[the__alchemist]

Anecdote: Most of the software I use isn't available in `apt`, or the version there is dated. I prefer to get software from its official source, not a third party I don't know will have the current or any versions. And, there is more to software than free/OSS.

[popol12]

I switched to an Arch based distribution and it's night and day. Almost everything is available through the AUR, you even have the choice to rebuild a package or to use a pre-compiled one. I'll never go back to Ubuntu and apt.

Oh, and it's a rolling release so my install doesn't break every 2 years with the new LTS upgrade.

[j_w]

The AUR really is night and day compared to other package managers. Official packages get updates FAST, user packages typically not much slower.

Issues with new versions get immediate solutions on the forums, so breaking changes hardly impact you if you just check the front page of the forums when they do happen.

Arch has the reputation of being the hardcore distro, but really its so user friendly to manage after the initial setup (and I think they have an "easy" setup process if you don't want to manually configure everything now).

[bobajeff]

I want to be able rely an an arch distro enough to be my main but it just seems like it needs too much maintenance and I'm afraid of some parts of my system breaking in some updates.

Meanwhile, on Ubuntu/Debian-based systems I can just install locally or use a third party repository for the things that need to be more up to date.

[j_w]

Since I've started daily driving Arch on my personal machine I've had two instances that I can recall of a breaking change, both related to an NVIDIA driver update relying on some package that for whatever reason couldn't be bundled with the NVIDIA driver package. On the front page of the forums the fix was immediately available.

The reputation that things are always breaking just doesn't have merit anymore.

[tombert]

You might look into NixOS unstable.

Its packages are generally pretty up to date, like Arch, but every update/rebuild snapshots the current system.

I find this pretty wonderful; if I am mucking around with packages or boot parameters or whatever, it’s way less scary; if I break something I simply reboot and choose an older generation.

[popol12]

I was scared too and found out that it's actually the opposite !

I'm using Manjaro (derived from Arch), so I can't talk for Arch itself but so far (2 years) it's been way more friendly to me than Ubuntu (which I used for 7 years before).

[bobajeff]

Long ago manjaro was my favorite distro because it had a lot of great defaults that are rare among distros. The thing I didn't like was always having to be on top of updates or the update system would break and fixing it was a process. However, the thing that made me stop altogether was that one update caused my Keyboard to stop working!