Same experience.

Arch has been nearly maintenance free, and it's been the one distribution where when I did break something, I was able to fix it 100% without nuking and starting over.

I still can't bring myself to run it on servers for some reason, and I go back to Debian stable for those, but honestly, I'm not sure why. I'm starting to feel that a rolling release would make for a lower maintenance server because it's always a PITA when the inevitable end-of-life comes into play and the upgrade inevitably fails and I have to reconfigure everything anyways.

Ubuntu in contrast would ALWAYS find new and bizarre ways to break. ESPECIALLY when snap came into play.

I agree, Arch is amazing. I haven't been using it for a few years, I've been on Ubuntu in an attempt to be closer to how a "normal computer user" would experience Linux. But every single time Ubuntu Softwate messed something up, every single time I get a notification to close Firefox in <13 days to avoid disruptions, every time I click the "update all" button on Ubuntu Software and it tells me it can't because the Snap Store is running (as a background process which I can't close through the UI), I get the urge to go back. At this point, it's only inertia which keeps me on Ubuntu, I don't want to take the time to set stuff up anew. But at this rate, I'm sure I'll finally make the switch sooner rather than later.

I'm not philosophically against Snap as an idea. But what I am against is all the absolutely terrible UX decisions and bugs which Canonical evidently considers "acceptable". It makes the whole Linux desktop look like a joke.

Maybe it's time to realise it is a joke. That Linux will remain a programmer OS and an OS for locked-down consumer devices, but not a general consumer desktop-style OS. And maybe we should recognise that in such a world, there is no space for Ubuntu Desktop.

I never have a problem with this, but I do shutdown my computer everyday. I do actually use arch as well but a lot less than Ubuntu and Debian, my feeling is that Arch is a lot more trouble than Ubuntu and Debian. I am very conservative with my desktop I always want to be able to work, I've had zero problems with that attitude running Ubuntu since it was just an idea. All problems I've had were self inflicted and there are many foot guns for sure.

I also shut down my computer every night. If it works for you I'm happy for you, but it's more trouble than Arch was for me.

The stability is nice while it lasts, but I've had way too many major things break when upgrading to a new release. The most extreme case was the time Ubuntu 19.10 broke GDM, so anyone with an nvidia card and auto-login enabled had their system bricked. This is even though I reported the issue a long time before the release, and there were very reasonable workarounds proposed in the issue discussion in good time to fix the issues before release. Ubuntu 21.04 released with a nextcloud-desktop application which segfaulted on launch. I also reported this a long time before release, and it was ignored because they had already frozen the packages they import from Debian, so I had to deal with a desktop which couldn't sync my files.

I haven't experienced similar huge issues in Arch, but more importantly, when an issue does occur, I can expect a fix to be out in days, not weeks or months.

This is why I stay on LTS versions. I'm about to install 22.04 on a new SSD. I'll dual boot 20.04 to work until I'm confident that I can setup 22.04 with all the GNOME extensions I need to have a sane desktop, plus all the software I need to do my job. Actually maybe I'll give a try to Debian 11, no snaps there.

Care to share what GNOME extensions you like? I've gone so far as to hack its CSS files, but that's not a happy place to be.

Here's the list, but the goal first: I want a desktop with only a bottom bar (I'd buy a Mac if I wanted a top one,) a task bar (like old Windows,) status icons and clock in the bottom right (old Windows again?), no laucher / dock on screen, virtual desktops but no animations that move everything on my screen, solid color for the desktop background.

1. Applications Menu - for when I forget the name of an app but I know more or less which category it belongs to.

2. Custom Hot Corners - to disable all actions started by moving the pointer to a corner.

3. Dash to Panel - The important one: panel to the bottom, intellihide the bottom bar, show the taskbar, position the date and system menus, background color, windows previews, workspace isolation, ungroup applications, disable gestures,

4. Desktop Icons - this seems to be a system extension, the only two icons I see are the trash bin and a link to my home directory. I'm not using them from the desktop.

5. Extensions - an extensions menu, useful only when I don't have Firefox open, so basically never. I could remove this extension.

6. GSConnect - not related to desktop customization but even more important IMHO. It's the GNOME implementation of KDE Connect.

7. Notification Center - notifications from the bottom right, in a menu, etc.

8. Places Status Indicator - a menu in the bottom bar with the bookmarks defined in the file manager.

9. Recent Items - a menu in the bottom bar with the recently opened documents.

10. Simple net speed - current bandwidth used by my laptop, in the bottom bar.

11. Sound Input & Output Device Chooser - list of sound output and input devices, set volume per device.

12. Start Overlay in Application View - very important one: when I press the super key I get the list of the available applications instead of the outlines of the open windows (what would I use them for? They are already on my screen.)

13. User Themes - to let me install a theme from my disk.

14. Workspace Switch Wraparound - I have one workspace per customer plus a couple for me. They are arranged horizontally. I go to a workspace with a hotkey but I also move with super-alt left/right and if I want to move a window across workspaces I do it with ctrl-super-alt left/right. This extension makes moving leftward work even on the first workspace and moving rightward work in the last one.

15. Workspaces to Dock - The other important one: it completes Dash to Panel at undoing the remaining default choices of GNOME Shell. Intellihide of the bottom bar (again?), no animations, never see workspace thumbnails, hide the workspace switcher.

I'm not missing the irony of throwing a lot of code at undoing the effects of a lot of code written by GNOME in the last decade. At least they still let us do it.

If somebody's asking why I'm not using another DE: I want to stay on the mayor ones (support and maintenance.) Why not KDE? I had bad memories of KDE around 2014: twice as many clicks than GNOME to do the same thing, especially in settings. Somebody told me that it got better but there is little incentive at investing time to only get where I am now. I'll do it if and when I won't be able to bend GNOME to my desires.

I only see problems with LTS. I do agree that there are some stability issues with Ubuntu that just don't get fixed, but this is mostly an issue with the other releases. This is the problem with staggered releases your fix might very well take 6 months.

Arch has severe problems in my mind especially in stability, but as you say it is easier to fix stuff and that is a huge plus. It's just a trap I try to avoid for my desktop!

Thanks for the explanation makes a lot more sense now!

I do truly believe that Ubuntu will be a lot more stable if you stay away from the "interim" releases. When I bring these things up with people, I do get the impression that Canonical looks at the non-LTS releases as more of a sort of public beta test to ensure the eventual LTS is solid. For the sort of stuff I do on my computer, using libraries which are up to 2 years out of date is incredibly painful; even the 6 months between interim releases is a problem sometimes.

So if you use the LTS, and the outdated packages isn't an issue for you, it makes sense that you'd be pretty happy with it. And maybe that's a use-case I'm underestimating.

I just do not trust new stuff being stable enough for a daily driver, but I still use it because I have to. As a developer I do not feel that this is an issue for me. I understand why it can be an issue.

I recently switched back to arch, and when I updated my xorg a few days later, a few things started crashing (notably godot) with a “[xcb] Unknown sequence number while processing queue”, so as much as I love arch I definitely wouldn’t call it “nearly 0 work” unless you just never update.

Unlucky, looks like it was an libx11 upstream bug. Has since been fixed as of a few hours ago at least.

That’s what I figured, yeah. I wish the Arch team used their news feed more often for things like this.

Same. I love their archiso, you can build your own little custom live ISO. I put Gnome and networking on mine, then install via a terminal shell window.

The only reason I reinstall is when I upgrade my box every 2 or 3 years. Years ago Arch was a bit more finicky, but today it's been perfectly stable for me, doing updates every Friday.

Might I suggest NixOS. Same benefits. Auto-updates are disabled by default. But even if they do happen it's not going to try to mess with currently running processes. In fact, the old version will still be installed just no longer to default. You could even run both simultaneously (using two separate config directories otherwise you get warnings). Snap seems like a huge regression in the Linux ecosystem.

Jumping on this bandwagon, running it for 10 years now and the last 5 years or so I've touched more or less nothing (aside from updates) and had no issues.

same here, I've been using arch for years both at home and for work, I love rolling release!

I'm using bspwm no DE, but I'm considering trying Arch+GNOME now that I've been forced to move to Ubuntu for work with my new job.

The update process broke a few times for me in Arch. Only been using it for a couple of years.

If you want to keep dpkg, apt, DEBs, etc., you can use Linux Mint, which doesn't have Snaps, unless you add it.

This also lets you download and install DEBs manually from projects that support Debian or Ubuntu DEBs but aren't in the official repos yet.