I was Nobara user, then I am using Fedora right now. I want to use things like Hyprland etc. and ya know, Its damn cool to say I am using arch btw. So I’ve decided to use Arch Linux. But everyone says its always breaking and gives problems. That’s because of users, not OS… right? I love to deal with problems but I don’t want to waste my time. Is Arch really problemful OS? Should I use it? I know what to do with setup/ usage, the hardness of Arch is not problem for me but I am just concerned about the mindset “Arch always gets broken”.
Arch never broke for me.
Unless you seek trouble and do stuff without knowing what you are doing (like blindly copy pasting commands from internet into your terminal), it generally just works.
It’s not as good as those distros where all packages come preconfigured for you to work nicely together, so if you want to build a custom system (like, choose your DE/WM/panels/widgets etc), you have to configure all of that to intergate nicely. But you could always just install KDE and everything is pretty stable there, same as in any other KDE based distro.
I know the danger about playing with wires too much hahsha. I made some mistake when I was noob. I am just asking about Arch has problem with itself or not. But if you say its just user’s problem, I am okay with it. Thanks for your answer.
What is a “KDE based distro”?
A distro that ships KDE in not a vanilla form and with some pre-installed custom configuration/fixes by default I think. Stuff like Kubuntu, Arco XL, Manjaro KDE etc
Ah ok. So basically any bigger distro.
I haven’t actually found one that doesn’t have kde.
That is not what he said. First, he means that the distro is KDE-forward and using that desktop environment by default. Second, he said that KDE was “non-vanilla”. Third, he suggested that the distro has extended KDE with its own utilities ( a more focussed version of the second point ).
To illustrate the difference, Ubuntu is a “bigger distro” but not a KDE one whereas Kubuntu is a KDE distro.
Red Hat does not package KDE ( which I assume means Rocky and Alma do not either ). You have to use a third-party repository to get it. Chimera Linux does not have KDE. I am sure there are others although it is not something I have paid attention to.
Ok I understood it as there is a live disk with kde as an option. Or you can install kde on installation. Like debian, fedora or nixos
AFAIK Next OS was discontinued about 30 years ago. Although some of it was used in OSX.
You mean NextStep?
Dammit, yes my bad.
Hahaha. I just shocked by what i read. It took 30sec to understand.
My Linux journey started when Ubuntu was in its single digit versions. I don’t remember the exact version I used first, but it was >15 years ago.
Of course I had a long distro hopping phase, that got finally ended by Arch. Because Arch breaks less, at least if you don’t molest it. Upgrades of versioned distros always had hickups or problems, and I grew tired of having to do a larger troubleshoot session once or twice a year. Arch has only very minor hiccups once in a while, and they’re typically always the same. 99% when the update doesn’t run through the keyring changed and you have to update it first, .9% is a bug with like a new release of the DE or something that gets fixed upstream in a couple days. And .1% is you have to look at the news because some manual intervention is required, like removing a package and going for something else or whatever. That is when you keep your system free of cruft and go with a popular DE.
Just 1.5 years ago I finally left Arch after a loong time. For something that is very new and different: fedora atomic (silverblue). Technology wise it is superior in my mind, and in my last years of using Arch I had most things in Flatpaks and containers anyways. But if you want a classical distro, Arch is definitely amongst the very well working ones.
Thanks so much for your detailed and helping answer. I can say that I’m a bit newbie. Only have used linux for 1 years. But I think I learned so much. Then I wanted to use Arch for its fame and the mindset “Arch is hard”. I’m using Arch in my virtual pc to learn how to use it. And I liked its gaming performance, features of Hyprland. But whenever I see something about Arch, everyones mouth full of “Its easily breaking”, “It gives error when you have an important job” etc. And that made me worry about Arch. I trust your experience and decided to use Arch. You helped so much. Thanks again. I wish you a nice day.
So if I understand you well, I just have to check news always to keep my system up to date and stable, and use popular DE. (I choosed Hyprland :)) And not to play with its settings/ packages too much because of the confidence that Arch gave. Right?
You do not have to check the news.
What he is saying is that mostly Arch updates just work, 99% of problems are keyring related, and ( when there is a problem ) you can check the news to find an easy fix.
I personally have not had to resort to the news but I will not refute his experience.
The keyring issue is real but it just prevents updates, it does not break your system, and it will not happen at all if you update frequently enough.
Arch is great
I just switched from Nobara to NixOS on my gaming PC. I’ve had NixOS on my laptop for almost a year and decided I’m comfortable enough with it to use it full time, and it works great for gaming.
Before NixOS, I was a die-hard Arch user. The only reasons it would break were because I was trying a bunch of stuff from AUR to play around with Wayland + Nvidia when that was brand new, or when I would forget to update for a while.
It breaking was primarily due to me tinkering around and not fully undoing those changes. Now I can do that with no fear on NixOS, and it’s fabulous.
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Use what you like. In answer to your question though, my experience has been that Arch is super stable. I have had fewer problems with it than maybe any other distro before.
I update very frequently, multiple times per week. There is almost always something to update. Most of the time it is just before I wrap up. Sometimes it is while I am reading something. Often, it is just as I sit down ( if I have the time, I sometimes look into new features that have arrived ). According to Lemmy, this behaviour should lead to my system being down all the time and me getting nothing done. My system has been rock solid and productive.
Now it may sound like a lot of admin but it is a mindless one line command to update and it just works. For me, it is fast, unobtrusive, and reliable. I for sure spent more time looking for missing packages on other distros. I spent a lot of time finding ways to run newer versions on other distros. I spent a lot more time dealing with problems caused by multiples application sources on other distros. Like the reading example, I mostly update while I do other things so it is not actually taking any time.
I pretty much never see the need to use Flatpak on Arch for example. I for sure am not doing anything like PPAs. I do use the AUR heavily.
IMHO, Linux works best when everything is managed by the package manager. While I have never used Nix, Arch is the only system that has made that possible for me.
Well, I should be honest on this last point. I have added the CacheyOS repos to one system ( it is actually EndeavourOS but essentially Arch ). From those repos I run a binary pre-release of the new System76 COSMIC desktop. The same package is available in the AUR but would build from source there so the CacheyOS repo is just a convenience. Obviously this system is just recreational so I am taking more risk with the packages I am using. Still, other than the incomplete status of COSMIC, this system has also been rock solid. It is in my living room ( as opposed to office ) and so I use it quite a lot every day.
There is one thing that bugs me about Arch systems. If you do not update for a while, you will get two problems.
1 - you will likely get multiple packages which have been replaced or duplicated ( multiple sources for NodeJS as an example ) and you will be asked for each one which you want to use. The system will be fine but it is a bit annoying if there are a bunch at once.
2 - New GPG keys may have been added and you may have a chicken and egg problem where you cannot move ahead without installing the new keyring but do not have the right certs to do that. You can resolve this quickly but it sucks the first time it happens and you will be Googling. It is my number one complaint about Arch.
I have only run into the second problem above for systems that I have not updated in months but I have run into it so, again, I want to be honest. That said, I have had Arch systems that laid dormant for years which I was able bring right up to date. I had a laptop that was powered off for three years. I had to refresh the keyring and the update was gigs in size but it was completely up-to-date and solid as a rock at the end of it ( same update command that I use every day - “yay -Syu” ).
Ok, one other issue…
I use the AUR extensively including to install proprietary software like IntelliJ, Rider, Microsoft Edge, Postman, and BurpSuite. As a result, occasionally I get whacked with a massive update. I did not update my main system for two weeks and got hit with a 14 Gb update! That can be mitigated though.
Mostly I update with yay or paru which includes everything from the AUR. When hit with a big update, you can use pacman instead which updates just the stuff in the core repos ( not the AUR ). So you can put all the AUR stuff off until a better time. Nothing in the core repos is that big.
With yay, you can also select which individual packages to update. So, you can skip stuff like IDEA ( about 5 gigs on its own I think ) or something that is going to take ages to compile from source.
I prefer package management from the command-line. There is pacseek for a nice TUI. If you really want a GUI, both pamac-gtk3 and octopi are in the AUR.
While I have some pure Arch systems, I mostly use EndeavourOS these days. It is faster to install and I like the defaults, including that it installs yay by default ( providing out-of-the-box access to the AUR ). EOS used to default to Xfce. It uses KDE 6 now. The online installer gives you quite a few desktops to choose from. I do not thin that Hyprland is one of them but it can be installed easily after.
Anyway, I can only speak from my own experience but Arch does not break on me and I push it pretty hard. I keep saying I want to try something like Debian as the base with Arch in a Distrobox so I still get access to all the packages. I just have not bothered yet because Arch ( or EOS ) works so well for me.
Arch doesn’t break on its own, but Arch is Arch, which means you might get an update where a post on the news says “btw, if you have changes to X file, your system won’t boot” or something. People don’t read the news before installing updates, but that’s also fine because I also don’t read them and have been using Arch for over a decade, and my system never broke on its own (to be entirely fair, one time back in 2007 I think, my system stopped showing jpg wallpapers because one library hadn’t been updated, the fix was to update my system the next day).
Also Arch is not hard to install, it’s labor intensive, but anyone with minimal Linux knowledge should be able to do it (and probably ask themselves why they’re being forced to do that).
Finally, Arch is not “cool”, lots of cringe people have ruined it and sometimes saying you use Arch sounds similar to saying you run Kali depending on the context.
Long story short, if you’re happy with what you have keep using it, I’m fairly confident you can get hyprland and everything else working on whatever distro you’re currently using. But if you’re determined to use Arch you should be fine too.
I cannot say I’m an experienced Linux user. Too young for it. And the main reasons that why im hopping on Arch are new experiences and different feelings.The arch is “cool” thing was just a joke. I think so about the Kali thing.
Finally, I wanted to use Arch for different OS experienced and some new, different things. I was concerned about the thing i have explained at post, but the previous comments about it made relaxed. Now, Im decided to Arch. I like its customisable, labor-needing nature. Thanks for your detailed and helping text. Have a nice day.
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I mean if the OS has problems with in it chronically or not as waste of time. As i said, i love to deal with any problems for experience. And, that was joke, im not hopping to Arch for the cool tag. Just, I want new experiences and learning about Linux much more. Thanks for your reply. Have a good day.
NixOS
Like I said in the post on c/archlinux, I had more problems on ‘user-friendly’ distros, than I had on Arch.
Me too. I have had more problems with the “stable” ones too I often break things trying to work around missing packages.
If you know what you’re getting into, arch can be a great experience, I’d say give it a try!
Its looking good for me. And i like its gaming performance. The main reason for changing os is new experiences. I want Arch but the quotes “Arch is easy to get broken” yk was making me worry about it. But the previous comments helped me for that mindset. Im decisive for hopping on Arch. Thanks for reply, have a nice day.
I mean, try it. Sometimes you can’t tell if something is the os or the users till you do.
Thanks to previous comments, understood the thing I was wrong and decided to use Arch relaxedly. Now I’m using Arch. Thanks. Have a nice day.
My vote is universal Blue and its spins like Bluefin or Bazzite
Rolling release 🤷🏻♂️ there might be updates which cause issues where you might need to rollback, if you can handle that it shouldn‘t be a problem.
I‘m using Arch myself since about 2 months and never happened that an update break something for me - when something broke it was my own fault.
So you say about being careful before getting new updates and read news about it (if i get it clearly). What to do with it? How can I understand that latest update will make issues on my pc or not?
If there is no problem inside of Arch, its okay and just asked for it. But the only problem is users as far as i understood. Thanks for your reply
Nah, I run my updates maybe once a week on average. If afterwards something breaks, I simply do a complete Rollback (with e. g. snapshots). If after the next update its still broken, then I start to dig in „what“ is broken and how I might fix it
But as I said, it didn‘t happen to me yet - but I‘m also fairly new to Arch as well, so that‘s at least my plan on how I would go after it.
Honestly I feel like if you can’t give a proper definition of what an OS or a distribution is in a single sentence, then stick to whatever is BOTH popular and matching your standards, both moral and economical.
I can say I don’t have enough experince to say anything about different distros. Its my first year and I didn’t changed OSs too much. I want to get new experiences and different types of things. And I liked that labor-needy and fully-controlable vibe of Arch. And just decided to Arch but I was worried about sths. Thanks to previous replies, I understood what I have to. Thanks. Have a good day.
If you’re going to distro hop, do it, don’t let people tell you you’re wrong. I’ve learned how to set up and use a variety of Linux and BSD systems by distro hopping. But, I think maybe you should set up one system that is solid and then distro hop in virtual machines using VirtualBox. It works well and often can handle things like Haiku and Amiga type OSes as well. Just for fun, of course.
It’s a learning process, even decades later you will still learn about differences so don’t worry about it. If you do want to learn efficiently IMHO have notes, and ideally share them with others who might be able to help you dig deeper. Enjoy the journey, it’s a worthwhile one IMHO.
That’s because of users, not OS… right?
It’s a factor, but constantly upgrading to the newest version of software does come with risks. I’ve had Arch and derivatives fail to boot on multiple devices plenty of times after an update.
Some people say that they run arch for years without having any issues, but that’s either extreme luck or bs.
I love to deal with problems but I don’t want to waste my time.
You can usually just use a btrfs snapshot to rollback, boot, and try to update later. But there were situations when I had to use arch-chroot, and it can be problematic to install new packages in that situation.
All setups have tradeoffs, but I’d wholeheartedly suggest a stable distro like MX and nix + home-manager. It avoids all of the previously mentioned issues, and comes with other benefits. Do note that you might need to make or copy a hyprland.desktop file because home-manager can only alter files in your ~.
