ve heard of atomic distros failing to install because of hardware incompatibility, but usually after it installs successfully, it’s smooth sailing after that.

      • ZombieCyborgFromOuterSpace@piefed.caEnglish
        12·
        6 天前

        No.

        I don’t have to go read articles about the latest update to see if it’s going to break and have to sift through documentation for a fix or a workaround and troubleshoot on nearly every update on Debian. Or Redhat, OpenSUSE, etc.

    • underscores@lemmy.zipEnglish
      3·
      6 天前

      I wish arch didn’t have that reputation because I seldom have issues with it

      Its like that subway meme where it goes “my brother in Christ you made the sandwich”

      If arch breaks it’s 99% of the time user error, and that’s ok. But to say it’s the distros fault is incorrect imo.

    • the_grass_trainer@lemmy.world
      2·
      6 天前

      Flashbacks to when I bought a Winblows Surface Pro 3 tablet that broke on every single update they released for the first year i owned the damned thing

      Yeah, idk bro, it’s weird to me too.

    • TeddE@lemmy.world
      1·
      6 天前

      It’s can be fun to plumb the limits of computing and Arch’s gimmick is living entirely on the bleeding edge of computing - it’s where all the exciting issues are being actively identified and worked on. However, if you’re not into tinkering, I agree - Arch is ‘C tier’ for average users - specifically because of the dangers of playing in deep waters. As an enthusiast myself, I have Arch on my daily driver, but only because I have a NAS, home server, backup strategy, and other Linux machines running Debian, Fedora, and SteamOS at the ready in case I hit one of Arch’s infamous ‘Bad Days’.

  • swooper@lemmy.world
    4·
    7 天前

    I just had my first one. Update shows a change in the template for official mirrors. Updated asks me if i want to view, merge or cancel. I view, looks okay? Merge. No more updates, corrupted. Heeeeetyyyyhh?

    • tumbling4986@lemmy.caOP
      3·
      7 天前

      When I type “yes” for view pkgbuild, it always shows failed to retrieve message. Then without asking for a retry, it asks to continue with installation!

  • hogmomma@lemmy.world
    23·
    5 天前

    I don’t (and will never) use Arch, but I’ve heard nothing but how user-unfriendly it is. I don’t look for posts about Arch; they just seem to find me – like this one. I don’t hear anything about other distros. Why do people use Arch? Does it offer some outlandish advantage that other distros don’t? Is it for bragging rights? Seriously? I haven’t heard a single good thing about it.

    • tumbling4986@lemmy.caOP
      4·
      5 天前

      Arch is mainly for people who prefer instant updates on every software. Like developers, some hardcore gamers want to tweak their system too deep and have too much time to fix if it breaks.

      Snapshots are a big relief, as they allow you to directly boot into the previous working version. But if the bootloader itself failed, you might need a live USB to fix it.

      Arch is not bad or unfriendly at all. It allows users to deeply customize their system how they want it, and that’s what causes an unstable system at the end. Also, the use of too many AUR softwares at the system level is another reason. It is not official. So by using AUR heavily, we can’t guarantee it will work with other system software.

      If you use Arch with snapshots and only install a minimal amount of AUR system-level software, then it’s completely fine for daily use.

      Other serious struggles.

      • Very new releases bring a lot of bugs. Recently I saw my screen was flashing when I opened settings. Also, crashes can occur constantly. You have to report it to get an immediate fix from developers.

      • Snapshots can take a fair amount of your storage. But you can control it in Snap.

      • AUR packages are not tested for their authenticity or security at all.

      • A breakage or failure to boot can terrify newbies. Unlike Fedora or Debian, there are no built-in recovery tools out of the box. Everything is the user’s responsibility.

      Arch is all about user freedom. All those crashes and failures are not too hard to fix, but you have to spend much time on them. If you have pre-cations like a live USB and snapshots, then there is nothing to worry about at all.

      Unlike Windows, Linux demands users know it more and read long wiki pages, which is good in a sense.

      Many people in the Linux community want their system built from scratch. So Arch stands in between, distributions like VoidLinux and Gentoo.

    • ruby@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      2·
      5 天前

      i use arch because i find it much easier to start from a system with just a tty and install software i need than to have a full distro and to find and remove packages that i don’t want/need and replace them with the ones i need - makes maintenance easy and i know what’s running on my system. it’s also in my experience one of the few rare distros that package a non-broken fcitx5 which i rely on (but that’s specific to my setup). and the build system is awesome. the community might be a bit harsh on people who post error messages to forums without any attempts at basic troubleshooting.

      i expect that people who make these memes installed arch because they heard that it’s a bleeding edge distro that all the kool kidz use, downloaded a bunch of packages from the AUR which messed up their dependencies after the update and now their system isn’t booting right. if you don’t skip updates for a long time and don’t do weird tricks with system packages, arch might be genuinely one of the easiest distros once you get past the installation which can be tedious if you’re used to automated installers.

    • eletes@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      2·
      5 天前

      I think it’s like driving a manual transmission car in the US. You have more control and are more in tune with your car, but when you’re stuck in bumper to bumper stop and go traffic it sucks ass. Similarly some people make it their identity and that’s where the memes come from.