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?
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I also noticed vlc has broken (installed last week apparently)
Using the pacman syntax:
pacman -Q -i -d vlc
showed a conflict with the vlc-plugin (which appeared to be uninstalled already) and no vlc-plugin-#### installed.
The dependencies were fully explained in the list, including the vlc-plugins-all dependency. I’m lazy so that’s the dependency I installed on my EndeavourOS.
https://endeavouros.com/ https://garudalinux.org/ both arch based maybe you will like the forum style better and they will probably also give you this information.
I’d recommend opensuse tumbleweed. It’s still a rolling distribution, it still has more bleeding edge software, but its package manager, zypper, does atomic updates, so if something doesn’t install right it rolls it back.
That’s the real thing for me: how painless is it to live with long term? After I’ve installed a couple of weird things, and configured some stuff custom - is this a distro that keeps rolling into the future, or is it one that makes me wish I had the time to re-install from scratch every 6 months?
I’ve run tumbleweed for quite a while with no issues. I’ve never had to reinstall it.
Based on what you describe, I would strongly recommend going with OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. It’s just as bleeding-edge as Arch, but all packages go through automatic testing to ensure they won’t break anything, and if some manual actions are required, it will offer options right before update. Moreover, snapper in enabled by default on btrfs partitions, and it makes snapshots automatically before updates, so even if something breaks somehow, reverting takes a few seconds.
One small footnote is that you’ll need to add separate VLC repo or Packman for VLC to have full functionality - proprietary codecs are one of the rare things official repos don’t feature for legal reasons.
On Arch rant: I’ve always been weirded out by this “Arch is actually stable, you just have to watch every news post for manual interventions before every update, oh, and you better update very often” attitude.
Like, no, this is not called stable or even usable for general audience. Updating your system and praying for it not to break while studying everything you need to know is antithetical to stability and makes for an awful daily driver.
you just have to watch every news post for manual interventions before every update, oh, and you better update very often
You have to watch the factory mailing list and make any manual interventions for Tumbleweed, and frankly, you should be watching the news and taking any action required no matter the os.
A decent daily driver distro for regular user should not break on blind update - at most, it should warn the user automatically before applying updates. If user is expected to check news every time they want to update their system - it is not a good fit for anyone but enthusiasts.
Where did you get the idea that Arch is a daily driver for regular user? The very distro that tells in big letters: stuff can break, you better watch out on updates? The very distro that has command-line install process with chroot-like commands as official one?
Plenty of people seriously propose it as such.
It is not - at least if you’re not an enthusiast happy to tinker with your system all the time.
Anyone who is not curious enough to type
yay -Pwbefore typingyayshould probably stick with something like Windows. And even then, you should watch out for the rare manual intervention.Edit: Tone.
I don’t think it makes sense to gatekeep Linux only to those who has time, energy, and dedication to continuously check for necessary interventions and to familiarize themselves with all the terminal utilities in the first place.
That is a sort of elitism we need to carefully avoid - one, because otherwise it would halven the desktop Linux community, and two, because there’s a huge group of people out there who need what Linux offers, but cannot dedicate themselves to it in the way enthusiasts do.
For them, there must be an option to push the button and get a smooth update, with everything resolved automatically or prompted in a user-friendly way. Arch is not that.
You feel comfy doing this - alright, no one stops you, Arch is great and has a purpose. But we should never put blame on users for not using their system The Arch Way™, because it’s too technical, too engaged, and is just a poor fit for most. People will not and should not accommodate for this just to use their system. There’s no need to.
If someone chose Arch and complains that it breaks things, it could be useful to point out Arch doesn’t have required guardrails to make it operable in a way they expect, and direct the user to other distributions that have them and potentially least painful ways to migrate.
Having tried Arch and its derivatives, and recognizing their strong points, I can absolutely tell the person needs another distribution, and that’s alright! Whatever fits anybody is up to them. And for stable rolling release experience without the need for manual checking (but also without some of the power features of Arch mainly geared toward enthusiasts) there’s OpenSUSE Tumbleweed.
Edit: Tone.
I don’t use Arch, I use Endeavour because they took Arch and made it better. As to why I used yay as my example, there are two reasons:
- It’s what I use
- It’s nice to show how easy and simple it is when it’s done properly and it normally takes 5 seconds, more when you have to do something. No wading through busy mailing lists hoping to spot an issue. I’m looking at you Debian and Tumbleweed!
I see!
I do, in fact, use Endeavour on my desktop as well, simply because I like snappiness and choice of Arch and similarly don’t wanna bother with the pure one (and also EndeavourOS forums are more friendly in my experience). I run OpenSUSE Slowroll (an experimental Tumbleweed build, same idea as Manjaro, but actually done right) on my other laptop, so can speak from the experience on both ends.
With Slowroll (and my gf’s Tumbleweed) I’ve only once faced the need for manual intervention, and it was simply to resolve a dependency change by choosing which package to leave - literally enter one number, and then it went on peacefully and correctly installing 1460 updates (yeah, they pushed a big Tumbleweed dump, 3.5 gigs total). On Arch and EndeavourOS, the last intervention was just recently, that’s the one OP talks about, and they do happen more often and are more complicated than I’d like.
I used Tumbleweed for eight or so years before switching to Endeavour and it only really bit me hard once. Update, reboot, and sudo no longer worked! If I had spent a bit more time going through the mailing list, I could have made a simple configuration change before rebooting and saved a lot of stress! It affected nearly everybody who installed that particular image.
FFS dude. It’s not lazy want updates to be as simple and pain free as possible. The entire point of these universal machines is to automate shit so we don’t have to think about it so much. We have different distros to run them because people prefer different ways of doing things. The one you pick doesn’t make you better or worse in any way. OP found out Arch is more work than they want to put up with for their daily driver and the benefits aren’t worth the cost. That’s a pretty big fucking club to be calling everyone in it lazy.
This kind of elitism is the most unnecessary, useless, vacuous, tedious horseshit and hurts Linux by pushing people away for nothing. Stop it.
taking any action required no matter the os
This is not really true for fixed release distros. I can’t remember when was the last time I had to read through the release note before Ubuntu version upgrade, or upgrading any package.
Ubuntu was by far the worst experience I have had in terms of updates destroying things. The number of times my post update reboot brought me back to a GRUB prompt, I’ll never go back.
Wayland or X11?
I used to think that, then I learnt the truth. Now-a-days, I say that you may as well use a rolling release because it’s not really any more work that a fixed release and you have up to date software.
Just to reiterate the same point - in fixed release, a package version is not released until all known issues are resolved.
At no point, it is end user responsibility to bother checking anything before installing a new version.
Oh yes, the most mythical of software. Bug free.
Bugs are of two types - known (found during testing by Distro maintainer) and unknown.
Fixed release fixes known bugs before pushing packages.
It is following the standard development life cycle.
Fixed release fixes known bugs before pushing packages.
So do rolling releases. What’s your point?
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The same thing happened to me. The package was split into separate packages. Install the package vlc-plugins-all.
sudo pacman -S vlc-plugins-allProblem solved
Rocky or AlmaLinux
Void is Arch, but stable and without systemd.
If you know your way around Linux in general, that’s a good choice.
Void is NOT based on Arch. It was an original distro created by an ex-NetBSD dev. But yeah, I’d recommend it too.
I didn’t say that in a sense it was based on Arch, I said it like it was like arch: rolling and keeping the kiss principle.
Void is its own thing, which is another great point of going with Void.
Fedora, great blend of bleeding edge and stability. Plus Linus uses it, so what better praise could you get.
I hope we’re talking about that Linus, and not that Linus. You know, the one that works with computers, and not the other one that works with computers.
My favorite Linus moment ever.
The only issue is that you provide free testing for IBM, so it’s a no go if you try to boycott/avoid US companies. If you don’t it’s indeed a great choice.
Can definitely recommend Fedora too. Software updates are at a good pace, and the system has a lot of polish all around. For example, all you need to do for updates is to press “update” in Discover and it’ll do everything for you, applying on reboot for stability. Most things “just work”.
that’s exactly how updates should work in every desktop distro. as an option of course.
systemd made it possible to install updates on shutdown.
packagekit enabled kde software to automatically obtain and prepare the updates.
plasma does the final touch nowadays to ask you on the reboot/shutdown dialog whether you want to install them.Basically all the system is in place, with code from widely used parties. packagekit can even integrate with your filesystem to make a snapshot before install. It’s wonderful. yet, it seems as if only fedora supports this full setup right now? or is there anything else?
I can totally understand that. In case you still want to give it a chance, I can highly recommend EndeavorOS. It’s basically pre-styled, pure Arch. But it has a welcome dialog, where you have a warning banner at the top if you need to be careful regarding an update. This directly links you to their Gitlab and forum with the steps you’d need to take to not break anything. This saved me multiple times already and I never broke my system, despite not even reading the Arch RSS feed or changelogs.
Besides the EndeavorOS forum is waaaay friendlier compared to the Arch one.
Endeavour forums helped when I upgraded during the 24 hours when Arch removed Amdgpu firmware. It did kind of make me wonder how many issues like that were present but that I’ve just dodged by random upgrade timing.
I’ve been an Arch user for about 15 years now, and I’ve never posted to the forums. Not because I’m great at this and don’t break things. I constantly break things and need to fix them. I don’t ask questions there because before you’ll get any help you are going to get sat down and explained (in great detail sometimes) how you are the stupidest piece of shit on Earth.
I posted on the Arch forums ONCE. Didn’t get a single reply, lol. Actually had to open an issue on the upstream git repo to get any info.
I had the same problem, i did start with arch ,but man i remember doing a update after 4 days(4Gb of new updates) and my system faild to boot. From that moment i went debian route.
The closest to Arch, a rolling cutting edge distro, is probably openSUSE Tumbleweed. openSUSE has excellent snapper integration that takes a snapshot before and after you touch zypper, so it’s easy to undo changes that might ruin your system. CachyOS also has that same great snapper integration, but that’s still Arch.
You can install snapper on normal Arch and it’ll snapshot before and after package installs
The closest to Arch, a rolling cutting edge distro, is probably
openSUSE TumbleweedVoid Linux.
I prefer Debian-Testing. Basically, a rolling release, but not unstable. Arch is akin to Debian -Sid, which is unstable. The latest packages are brought in to -Sid after some rudimentary testing on -experimental. But only the stuff that make it and are solid on -sid, make it to -testing. Basically, Debian has 2 layers of siphoning bugs before they even make it to -testing. And that’s why the -stable branch is so solid, because whatever makes it there, has to go through the 3 branches.
So if you like rolling releases with much newer packages, consider -testing. The easiest way is to wait for the Trixie release, and then do the manual update to -testing by changing the repository names (there are online tutorials about it). The other way is to get a -testing iso, but these usually are broken because most people “upgrade” their installed distro to testing instead of just install it outright.
I’ve been using -testing for over a year now with 0 problems. Even Google is using -testing internally! I also have had Arch installed and endeavouros, and have had 3 problems that I had to fix in 5 months.
The other way is to get a -testing iso, but these usually are broken because most people “upgrade” their installed distro to testing instead of just install it outright.
I’ve installed Debian testing from ISO a handful of times and never had any issues.
Very often it’s broken. I had two such instances. Even Debian recommends that you just upgrade from stable.
What do you do for security updates?
There are security updates on testing. Maybe not as fast as they’re on Sid, but they are.
What do you mean? They are included in the updates to -testing.
They are included in the updates to -testing.
Only after they meet the requirements to be moved from unstable.
From the wiki:
It is a good idea to install security updates from unstable since they take extra time to reach testing and the security team only releases updates to unstable.
and
Compared to stable and unstable, next-stable testing has the worst security update speed. Don’t prefer testing if security is a concern.
- https://wiki.debian.org/DebianTesting
There is some advice on that page about how to deal with security updates for testing and I’m wondering how people who use testing take that advice, and what changes they make to get security updates. Or maybe you don’t bother. That’s what I mean.
I use Debian, for the stability.
