What are some of the biggest drawbacks about using Arch? Hard to install is obvious one but not a major one and you have to do it one only.
Is there anything bad about Arch? Did they get anything wrong? Anything better out there?
Only valid criticisms please...
it's arch
it's GNU/Linux
Install Gentoo
systemd
arch can be annoying because an update may break something.
especially if you install a lot of AUR stuff
not being an uber power user myself, best I can come up with is the rare jankiness that's to be expected from bleeding edge.
if you can read a manual, you can install arch.
forgot about this part, though my issue with it is wholly political. Functionally, hasn't impacted my day to day (again, not a super power user)
>systemd
What's so bad about it? From what I've read, it solved a shitton of issues.
Bleeding edge software is more likely to have issues uncaught. It's rather spartan out of the gate as well. These could both be seen as a positive and negative.
It goes against the idea behind the linux file system, also no one knows exactly how much telemetry/spyware is in hidden in the code itself.
>Hard to install
It's not even that hard to install. You have fucking netctl and dialog to help you connect to internet. You have arch-chroot to help you chroot without having to manually /proc and /sys, and you even have genfstab.
Honestly, only those who are new to linux or aren't familiar with CLI find installing Arch is hard
*Manually mount
Drawbacks: It's Arch
Anything beter out there?: Yes, Debian.
Downsides: 1. You HAVE to update. 2. You may have to read the archwiki to solve any problem you ever have ever. Problems are caused by failure to 1.
Everything else is ezmode, every program ever written is 1 command away.
>You HAVE to update.
Why? Why is this a must?
both are systemD dependent.
I run artix (arch w/o systemD), running pacman -Syu is like playing russian roulette. Once in a while it blows up and fucks the boot sequence or renders things very broken.
The longer you go without updating the more likely shit is to explode (on your next update). I don't know why Arch is the way it is but small regular changes are fine.
>The longer you go without updating the more likely shit is to explode (on your next update). I don't know why Arch is the way it is but small regular changes are fine.
That's fucking interesting... never thought of it myself. I wonder why that is...
the way I saw it is if you regularly update, you catch 1.0 -> 1.1 -> 1.2
but say you took a week vacation and update when you get back, your 1.0 attempts to jump to the latest (1.2) would could've possibly modified or added onto code implemented in 1.1 and with the loose ends hanging like that...
xorg dot conf
>xorg dot conf
xorg.conf isn't even necessary anymore and official documentation says you should remove it.
Apt still doesn't have any sort of dependency resolution. It blows up regularly. Also purge seems to be broken nowadays. Debian's package maintainers are also on the lazy/incompetent side so there's a good chance any given package will ship with broken configs. A debian is fine too though.
Arch takes 10 minutes to install, it is the post installation configuration and customization that is the timesink.
Depends what you want, I never boot into a DM so thats like one command and some minor configs away from a fresh install. Assuming NetworkManager ever worked, which it doesn't.
Not hard to install. Use Antergos and select the server edition. Next you can install anything with aurman -Suy retroshare or aurman -Suy whatever...
Sure... install gentoo just with calculate linux and you will be fine... Later on you can experiment with an advanced install...
This is actually true for the majority of Arch users at least on Jow Forums.
what's the point of installing a rolling disto and shy away from updates?
Downsides are including all the compile options, which pulls in unwanted dependencies, also some packages are linked dynamically against very volatile packages (e.g. Haskell), so you end up updating a host of packages you wouldn't even need in the first place if only they linked them statically.
Arch does what's easiest for the maintainers, users are unimportant
Biggest issue: when an dev does something stupid (e.g. having bad defaults or not utilizing certain defaults properly), you aren't shielded from it by good maintainers. Indeed, Arch maintainers basically shield you from viruses, heavily broken shit, and overwritten config files: everything else is vanilla from upstream on 99.99% of packages, including install directories.
Another issue is the occasional downside of the Arch Wiki: you'll get used to a certain rhythm due to following a user's hack to make some program or some setup be functional, and then suddenly the hack will stop working and you'll kinda/sorta be in a free fall, wondering what to do. The Arch forums will usually have an answer buried somewhere, but still.
And speaking of the forums, the people there can be fucking cunts, and not in the fun way.
Basically this, in a nutshell.
It's because the OS is a conglomeration of thousands of components that interact with each other in order to function properly and those core components are being updated/altered not like in point release distros in which every component is updated in tandem to a fixed release and isolated from an unlimited number of potential alterations from end users to form one big control variable for actual proper testing.
Rolling release is inherently less stable.
>Rolling release is inherently less stable.
Strangely I find Arch more stable than Debian or Ubuntu.
If so then if Arch had point releases as well then it would probably be even more stable. The devs must be taking extra measures to ensure stability on an inherently less stable method.
Be it anecdotal, but my installation haven't broken yet. I do updates every week or so and even do partial upgrades from time to time, which isn't recommended.
One day you'll understand why patching everything is less stable than a rolling release.
I don't understand why updating often would be more stable than updating down the line, say once a month. aren't the packages you end up with the same as the guy who updated daily?
"Patching everything" is the result of devs scrambling for some reason under a looming deadline which is not inherent with point releases as some are released only when the lead dev deems is the right time. Of course with a bleeding edge rolling release there is the pro of a significant portion of the userbase essentially serving as beta testers of the OS as it is being developed.
Might be because the packages are sensitive to system configurations in some ways and the system configurations with which they were installed differ in some critical ways because the historical sequences of installed packages differed such as one having skipped even perhaps one package update which also might in turn have led to further alteration to the configuration in some way. I'm thinking butterfly effect. So with more skipped updates the possibility of malfunction increases exponentially. But when an end user consistently rolls along with the updates his system configuration is more likely to mirror that which is generally being tested and debugged by the majority of end users and devs.
gnome updates break something every 2 weeks
gnome is a meme
>all these posts saying how everything breaks all the time
>in reality it's all arch users who want to scare people off their special snowflake distro
it's easy to install and maintain and it's handily the most stable distro i've used. would only ever switch if systemd got out of hand
Or maybe the packages depend on alterations made by prior package installations.
Which DE is that?
Broken python ootb. PEP clearly says python should be linked to python2 for backwards compatibility. Every distro does it like that, except Arch that links python to python3.
>inb4 python2 is dead use python3
The point is, there are incompatible differences between python2 and python3. A python2 program can break when run with python3 and vice versa.
I used Arch for about 9 months. During that time, it worked flawlessly and I was happy with it. I also.thought the "Arch breaks itself" meme was indeed a meme.
However, about a week ago, it did break itself. Regular update, no AUR shit, nothing on the release notes (which they repeatedly told me to check on IRC despite having told them I already did multiple times).
Considering how arrogant the community acted for something that wasn't my fault, I decided to unironically install Gentoo out of spite.
And boy, let me tell you: whoever tells you that "Arch is the binary equivalent of Gentoo" is lying. Gentoo is A LOT more flexible, without systemd by default and being souce-based allows you to get truly small and fast bloat-free binaries. It did take me a while to set everything up, but the OS itself is objectively superior to Arch.
Anyway, Arch would be fine if these random ass issues didn't happen, not to mention that the community is mostly cancerous.
Also, why include "unsupported features thst can break the system" in the package manager? Why give me the possibility to do pacman -Sy and then tell me "hurr durr partial upgrades are not supported" in the wiki? This shit doesn't make sense.
Arch has the potential to become an excellent distro, but it has to, at the very least
>have more rigorous package testing
>make multiple init systems available during installation other than systemd
>fix or remove dangeruous deprecated features like partial upgrades
GNOME - there's a *fetch right there
youtube.com
party on
solves some issues and causes others
btw I use Arch
It will break and take Bob down along with it.
15 year old arch ricers
bleeding edge
the shitty AUR
the even shittier wiki
You only have to do a bit of reading to install Arch, surely that's all it takes to install Gentoo.
I've been using antergos for nearly 2 years now, and never had to format, or fix the boot beacause of a suposedly broken update... you guys are just trying WAY too hard...
...
I actually had no problems at all installing both arch and gentoo but I could not find any excuse for preferring gentoo over arch. I wanted my os ready to do stuff and had no time to wait for it to compile everything. why bother? to squeeze that .1% in performance? my pc isn't 15 years old, I'm not really trying to salvage a fossil out of nostalgia. the only reason for hating arch is because of this
I would never touch anything Jow Forumsmade you surely have guts
I used it back in 2010 but then updates started to break it every other day.
It doesnt respect your software or init freedom. However, parabola, a fork of arch, does both. I use it on one of my day-to-day machines and it works beautifully.
isn't this just poor planning on the dev side? not really arch fault
I used it for a while then they started to change their directory layout, IIRC it had something to do with where the bulk of libraries would be stored for dynamic linking. Long story short it broke my entire install. So I reinstalled and then another update a few days later FUBAR'd that install too.
Never again.
It's great, but not user friendly. Which is where Manjaro comes in, it's Arch with a facelift and better tools, including 2 installation softwares.
>You only have to do a bit of reading to install Arch
It takes a lot of time compared to distros with their own installers, and also it's not user friendly at all. Even RMS doesn't install arch on his own.
Contains and leads users to proprietary software. Install Parabola.
Causes way too much issues by trying to solve too many issues.
E.g. a month ago I booted up my laptop and I was greeted by a little systemd message saying "Time to update your man-db cache :^)". I waited an hour for it to complete before I realized that it should have finished in a minute or two and that it actually silently crashed and told me fuck all about it.
As it turns out, this spanking great init system decided it can schedule updating and indexing of your system (/usr/lib/systemd/system/man-db.timer).
So I manually powered it off.
And of course, that fucked up my xorg.conf.
networkd is pretty neat
daemon control is nice as well
>15 year old arch ricers
same, also don't like Windows and RHEL because it's used by poos, macOS because of faggots with aids and don't even get me started on Debian or freeBSD and their coced community...
you fucking retard, just use what works for you.
>bleeding edge
as long as you
pacman -Syu
pacdiff
and stay away from testing repo you should be fine
>the shitty AUR
it's user maintained. what do you expect? you can still compile from source. heck, you can even install deb packages if you must
>the even shittier wiki
people on other distros use it as well. must be really shitty what they have in comparison then
>look up arch communities
>look at bugs and problems
>most fall into either "wontfix: we are too minimalist (lazy) to support this feature that every other distro can do" or "bugs are fault of upstream and we don't fix them, but we also only support upgrading all packages at once so enjoy your broken package until they fix it"
>look at gentoo community
>they are actually helpful and knowledgeable and don't have retarded principles like "KISS"
>package manager actually does everything you want it to do
Also the default arch repos are tiny so you'd have to compile from source anyway, but using shitty non-maintained scripts instead of like in gentoo from maintained ones
the update kernel by removing previous one thing is fucking annoying.
sometimes you have e.g. your ESP partition not mounted automatically and now you cannot mount it to change bootloader config.
Manjaro is better in every way.
If you had half a brain, you'd click on designated links to learn more.
It's not hard to install. Why do people think this?
>Hard to install is obvious one
youtube.com
This is a shit video. You can just read the installation guide and be done in 10 minutes. If you need a really simple guide then use the Parabola beginners guide.
Default lennartd
Arch is Gentoo for those who didn't make it.
Arch and Gentoo are completely different. The only comparison between them is that they both have an obnoxious userbase. Other than that there is no comparison.
I used arch for some time
At first everything was great
But occasionally kernel updates would break some shit
And now gnome in general is just buggy, especially nautilus.
I switched to manjaro but it's not very different.
install gentoo
Nice meme. I'm using Gentoo right now.
I like it, been running it for years , can't think of any problems I've had but you should subscribe to arch-announce mailing list as there's the occasional major change that can catch some people out if they just mindlessly pacman -Syu all the time
lists.archlinux.org
As an example. It is rare, but it does happen
wipe and reinstall it
>Not backing up your configs, in your whole /home.
Why?
this nigga get it
Gnome is in a continual state of brokenness since 3.
systemd networking is really the only thing i've ever found legitimate complaint with. Systemd-resolved and other networkmanager based nonsense has never ever ever worked.
>binary logs
was only theoretical.
Baste false flag poster
>Hard to install
>Literally installs itself
Wut
>I switched to manjaro but it's not very different.
Manjaro is to Arch, as Ubuntu is to Debian. Without the corporate control.
I'm pretty sure the livecd comes with a text file that explains the whole process, too. ArchWiki is the single best resource for anything linux-y too. They even package it for you.
>This is actually true for the majority of Arch users at least on Jow Forums.
why retards likes to comment about things they never used?, the installation process on arch and gentoo is the fucking same, the pacstrap is like the basic gentoo's stage. The only difference with gentoo retards is that they have to way to compile every single fucking package
pkgbuilds and ebuilds are pretty similar too.
Is there a dump for weeb pics like this and or did you guys just collect them with time?
Opensuse is a better distro if you want rolling release like Arch. It automatically sets up btrfs snapshots so if your system breaks from an update, you can recover from it.
opensuse is preddy good too, yeah.
It's shitty OSX like all linux distros.
It's distributed with nonfree blobs. Try Parabola.
The problem is that you never know if everything will work after an update. And this is because Arch allows to easily install proprietary packages such as Nvidia drivers.
While on Ubuntu there is even greater chance of not working when jumping versions with such packages, on Arch you update more often.
I once had a problem where new X11 broke Nvidia KMS on optimus cards, I had to temporaly downgrade.
On the other hand, if you have a simple setup, the issues would be fixed next day.
Still better than using 3-year old software on LTSes on mayor distros.
On Ubuntu such things would never happen since it would cause enormous problems to even setup your propietary drivers.
And Gentoo sucks since its packages are older than on Debian. Plasma 5 was still masked, when Arch deleted Plasma 4 for simplicity.