And of course I’m installing Linux on it. Install went well, even the fingerprint sensor built in to the laptop works.
Mostly this will be a school and DND machine but always nice to have a functional laptop for whatever else I may need it for.
And of course I’m installing Linux on it. Install went well, even the fingerprint sensor built in to the laptop works.
Mostly this will be a school and DND machine but always nice to have a functional laptop for whatever else I may need it for.
I’ve ranted at length many times on Lemmy about how Arch is very stable and doesn’t need fiddling. You can check my comment history, I’m not feeling like repeating myself right now. 💀 Arch not being “stable” is a myth.
There seems to be a misunderstanding in the definition of “stable” for distros. Arch is solid, it’ll rarely break, when it breaks it’ll be mostly due to the users own interest in fiddling with the system in the first place. But Arch follows the rolling-release model, with incremental updates which may require manual intervention — again, happens on very rare occasions — it differs from the stable release model, where distros like Debian have small changes, more guided towards security rather than having the newest software.
So by definition I wouldn’t say Arch is stable, even if it’s not the common usage, it’s best to describe that it requires system management and maintenance, but it’s not brittle, unlike Windows.
This is also a myth, on both counts. This is assuming you always install every single update to all packages as soon as it’s released, and have to do so just because there’s a new version. That’s not how Arch operates. You are in charge of initiating an upgrade. It’s a manual command that you run, right.
If you upgrade often, you’re more likely to run into buggy releases. Just upgrade less often and reduce your likelihood of installing buggy latest releases. Just like Debian and other such distros do. You’re in charge on Arch.
This is only one way of mitigating risk that you can do, but I do concede that Arch does not take every precaution that other distros do to ensure that broken packages are not released. They do however follow up with news posts if there’s an issue, with info about what to do. This is an awesome thing.
But still, I haven’t had an issue in over a decade, upgrading packages probably once a week or so.
There’s no “maintenance” other than what you create for yourself. This Arch = “maintenance” (whatever that entails in everyone’s mind) nonsense has got to be put to bed.
The whole point of a bleeding-edge and rolling-release distro is that you get the lastest packages available. If you wait longer for the buggy updates to get fixed, then it doesn’t make it any different from Mint and other stable distros. It might even be worse because even if you wait, every update would still include a package that may be buggy because of the nature of rolling releases.
If you update once or twice a week, chances are there are literally hundreds of packages to upgrade every time. There’s no chance someone will look into every single one of these packages to verify what could potentially ‘break’ their system or not. They just upgrade the whole thing and THEN, if something breaks, they work around it.
As someone who uses CachyOS daily as my main distro, I wouldn’t install it on a device for someone that doesn’t want to do some maintenance from time to time. Maybe I wouldn’t go as far to say that it is UNSTABLE, but point release distros such as Mint or Debian are definitely more stable and require much less maintenance. Rolling release distros are, naturally, much riskier.
That’s the thing though, what breaks? I haven’t had anything break in 10+ years. Guess I’m lucky? Or other people are really unlucky/careless? Where is the discrepancy coming from, between this notion of Arch breaking for everyone all the time and it not happening for me? Or is it just simply a legend of a bygone era? I hear it was worse like maybe 15 years ago. Maybe Arch hasn’t shaken that image, still.
I mean, Steam Deck is based on Arch ffs. You can have it “stable” if you like. Why choose that distro if there’s so much “inherent risk” with it. It’s a solid distro if you know how to control yourself and your actions IMO.
this is total bullshit. you need to update for security reasons. and every time you update, you get the latest version with allpossible incompatibilities. even if you are updating only a few times per month, you don’t update to a “known working state”, you update to the latest package version with all problems that might come with it.
also long times between updates can cause various other problems.
While it’s true you can do that, then why choose Arch in the first place? One of the key elements in the philosophy for Arch is: Modernity, i.e. to always have the latest version to be the stable version, aka the rolling release model. You can choose not to upgrade, but it can be a immense footgun. There’s a reason it’s harder to upgrade between release versions in distros like Debian.
Besides being a stable release doesn’t guarantee no bugs either, only that they don’t change. Meaning as long as the bugs are minor or can be bypassed, it’s still considered stable.
No doubt, but you do have to keep track of this. People non familiar with it may find their systems temporarily borked if they don’t. One good mention for those of interest is their incredible documentation, it can also be used as a reference for other distros too.
In over a decade using Arch, I have encountered bugs or changes when upgrading packages, following a similar upgrade cadence. I also used packages that have been deprecated from the official repository, and then maintaned by users in the AUR. These are things that break the users experience and require maintenance. Regardless if it’s a bug or not, or if it happens once or twice a year, the user has to pay close attention.
It doesn’t need fiddling, but it invites you to do so. And the default setup is hardly a best practice: swap on a partition, no FDE, no zram… missing FDE in particular will require you to reinstall, and you better have found out how to do proper backups including metadata.
I don’t have FDE and I haven’t had a need to reinstall. I’m running it on my desktop computer at home.
But that’s during installation. Arch users will/should tell you that once you install your system and it works the way you want it to, you don’t really need to “maintain it” unless you create maintenance work for yourself. Same for “fiddling”.