[necrotic_comp]

My only/major beefs with Arch are the frequency with which they introduce breaking changes, the fact that your system may not work if you miss a news item, and the lack of humility in the community. It works, for sure, but I always felt a bit iffy when doing a massive update after a while, and I felt like I was being dragged along with their choices instead of making my own.

I bought a beefy computer last year and installed Gentoo on it - it's obviously not for everyone, but its reputation as a hard to install distro is overstated, and if you have enough horsepower and ram, an emerge update isn't a big deal. Additionally, having the ability to tailor your builds to not include libraries you don't need AND to install the sources and debug information is huge. Mostly, though, it feels logically designed, and standard sysadmin tools allow you to do maintenance without much hassle.

I'd recommend at least looking into it to see if it fits your use case.

[lbhdc]

> My only/major beefs with Arch are the frequency with which they introduce breaking changes, the fact that your system may not work if you miss a news item, and the lack of humility in the community. It works, for sure, but I always felt a bit iffy when doing a massive update after a while, and I felt like I was being dragged along with their choices instead of making my own.

This was my experience with Arch as well. It left me feeling like I needed to check the wiki to see if there were any new warnings before updating.

I switched to distros that release ~6-12mo, and I have found my environment is much stable. Currently on Fedora, but considering trying out Suse Leap.

[kjs3]

I've been running Suse for a couple of years on a lot of my kit, and it's been pretty worry free once I learned the deltas from my previous distro (e.g. zypper instead of apt). The only issue I've had is that once you get beyond the general desktop productivity environment it's a bit of a second class citizen. Usually not an issue, but make sure your favorite workflows/apps come over painlessly.

[pimeys]

It has been much better for the past 5+ years, but what I did with my workstation is I installed Arch into a btrfs file system. Now when I `pacman` whatever, it'll create a snapshot first and then run the updates. If anything breaks, I go to the grub menu, boot into the previous snapshot and rollback into that state.

Never needed it yet, but it's good to have. I remember the problems in the past...

You can also do it with zfs, but I wanted to not have the filesystem as DKMS.

[pkulak]

I do exactly the same thing. Snapper is amazing. I've used it once, but only because it was a bit more convenient than downgrading the one app that got messed up.

I also used it recently when I tried to get the new Assassin's Creed to run. I knew it was a bit of a crap shoot, so I took a snapshot before I started compiling and installing the Git versions of graphics and translations libraries. After a couple hours I realized it wasn't going to work and just rolled my root directory back to before I started throwing packages all over my system. It was very satisfying. :D

[Shared404]

If you don't have the specs to handle Gentoo and all of it's emerge's, you may like Void as well.

I've been using it a bit at work recently, and am probably going to move a personal machine or two over to it soon.