Arch Linux turns 10

I have a bunch of painful stories about using Arch but the best one happened most recently.

I had some outdated package that I wanted to update so I asked in the #arch irc room how to just update that one package. I was told upgrading a single package is generally a bad idea and its better to just update the entire system. I have had a server running Gentoo for ~5 years and I frequently upgrade single packages at a time so I saw no problem with this but ok, I'm not an Arch expert so I followed the #arch people's advice.

I invoked the upgrade command and I see it wants to upgrade the linux kernel to 3.2 and a bunch of other stuff. After the upgrade completes I rebooted the machine (or it rebooted itself, I forget). It wasn't able to boot up. I put in a rescue cd but I couldn't figure out what was wrong.

This is exactly why I don't do 'emerge world' in gentoo anymore. It has backfired on me more than 50% of the time (when I used to do it). I simply do not trust these bleeding edge distro people to get everything working all the time and I am annoyed at the zealots who constantly advise to just upgrade as if nothing could possibly go wrong.

I think having to use an option like '--force' is considered warning enough. Which is, I think, perfectly reasonable. Of course, I don't know your exact scenario, but that's how things seem to work.

The more I use Arch, the more I do things on the command line. That means a lot less software to maintain. I think if you run tons of different software, you are asking for things to break.

I happily run dwm, and a handful of CLI tools. This minimalistic setup is enough for me - and seems to cut down on things breaking.

Ubuntu is the best distro around... for what it's purpose is.

Ubuntu isn't around to cater to power users, the whole idea behind it is shipping a distro thats so easy your grandma can install and use it.

> Congratulations to all those past and present involved with Arch

Thanks! I still feel good about being listed on the fellows page as a past developer. :)

Unlike Debian, Arch Linux has what they call a "rolling release schedule," which means that the only choices you have are (1) refrain from using Pacman at all to update your software, which of course leaves security vulnerabilities unpatched and (2) opening yourself up to major changes to major subsystems, like Gnome, any time you use pacman to update your system.

In contrast, on Debian, major changes to e.g. Gnome are mostly limited to when a new version of Debian comes out, and you get a lot of leeway as to when to upgrade to the new version, and in particular, sometimes you have the option of subscribing to just the security patches for your version of Debian -- an option that Arch Linux just does not offer at all.

And I got the impression that updates of Arch Linux broke things that required my manual intervention to fix more than updates of Debian did.

Still it is a very compelling distribution because of its "elegance".

I probably spend just as much time maintaining my OS X box as I did maintaining my Arch Linux box: e.g., when I upgraded from Leopard to Snow Leopard and from Snow Leopard to Lion, I had to install a bunch of stuff (a dict client, Gnu coreutils, Carbon Emacs, even wget IIRC) to get a comfortable environment, and the installation took a lot more time than it would have on a Linux distro. E.g., the upgrade to OS X 10.7.3 changed the behavior of sleep mode such that simply bumping the mouse wakes the system, which eliminates most of the value I used to get from putting the system to sleep, so now I have to ask on some forum for a way to revert to the OS X 10.7.2 behavior of waking only on key press or mouse button click.

Rolling-release distros and low-maintenance updates are pretty orthogonal concepts. That said, once you get it set up, it's only the major, breaking changes that require real work to maintain, and these are posted regularly on archlinux.com.

I update once a week, keep configs up to date with "yaourt -C" (yaourt is available in the AUR), and read archlinux.com prior to updates to avoid issues.

One caveat is that you need your /boot mounted if you keep it separate, or else anything that depends on linux-headers (like filesystem drivers :/) will break if there's a kernel update.

If you want stability along with the tweakability, go with Debian.

For me it is (unrealistic). Every update is fear that something will break. Vim, kmail, even gtk themes. You don't know the day or the hour.

At least that's how it is for me. I know many people who have no problems with updates breaking stuff in Arch; maybe it's the fact that I'm using a full-blown KDE instead of a mere xmonad or such. But I wouldn't recommend Arch to anyone who expects stuff to work.

Now that I have arch working for my needs, I spend hardly any time maintaining it.

The only issues come up when some sort of breaking change is released, and in that case there is always an article right on the arch homepage for steps to migrate to the new package.

I had the same concerns, but after a solid year on Arch only, I can say that things rarely break and if they do I learn something in the process.

Yes, sometimes, like every few months or so, there is some maintenance to do, but only after manually initiating system updates. Never once have I come across a maintenance issue that didn't have a quick solution already discussed on the Arch forums or wiki.

I find that almost every time something breaks it's really because I haven't been careful enough. What you need to do is watch out for any messages during updating (especially during kernel updates) and make sure to just use sudo carefully etc.

I also want to add that while people always seem to talk about Arch breaking, it has hardly broken more for me that Windows of Ubuntu have in the same period of time. The advantage is that when Arch breaks, you fix it because you just tend to really learn how your system works when you use Arch, while in Windows and Ubuntu, I'd just reinstall usually.

I use Arch as my only OS, for day-to-day use, and it's perfectly stable when I'm not actively experimenting etc.

In my own experience with Arch, things offered through AUR (while convenient) seem to cause more problems than that which is in core, extra, community, multilib, etc... In other words, things which pacman handles.

So using AUR introduces a bit of maintenance overhead in the sense that I spend more time reading the comments, checking the number of votes for an item, researching the dependencies that arise, etc. But I'm also happy AUR is there to supplement what is in the supported repos. That said, I've definitely had some MAJOR problems that I've had to work through using AUR packages.

I would say that your statement about putting in the time up front to learn how the system works in order to do relatively less system administration in the long run applies more to Gentoo than to Arch. I was a Gentoo user for several years before switching to Arch, and once you get all your configuration files set up on Gentoo, the system is rock solid. The only drawback is that you're compiling nearly everything from source based on your specific system configuration through make.conf and such, updates can take a while. However, the internal consistency and dependency resolution of emerge seems far, far better than pacman in my experience.

To me at this point Arch is as stable as OSX, and possibly even more so. I go weeks without reboots and my computer never slows down. I do updates almost every day, and most of the time have no problems. And I really appreciate the rolling-release paradigm. In fact, I'd be willing to bet that possibly sometime in the future, OSX could potentially go that route as well. It already seems like they're headed there in some ways.

I've been using Arch to 'get shit done' for about two years now. Apart from the occasional package upgrade to update everything to its latest versions, you don't have to do anything you don't want to.

I have seen arch break pretty spectacularly, but only on systems where i did some, to put it delicately, unadvisable things (put /tmp, /var/tmp on tmpfs, put /usr on unionfs over squashfs, etc). Where I have avoided breaking standard practice, I have never had a single problem. I also see it to arch's credit that I was able to do such horrific things to it with such ease (and fairly good documentation).

I have been using Archlinux for over 2 years. During this period I have installed it on all the machines I _own_ (3 laptops, 1 work desktop). The biggest problem I had was when I had /usr on its own partition. This behavior was not recommended and an update broke it. However this was easy to fix and took < 20 minutes to resolve.

Also, try to use pacman as much as possible.

If I never broke anything...I would not know much about Linux! I think part of maintaining a distro like Arch is dealing with things breaking. The good news is that you learn about how something works and usually can figure out a solution. The Arch community is awesome and is very responsive when things don't work.

If you can, try and track down the documentary Einstein's Brain by Kevin Hull[1], an amusing yarn about a Japanese professor's trip across the US in search of the great man's grey matter.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relics:_Einsteins_Brain

I've been using debian based systems (including ubuntu) for over a decade now, and I can't think of more than a handful of times time I've had to jump through hoops to keep apt and dpkg happy. You may not always have the latest version of the software, but the productivity compared to compile.everything or rpm-based systems is significant. Almost everytime I need a piece of software, it's one command away.

What do you think gentoo was? When I used it (2005-7ish), I think it was a toy for brat haxxors. At the time, I was a brat haxxor, so it worked well.

I think they are in quite the opposite ends of Linux desktop distro spectrum. Mint attempts to provide nice out-of-the-box experience and Arch is "tweak everything". Mint being based (more or less directly) on Debian includes far more distro-specific patches than Arch which has fairly vanilla packages (afaik).

As for my recommendation, imho you should learn the system you are going to use. If you want to learn Debian, use Debian (or Mint, or some other close Debian derivate). If you want to learn Arch, then use Arch. Every major distro can be poked and prodded, tweaked to no end, and you can look what happens under the hood.

Arch will give you a deeper view than Mint, including having to make choices for yourself, about every component you wish to use.