As the title says, I’ve been using various flavours of Arch basically since I started with Linux. My very first Linux experience was with Ubuntu, but I quickly switched to Manjaro, then Endeavour, then plain Arch. Recently I’ve done some spring cleaning, reinstalling my OS’s. I have a pretty decent laptop that I got for school a couple years ago (Lenovo Ideapad 3/AMD). Since I’m no longer in school, I decided to do something different with it.
So, I spent Thursday evening installing Debian 12 Gnome. I have to say, so far, it has been an absolute treat to use. This is the first time I’ve given Gnome a real chance, and now I see what all the hype is about. It’s absolutely perfect for a laptop. The UI is very pleasing out of the box, the gestures work great on a trackpad, it’s just so slick in a way KDE isn’t (at least by default). The big thing though, is the peace of mind. Knowing that I’m on a fairly basic, extremely stable distro gives me confidence that I’ll never be without my computer due to a botched update if, say, I take it on a trip. I’m fine with running the risks of a rolling distro at home where I can take an afternoon to troubleshoot, but being a laptop I just need it to be bulletproof. I also love the simplicity of apt compared to pacman. Don’t get me wrong, pacman is fantastically powerful and slick once you’re used to it, but apt is nice just for the fact that everything is in plain English.
I know this is sort of off topic, I just wanted to share a bit of my experience about the switch. I don’t do much distro-hopping, so ended up being really pleasantly surprised.
This I find a very weird statement. Perosnally I use arch on a laptop for work and I never ran into the scenario of not having a working laptop always ready.
I have btrfs snapshots pre and post update that I can roll back to
I update my packages every friday in the last hour of work, where I can roll back or do the required manual intervention in peace
When I have an important time period where I judt don’t want to deal with it, I just don’t update anything. At some point I had everything out of date for 7 months due to a big and stressful project. Once it was over, I updated as usual.
Nothing ever broke since I started doing it like this and following the arch news.
And for that I get way more packages, no missing out on the newest features and it is way easier to install anything not in the repos/AUR by creating my own PKGBUILD so that I have updates - than manually installing it on debian from make and it never updating.
I think the last three points are exactly what is wrong with Arch for nornal users. I don’t need to follow Windows or macOS news sites to know if I can update Firefox or not, but in Arch you kind of have to dig into this stuff.
On every Debian (derived) machine, I’ve set up automatic updates. Every now and then a bigger update prompts me to click “yes”, and sometimes it asks me to reboot when I have time. The brain space wasted on updates and recovery just becomes usable again without Arch.
BTRFS snapshots are something Debian sorely needs (preferably with a GUI, like Timeshift), and the PKGBUILD based system is very nice indeed. However, they’re not worth the risk in my opinion.
I think point number three is likely what Deckwise is getting at. Every distro is stable when you don’t update it. I generally measure the stability of a distro on the ability to blindly update without taking out something mission critical.
I think point 3 is an extreme measure because I make my living with that device. If it ran debian/ubuntu, I would still apply all the above points due to that circumstance.
I also use arch on my gaming pc, where I update blindly (still with btrfs snapshots) and the only time in the 6 years of that archlinux installs lifetime when it didn’t function afterwards was during the grub update.
I used ubuntu for 2 years (and then plain debian for another 2 years) before arch, and for me it broke on every release version upgrade (
do-release-upgrade). So once every half year. (And yes I followed the proper procedure. And yes it may be better now compared to back then.) As I found no way of fixing it, but I wanted the newest release, I reinstalled ubuntu/debian every 6 months, while keeping the home dir.I guess if you are fine with staying on LTS for 5 years, it is indeed very stable, but if you want to have up to date features - arch was way more stable than Ubuntu or Debian in my personal experience.
Heavy debian testing / unstable user for over a decade here. I have never had to worry about doing 1/2/3 and I let my package manager do whatever it wants whenever it wants.
Imagine being able to turn on automatic updates and nothing breaking or requiring rollback. That’s Debian Stable. 🫠