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”.
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
Arch is gonna die the moment u r late to upgrade ur packages, and i don’t really wanna live in constant fear of losing one update and thus my hole system by a kernel panic.
So u can use it if u r one of those guys always on the edge for updates.
AFAIK Next OS was discontinued about 30 years ago. Although some of it was used in OSX.
Hahaha. I just shocked by what i read. It took 30sec to understand.
You mean NextStep?
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.
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 ~.
Arch user here. If you’d like to improve your skills and maintain your perfectly fitted distro Arch is a great pick, if you want something that just works forver without learning stuff, try something else; I also don’t recomend Arch-based distros for non-Arch user (manjaro, endeavour) since you’ll break these soon or later. Would be nice instead waiting for a good immutable Arch-based distro. Atomic desktops go brrr
Like I said in the post on c/archlinux, I had more problems on ‘user-friendly’ distros, than I had on Arch.
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
Arch has a good package manager and tests updates, but it is still a DIY distro.
If you add BTRFS snapshots with snapper, or timeshift with whatever, it is more stable.
What all traditional distros lack though, most important imho, is a “factory reset” feature.
Fedora Atomic desktops have this.
rpm-ostree resetHere is the issue tracker on more factory reset components to have a “like Android” experience. (Reset /etc, reset LUKS password, recreate a new user account)
If you want Hyprland on there, qoijjj maintaines wayblue where PRs for good defaults will for sure be accepted.
Ones of the reasons I like Pop, they install a recovery partition with a copy of the install USB, finally they have a ‘factory reset’ that reinstalls the OS while keeping the users home folders.
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.
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.
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.
I love to deal with problems but I don’t want to waste my time.
Then Arch is not for you. The distro requires you to always be informed of the latest news regarding Arch before upgrading so you’ll probably have to admin your system.
If you’re not ready to do that then you should probably stay with Fedora.
My suggestion: run arch in a virtual machine and get familiar with it before installing it.
I’m the OP! Just have read it and its replies. So I can write a general reply to these messages. I mean if Arch has problem with its stability, its developer team and etc. as the waste of time. Like, if there is some problems chronically with Arch, I don’t want to mess with it. But if there is nothing wrong about Arch, don’t take my “waste of time” quote important. I’m ready for learning new things and deal with problems like I said. I can say I have got somethings wrong because of the ignorant people. I understood that Arch is stable and non-troublemaking thanks to you guys. Thanks to you all. Have a nice day.
I’m sorry but that is not true. Been using arch for 15+ years and update once a week without checking the “latest news”. In all those years I’ve had to manually intervene because of a file conflict maybe 5 times or so.
OP said he didn’t want to waste his time. Arch is not like Ubuntu. It requires you to RTFM (and Arch documentation is excellent) and know what you are doing and be willing to learn from your mistakes. That takes time and dedication. I went with what OP said.
Of course arch runs but you have to take care of everything. You have to install flatpak etc. Yourself. You will only do that if you keep up to date with the system. On fedora, especially fedora atomic the maintainers take care of it and somewhat teach you. There’s much more than just flatpak. You have to know the system or being eager to research everything. It’s good to understand linux but not if you just want to own a computer and use a text editor and browser. I’m not op btw.
I don’t use flatpak so no idea about that.
But I use my system professionally so it just needs to work and I can’t be spending time fixing things. Luckily there is no need for that at all.
Not saying arch is the most noob friendly distro out there but I wholeheartedly disagree with people saying you need to spend lots of time fixing things or keeping your system stable as that is simply not true.
All good. Arch is just not for someone who doesn’t care about the computer at all and who doesn’t want to know what a firewall is. And it doesn’t matter which distro you use, you should always use the arch wiki. That’s the holy grail.
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 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.
NixOS
