[bbv-if]

And he didn't mention that in Arch a routine upgrade can break everything which rather doesn't happen in the release-based distros. It has happened to me more that once over the last 8 years. I still use it nevertheless, but it's definitely not for everyone.

[number6]

This Never happened to me in 5 years of arch. I always considered this a hoax. How did Arch break?

[bbv-if]

To name a few: when systemd was introduced; when there were changes made to the file structure (moving everything to /usr); when kde4 was replaced with kde5. And there were more issues, I just don't remember all of them. Reading the news before the update could have helped sometimes but I don't do that every time I execute `pacman -Syu` for various reasons; and sometimes problems are unexpected or just bugs fixed on the next update.

[KozmoNau7]

I will second this, I faced these exact same issues, for the same reasons.

If you don't subscribe to the Arch news feed, you're taking a chance on every upgrade, that your system will not boot correctly.

[zdkl]

Yeah but that's the point of Arch: teaching new blood to RTFM when it's patchday.

You can trivially fubar an arch install by updating your base install+user additions if you're not in the loop with the releases of whatever you installed.

[KozmoNau7]

That also makes it a bad distro to choose unless you want to be a hardcore sysadmin and micromanage your personal system.

That's generally what distro maintainers are supposed to minimize for the end users.

I see people recommending Arch for newbies, who maybe just want to dip their toes. They're figuratively thrown into the deep end, and I just don't think that's a particularly good idea for most people.

[zdkl]

Yeah if you're looking for easy and risk free, yiu should stay with windows or mac. OTOH, if you want linux to stop being a black box, install arch. Just don't expect it to be your stable day to day workhorse with no effort.

[bbv-if]

For me, a simple alert "Hey, this update can break things, do you know what you're doing?" in case of a risky update would be enough.

[KozmoNau7]

Which is what Mint does by default. It shows the update, but doesn't select it automatically.

[arc_of_descent]

I used Arch Linux around 4 years back. I did a routine upgrade and it broke my system.

What is this rolling release fiasco? Even Ubuntu, which I use now has a "release" (technically an pt-get upgrade), almost every other day. But I've never had it break my system. If you keep your Ubuntu updated a dist-upgrade works just fine.

I might try Arch again, but for now I'm sticking to Ubuntu.

[zdkl]

No judgement, I've been in the same place.

What you describe sounds like the consequence of installing a lot of packages. Arch "prefers" when you strip it down to what you need, if only because that way you don't need to worry about too many version mismatches.

[KozmoNau7]

So if you actually try to use the system for more than a handful of things, it tends to break? That's not very reassuring.

[zdkl]

You put it well in another thread with "it absolutely isn't [...] a good distro for people who just want to get on with life."

If you're looking for your computer to Just Work(tm) look elsewhere. However I stand by my comment about it being an outstanding learning tool for the curious & future sysadmins.

[agumonkey]

In years I might have had 3 breakage, it didn't feel like a specific issue because for instance ubuntu upgrade install didn't work well enough either.