First of all how are these MY failures and not failures of the Arch ecosystem? Running `pacman -Syu` on any given Friday should NOT leave you with a machine that no longer boots. Installing a very stable software such as fucking python3 shouldn't break litereally everything else that is linked to same lib. Everything is anecdotal, but trying to use that to dimiss literally OS breaking incidents feels silly.
If I type in `apt update && apt update -y` I can be sure that my computer will be usable after a reboot. I've once ran into an issue where the next kernel update didn't boot, so Ubuntu booted me back into the previous version and told me the issue. This is exactly the kind of thing I want my OS to protect me from. I am not a kernel developer and don't have sufficient knowledge or interest to get into that. I also don't want to be afraid to update my software.
I have nothing against Arch or its users, but I wouldn't recommend it to anyone who actually needs to use their computer and isn't willing to spend a day every now and then fixing their OS.
Just as a side note on this rant: My experience is by no means unique. The whole reason I even gave Arch a second try (after the python3 library ordeal) was that my colleagues are using Arch as their daily driver, but even with them every now and then I hear how they have to fiddle with their packages to make things work/compile or that they updated something and something broke (often it is audio).
Says who? That's pretty much not what Arch tries to guarantee at all. You're at the very least supposed to read the announcements and you should upgrade often, as otherwise the end result is undefined. Some distros like Debian support partial updates, Arch very explicitly does not.
If you use Arch the way it's intended to be used, you're not going to have to spend a day every now and then to fix your OS, but if you don't, you will. I use it as my work system for years and every time I broke it was my own fault.
And if you don't want to use it the way it's intended, then just use another OS that better matches your expectations. I don't use Arch on my server after all.
>you should upgrade often
But you litereally started by saying that upgrading any given Friday is not quranteed to leave you with working OS
To give a practical example. In 2013 Arch Linux merged all binaries into /usr/bin. This architectural improvement was obviously a major change, and the way Arch is designed as a rolling distro meant that you couldn't leave users behind on the old way of doing things. After the change, everyone needed to be using the merged /usr/bin.
This is a designed lack of backwards compatibility that means you're guaranteed to be using the latest system architecture at all times, reducing the maintenance burden for the maintainers and making sure everything just works most of the time. But it also means that you have to be willing to do system maintenance to get your local system in line with what the Arch devs use. In the case of the /usr/bin merge, manual steps to perform the upgrade were required. [1] They weren't hard, but Arch requires this kind of oversight as part of its design.
If you're not willing to perform that kind of maintenance, then Do Not Use Arch! It's designed for people who are - although in practice this kind of intervention is required only about once a year.
[1]https://archlinux.org/news/binaries-move-to-usrbin-requiring...
Not "if it's ok to update", but "whether there's manual intervention required". See https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/General_recommendations#Pac.... Not reading that before upgrade seems to be the main reason for post-upgrade failures.
> But you litereally started by saying that upgrading any given Friday
The point was that you should rather upgrade "every Friday" than "any given Friday".
As from my other replies, that's awesome - you're looking for a usage paradigm that is not what Arch is for; it requires attention and regular maintenance, and "keeping up" on a regular basis. You've hit the nail on the head with the followup sentence, you have to be willing to spend a day every now and then keeping up.
Arch is not for people who want to ignore their system and hope it all just keeps working, then update 700 packages all at once and have it come crashing down. There is an agreement (the social kind, not the legal kind) you enter into when using Arch that you actually engage with it on a regular basis because you like doing that and like to tinker. It's build for experienced Linux techs who like to engage on a regular basis with the plumbing.
>It's build for experienced Linux techs who like to engage on a regular basis with the plumbing.
Yeah, sure. This is where the "Linux is only free if your time has no value" saying comes from. I think I've said this in all comments in the thread, but if it isn't abundantly clear anyone is free to use any distro they want or any OS for that matter (I use all major 3 almost daily), but I would not recommend anyone to use Arch unless they are willing to spend a lot of time fiddling with their machine and I wouldn't install it on anything that I might have to use at a moments notice since as I've been told part of Arch is that updating your packages just breaks your OS.
Yes, exactly right. As an Arch user, I endorse this.
It goes beyond anecdotal evidence. I mean, if you look at the Arch news feed[0], there are a good few updates since then that are labelled "requires manual intervention". I like Arch and it's great they're posting those notices, but I don't think it can be claimed that upgrading an on-the-edge system is always problem free.
That's by design. If you choose Arch as your system, you're agreeing to that (otherwise why would you choose it in the first place - that's a direct consequence of its value proposition). I'm not sure I would call that a "problem".
You absolutely ignored your Arch system for far too long and most likely missed important News notifications that manual actions were required, it happens now and again. With updating 700 packages at once you've just dug yourself a hole - Arch is not a system you can ignore for that long, by design it's always changing to reflect the newest upstream changes to software. As I posted to the other person, if you want a distro to ignore over time then Arch is not for you.
Arch's demanding nature with respect to being routinely updated follows directly from the fact that its package manager is stateful and unsophisticated (e.g., its dependency resolver is incomplete (will fail even when solutions are available, because dependency resolution is NP-complete and 'gotta go fast')).
It's totally fair to call this an Arch/pacman defect. Part of it is also lack of enduring hacks like Debian and derivatives use (long-lived transitional packages), which is a choice by Arch developers. A glance at the online Arch package listing and some example .PKGINFO files indicates that Pacman also doesn't support metadata like 'provides' and 'replaces' in DEB and RPM, which means the developers have fewer tools at their disposal for dealing with transitions like that, even when they want to.
Clearly many users don't mind all these tradeoffs, but others who shy away from Arch after experiences like that mentioned in the GP comment are totally right, as a matter of fact, to blame the design of the package manager for their woes.
We're not looking at the price of bleeding edge packages or a rolling release. We're looking at the price of 'keep[ing] it simple, stupid'.
Edited to add: the existence of the DUR shows that Debian probably doesn't fall on the right side of the complexity tradeoff for the purpose of maximizing user contributions. The same users who contribute to it could also create their own Debian packages, but they don't, presumably in part because it seems harder to get into. (It's not that bad if you use debhelper, but it is also clearly a crufty system that has evolved this way and that over time.)
So Arch's philosophy also clearly has other strengths. But imo we shouldn't give it a pass on the kind of fragility outlined in the GP.
I guess this is what you get for making assumptions about a platform you're technically unfamiliar with, isn't it?
pacman and apt have a different feature-set. Handling a neglected system and recovering from terminated upgrade are explicitly not what pacman does. If you expect such features from your system, why did you install Arch in the first place?
I disagree 100%. This laptop I'm typing from now was installed 2014-07-06, it's my main personal machine with all the random things your typical desktop does and it works great. I similarly used a work laptop almost as long until I was forced off Arch for compliance reasons this year (sigh). Your anecdotal failures are not everyone's experience, definitely not mine.