I keep seeing conflicting opinions about Arch Linux on Sup Forums. is it stable or not? Some users call it a time sink OS but I also see a lot of users claim that they've never had any problems with Arch.
They can't both be right so I killed a whole thread so that it can be settled once and for all in a melee of autistic screeching.
Works on my machine.
>is it stable or not?
it really depends on your hardware. It worked great on my desktop PC, but on my laptop it was a fucking headache to set up. (and it even broke after an update true meme)
It's work to set up (though less than Gentoo). If it's unstable, it's probably your own fault, though.
This.
Even if everyting goes perfectly it's still a time sink
0 servers run arch, because it is an unstable OS
It's unstable for production and as a reliable workstation, it's simple for amateur usage such as ricing and shitposting.
If you can build your system from a minimal installation such as Debian netinst and aware about chroot you'll have no problems to use it.
You can write shell scripts to automate your tedious steps.
you have a OS that constantly change. Even if the developers and mainteiners where serious, it's almost impossible to keep a stable system with an ever changing OS, even worse if every package have the ability to break others.
That aside, if you are willing to put some work "it could work for you". If you want something more stable or at least predictable but staying in the bleeding age, you could try Fedora. It changes every 7 months, so you will only make a full system upgrade every 7 months while keeping the bleeding age.
tl;dr: Try it, and if you like it, keep it. Not sure to try it? Use the last Ubuntu LTS.
I mean at that point, why not just run Debian's untested stream?
Isn't ubuntu going through some horrible changes?
I have it on old asus laptop, I have it on my desktop PC with ryzen CPU.
It works.
People who encounter problems might have some exotic hardware though.
It is possible that you might encounter problems.
install sourcemage
>lot of users claim that they've never had any problems with Arch.
That's because they don't do any shit with it and just rice their desktops and browse Sup Forums and watch anime all fucking day.
I ran Arch for 3 years and had tons of issues. Shit would break every week or so. Apps would just stop working because some package changed something and now it doesn't work anymore.
It's just a fucking mess. After I left Arch (and Linux for that matter), I don't miss it one bit.
they are going to drop their flagship DE that was developed for 4 years. That aside, they are going to use GNOME fallback as default.
Just use Ubuntu LTS
As a NEET, I make more shekels than you. Let that sink in wagecuck.
Some people use, debootstrap with the sid repository will behave similarly to Arch.
The difference is that sid is officially unstable and no one officially gives guarantees that it can't broke down eventually, Arch maintainers in the other hand keep some consistency. But that's theoretical.
Arch is a toy and shouldn't be used on anything serious.
This
my desktop works fine and looks cool
but my laptop is a fucking nightmare, sound brakes all of the time and wifi doesnt works you need to compile drivers and shit
it all depends on the hardware though, im sure any thinkpad is fine
running fine for the time being on my system, Settled temporarily with GNOME3 running on my i7 4790 iGPU until sway improves enough to be my daily driver.
KDE plasma (wayland) kept freezing my entire input and panel, absolute turn off, I don't like Gnome 3 much either but at least it runs stable on my system. Xubuntu+i3wm is my favorite so far but the screen tearing even with compton installed was painful.
Only thing giving me shit was NVIDIA with wayland on arch
>Special snowflake EGL implementation, poor performance so far.
>Can't fucking modify fan speed with nvidia-settings in wayland
>If I try to use Nouveau still can't fucking modify fan speed at all on GTX980 because the implentation is locked behind the proprietry driver
Got sick of my PC sounding like a jet engine at 100% fan speed until I found a quick hack which involved opening an instance of X in a sperate autostarting tty running nvidia-settings to change fan speed with persistance mode so the card remembers that setting after that session is killed.
I only use that card for passthrough now, can't wait to replace it with an AMD GPU, their open source drivers should be far less painful to deal with.
Myself, I like pacman better than apt-* and I don't love Debian's package splitting style (-dev packages, for instance). And AUR is comfy.
Unity needs to die
barely had my setup runing for a week, I feel uncomfortable compiling stuff from the AUR only installed firefox-nightly and gnome extension integration rather stick with pacman as much as I can to keep the system easy to maintain. With AUR stuff I'd have to baby sit with every upgrade even if I do make an attempt to automate it with a script to pull/makepkg. Sounds like a nightmare to deal with all the dependencies once I have a lot of applications installed.
I used it for my media pc for a while. It was pretty good I thought. I did have to fix it a few times going through the change over to systemd on updates, I had a bit of weird set up for historical reasons where some partitions were on zfs and some not and it got a bit much for maintenance after a while and it was annoying all the ram usage of zfs so I wiped it.
Pros: super up to date packages, AUR configurations packages for anything you want, acestream, sickbeard, all sorts of shit. Easy to get info about any obscure detail off the wiki.
Cons: breakage and maintainence if you have a heavily custom set up (you should try and keep up to date).
If I did it again I would probably try it with btrfs and take snapshots any time I do an update. Then rollback if I can't be fucked fixing any breakages.
After a little while messing with the extensions I don't mind gnome 3.
Have to fiddle around with gTile a bit and see if I can get the tiling to bearable.
stable af
uptime 40+ days
the only problem I had is with fat32 usb driver.. the transfer rate was 100kb/s
It's not for lazy people. Idiots who stupidly hit yes to everything in updates are bound to get in trouble. If you KNOW your system and what's on it, you're fine.
If you use an Arch installer like Antergos, you won't really be wasting any time, it'll just work.
Unstable only woth NVidia.
This.
Only professional linux distribution.
Its fine, just dont enable testing.
Ive been using arch for years.
Again, dont enable testing.
I havnt had a damn thing break in years.. well except for last week when I enabled testing to get the new plasma update a day sooner and it broke dolphin and a pissed off kde.
But that was my fault for enabling testing.
I do virtualmachine work, did virtualbox but we kvm now. This includes nested vms.
I do gpu passthough and game without an issue.
video transcoding, never had an issue even with hardware acceleration.
multiple monitors
heavy browsing (600+ tabs, 20gb ram used for just firefox alone)
samba, ftpd, dlna, (arch) vps running voip and irc servers
firewall
multiple networks on the same machine with one physical port masqueraded straight to a vpn
shit I cant even remember right now
sometimes all of this shit at once, but usually just most of it at once. never been an issue.
How does a NEET afford all the hardware needed for mining?
Not him but I've been running Arch for about 9 months or so. I've had my DE break twice. I've had issues with Nvidia drivers just stopped working, just last week I've had OpenSSL break colord daemon which caused colord to dump core ever 2 seconds which filled up my SSD in a day.
I've had other shit happen too and I've had to roll back updates several times.
When people tell me they don't have any issues with Arch, I think these people don't really use their Linux all the time. I use my Arch for 8hrs+ every day and I've had issues.
If you really think there's no issues, I think you should just look at the Arch forum and also Arch bug tracker. There's TONS and TONS of issues daily. Many might not impact you but I bet some do.
Anyway, I continue using it because I haven't used windows in like 8 years and never will. So I'm stuck with this shit.
>Nvidia
stop reading there
I've ran it on a desktop and a laptop for quite a while before switching to gentoo. I didn't experience the "update broke xorg" meme and it was quite stable for me. Practically it was like debian with a different package manager and up to date packages.
You can use arch anywhere if you dont want to install it yourself but overall it realitively is a timesink, which isn't that bad if you like tinkering. You might as well try Gentoo if you want to go the timesink route since you at least get the benefits of a source based distro unlike arch which doesnt bring anything new to the table other than pacman. If you only want a environment you can achieve that on other distros as well.
I'm using it 8h+/d as well and only issues I had was some months ago using infinality + harfbuzz, though I think it affected other distros as well, and more than a year ago when some KDE updates broke lib64 -> lib symlink and couldn't boot. I'm having a USB with Arch on it so it took me 5 minutes, but others that don't will have a pretty serious problem.
>I also see a lot of users claim that they've never had any problems with Arch.
I didn't have any problems with Arch for years and years, until I installed it.
>a environment
A minimal environment*
Interesting. And now that you mention it, I've had so many issues with Bluetooth and Arch that I just gave up at some point. For some reason, I just can't get BT working. Several people who know Arch better than me (+ Arch forums too) tried to help but we just couldn't get it working. It would just fail even though the firmware is correct etc.
It does work under Windows when I tried booting into it. But under Arch... nope.
I have been using Arch as my desktop OS since 2008, so I can tell you this: Arch is the kind of distro you would use if you like to customize your system. If you are OK with reading the wiki, the forum and the home page from time to time, then Arch is definitively a good option. If you like things that "just works" out of the box, then it's obviously not the right distro for you.
It's pretty simple isn't it?
Actually, both can be right to some extent, depending mostly on the hardware and software used. My experiences using and maintaining three different Arch machines have definitely been closer to than though. And yes, they are my daily drivers. If I ever set up a (home)server I'll most likely use Arch on it too.
I definitely recommend checking for hardware compatibility (had to disable NCQ and known issues before putting together a machine. Proprietary drivers (mainly nVidia but also AMDGPU-PRO to lesser extent) can also be a pain in the ass.
The "time sink" meme is bullshit spouted by fags who never even used it. Takes 15 minutes to install following the official guide. The installation guide is one page for fucks sake.
The only way you can consider it a time sink is if there is some compatibility issue with your hardware that you spend hours googling and trying to fix. If any Linux distro "just werks" on your machine, then Arch will too, and there's literally no reason for it to take over an hour to get installed and set up. Read the goddamn wiki and there will be no problems, it's one page.
Now as for the "unstable" meme, this too is bullshit spouted by fanboys of other operating systems who've never actually used Arch. I have updated at least once a week for the past two years now. ZERO ISSUES. How did I accomplish this? Well there's this page called "archlinux.org", and on the front page, they have this thing where they inform you if there's an issue with updating that requires manual intervention. Usually no more than a couple commands in the terminal that they tell you to type. Does that sound like too much? The whole process takes no longer than installing Windows updates. In fact you save a lot more time because those issues are very rare, while Windows updates will always force you to stare at the spinning circle screen as it applies updates before you can actually use your computer.
Arch is great. Literally just works, as long as you're using hardware that is properly supported by any major Linux distro. Any hardware issues come from people not researching to find a properly compatible machine to run Linux with.
its supposed to be cutting edge
I tried it once and everytime I did an update something broke apart, was no fun.
Guy you replied to here.
Back on my old computer, I did have nvidia break for like two years and had to use noveau, so I know what youre talking about with the nvidia drivers being shit. But that would have to be pinned on nvidia.
Check your pacman.conf and see if any of the testing is enabled.
There are small quarks that I think are mostly related to plasma more than anything else, like clipboard issues which Ive pretty much normalize now.
But if I walk away I know other shit like samba or voip will still be running right.
>Check your pacman.conf and see if any of the testing is enabled.
I know about testing. Was never stupid enough to do that. I consider Arch to be "testing" for other Linux distros tho.
Arch's website runs on an Arch server
>bleeding age
I HATE the arch package manager
It seems to be alright when it comes to stability
setting up is easy if your computer is compatible, it is a bit of a time sink
did I mention, pacman is cancer?
this. thank you for posting this. have a (You)
Okay, here's my understanding. If you want arch stability, install a vanilla DE and leave it alone. it should be OK. The people who make Arch unstable are generally ricers who mess so much with the configs that often updates come along that break things.
If you really want stability, install something like Manjaro that holds back the rolling release for a couple of weeks while the Arch user base beta tests everything.
I use Arch for at least 12 hours every single fucking day and I never had any issue like that, so you know what? I don't fucking believe you: you either are some incompetent pussy boy who can't read a fucking manual page and do stupid things like partial updates, or you are a shill. Either way, get the fuck of my board.
you really need to go back to Windows. You definitely shouldn't keep using Arch if you're literally too fucking dumb to get it working. It just works. Not for you apparently. Buy a fucking mac if you can't even handle Windows.
Sup Forums is secretly full of tech illiterates.
>"""secretly"""
You all know you like those errors. Yes, it's a pain in the ass to fix it, but that's the fun part. It's challenging to find a solution. Of course not so funny when it breaks every minute but you get the point.
I have had less problems with Arch than with Debian "Stable". And I used Arch way longer.
>settled once and for all