I can provide some details regarding the times things did break that I mentioned in the article.<p>* In September 2014, X broke, and I created an `/etc/X11/Xwrapper.config` file with the lines `allowed_users = anybody` and `needs_root_rights = yes` to get it to work again. I don't remember and don't have notes on why that helped. It sure does sound like a pretty terrible hack. I don't have that Xwrapper.config file anymore, and I also don't know when I deleted it.<p>* In June 2017, audio stopped working, but all I had to do was add my user to the `audio` group.<p>* In May 2018, X broke a second time. This time I downgraded the `xorg-server-common` and `xorg-server` packages. A few weeks later, I ran another system upgrade, and this one went fine.<p>These weren't the only problems, but they were the most disruptive. Generally, things like TrackPoint driver updates changing how the cursor responds or Firefox changing its UI have been far more annoying than Arch Linux issues :)
I always reinstall from scratch although I could just Debian "dist upgrade". My thinking is this: if, ten years ago, I somehow missed a security patch or some 0-day owned my machine before it was patched, then I'd potentially have been copying / dd'ing / rsync'ing a rootkit for ten years.<p>By installing from scratch at every new stable (or unstable) release, I get rid of a lot of potential security issues.<p>Now as an anecdote: ten years with the same install is nice but... I've got a dedicated server at OVH with 3400 days of <i>uptime</i>. You read that correctly. Nearly ten years of <i>uptime</i>. Once in a while I give temporary ssh access to people here and there just so they can type "uptime" and see. Kids: don't try this at home. Yes, it's insecure (although there's a firewall and only the SSH port open). No, it doesn't do much nor is it very useful. But it's fun to think I own one of the computer in the world with the biggest uptime.<p>I plan to kill it once it reaches ten years \o/
I stuck with Ubuntu (eventually Kubuntu) for many years because I thought it was the best for a no-fuss distro for folks who wanted things to just work (TM). I was afraid of things randomly breaking and interrupting my daily work. One day I eventually bit the bullet and installed Arch instead. The experience has been phenomenal, and if anything it feels <i>more</i> stable than Ubuntu. I was underestimating my own Linux knowledge, and it really isn't difficult to setup/configure at all if you have a reasonable understanding of how Linux works. The initial installation can be done by just following one of the many YouTube videos that break down the process step by step - you may even learn something if you don't already know it. I can't ever see myself going back.
I recently switched to an arch flavor because the AUR had a lot of little small utilities that make life better on wayland. Also, it's quite easy to install the latest version of golang and rust, etc.<p>Pros:
Documentation is excellent. Better than even Gentoo or Ubuntu's docs.<p>Cons:
Arch doesn't have an installer, and seems almost militantly against providing one, or a lot of other little utilities that could improve the user experience. I get the same sort of 'I suffered, therefore you must suffer, learn to RTFM noob' elitism that I saw with slackware 20 years ago. I'm a grizzled vet, I can figure this stuff out, but it doesn't help your average technically literate joe.<p>Updates seem to break for odd reasons. I had to uninstall nodejs to be able to do a system update. Why? There should be some sort of automated way to address this.
The best thing about the rolling releases is that the OS feels ageless. If I leave a Thinkpad sitting in a corner for 3 years and boot it up again to pacman -Syu, it will have basically the same software as my modern Thinkpad. This just tickles my sense of "this is how the computer _should_ behave".
The keyring issue that other commenters mention has to be the dumbest misfeature ever, because upgrading is guaranteed to fail, yet nobody fixes it. To make things worse, one of the top Google suggestions is a pacman command that can cause libc to be upgraded without a full system upgrade, which will make your system unusable immediately. No process will launch after that. I had to do very desperate recovery steps when that happened to me. To be honest, I'm still not entirely sure how to safely fix the keyring issue when it happens.<p>Other than that, and this may sound very strange given the last paragraph, Arch is <i>fantastic</i>. It's the most usable and useful system for general software development I've ever owned. Basically, you follow the wiki, and everything just works, sound, graphics, wifi. I never had that with Linux, not with Ubuntu, not with SuSE.
I'm a happy user of another rolling release distribution: Debian testing. It's on my desktop and a laptop for a decade (even more for the desktop since I transferred the OS from my previous desktop pc).<p>I can't remember any problem during the upgrades of the recent years. I often apply partial updates through `aptitude` on a weekly basis, and full upgrades once in a while (maybe monthly). There were some rough times long ago, but I think it was related to the transition from initrc to systemd: for a major change like this, it's would be surprising if a <i>testing</i> release was perfect.<p>I don't think I ever had problems as acute as having no Xorg or alsa. If several occurrences of this kind had occurred, I would call my OS <i>unstable</i>.
The software install on my daily driver dates from 1999 (though the oldest file in /etc is dated 1994) and was originally an old Red Hat release. It runs XFree86-4.x (last rebuilt 2004) which works fine with nvidia-390.132 (no more than a few years old) on a GTX780Ti and an i7-3770K (maybe a decade old itself now?). Desktop is currently Xfce-4.something (was FVWM for many years); applications only get upgraded as needed (autoconf and make FTW). It's been triplehead pretty much forever (easier now only one graphics card is needed, current running 3x27" Dell something or others).<p>I don't normally explain why it's so fast, just smile quietly when people comment on how instant the response is.
>my experience doesn’t match the common notion that Arch Linux is unstable<p>Arch is unstable, as in, package versions constantly change and can (will) introduce bugs and regressions. Debian is considered stable because apart from security updates package versions are set in stone til the next release, so there won't be any surprises.<p>This is stable/unstable difference, that doesn't mean that you can't break your OS and have to reinstall in either Debian or Arch.
As another Arch Linux user, I can attest that it is the rock-solid foundation for your computer.<p>I use double boot to host both Linux and Windows; when I need to use Windows, I just put Linux into hibernation. This greatly extends the amount of time it can go without being rebooted.<p>Driver and X problems still cropped up occasionally, but things seem much more reliable now than they did a while back.<p>This is a also the distro I'm familiar with from my time working on servers, where I've used it with ZFS with great success.
> "With Ubuntu, I would’ve had to upgrade (...) five times to end up with the latest LTS release.* And these release upgrades don’t always go smoothly either."<p>I read this in the exact moment I was upgrading to 22.04.1 end it stopped due to lack of space in /boot. A rare case of synchronicity in my life.
I've had the same install going since January 2012:<p><pre><code> > head -1 /var/log/pacman.log
[2012-01-22 14:55] installed filesystem (2011.12-2)
</code></pre>
In that time I've converted the install in-place from x86 to x64, migrated from legacy boot to uefi, replaced the entire RAID set twice, motherboards, CPUs, etc. It's my own ship of theseus. Many of these tasks people would say to do a reinstall, but I've always been able to find a guide on the arch wiki to do it in-place without losing anything.
I am currently running Fedora 35. I haven't reinstalled since at least Fedora 21 (maybe older, I can't quite remember)! Every 6 months, I do the standard fedora upgrade and keep on going! This reminds me, it is time to update to Fedora 36!
I have a similar experience, though only now am I faced with the existential crisis that "2013" is going to be "a decade ago" in a few months. My Arch Linux install started life as a VMWare Workstation image. It made it through two major init systems (sysvinit -> systemd), different audio subsystems (alsa -> pulseaudio -> pipewire), different WMs (gnome2 -> kde4 -> i3 -> sway), three filesystems (ext3 -> ext4, ext4 -> brtfs -> ext4, then ext4 -> zfs), several different versions of VMWare Workstation (7 through 14 I believe), different storage substrates, etc. It's also lived on three different uArchs (AMD Bulldozer c. 2012, Intel Skylake c. 2016, and Ryzen c. 2020) but VMWare abstracted most of that away, of course.<p>Eventually I got fed up with Windows and decided to `zfs send` the install to a real disk and booted it on bare metal. It has been my daily driver since then for the last 2 years or so. (I did drop into the Arch installer a last year to unfuck my bootloader while trying to get rEFInd & ZFS Boot Menu to work, but that was just building a new initramfs; I haven't run "pacstrap" since I built the image c. 2013.)<p>The flexibility this operating system has provided me with is nothing short of amazing. I do have to say though: since switching to Wayland + the in-kernel AMDGPU driver, I can't remember the last time my system was rendered unbootable. (Excepting the one time I tried to change my bootloader, but that's user error.) In hindsight I feel like the vast majority of Arch's reputation for breaking systems is overblown, and the blame rests mostly on DKMS + NVidia's proprietary drivers.
I've been using the same base-install of Gentoo since like 2010. Switched from Gnome to Xfce some time ago; new machines just `rsync` the stuff over. But when the root partition when from /dev/sda3 to /dev/nvme0p3 there was some switching.<p>Back in my Windows days (1990-2001) I was <i>NEVER</i> able to do anything like that; copying that damned registry. Had to make special files; apps would never work. It was a game changer to find a system that was as simple as copy the files to the new hardware.
The Arch Linux install on my ThinkPad X230 is about twelve years old now. For most of the time it was my primary laptop, until a couple of years ago when I turned it into a sort of home server with built-in KVM and battery backup.<p>In contrast to my experience running Gentoo or Fedora, I never experienced significant breakage when doing a system update. Having said that, I've always run a fairly minimal desktop environment and I've been conservative with wifi and audio software. So maybe I wasn't pushing it very hard, but still full credit to Arch for having a rock solid foundation.
I'm the same but with Gentoo, which is another rolling distribution. I've had it installed for over 12 years on multiple servers without any issues.
I am using the “same” MacOS installation since the first Intel Mac Mini (2006?). It has branched out to a dozen or so boxes (3 kids, a wife and a TV set etc). I had to make a clean install on one “leaf” only - a former main computer relegated to video watching (a lot of different video players, torrent clients and such) began crashing once in 2 days. Clean install helped.<p>But to be fair upgrading a Mac computer consists now of adding your old stuff on top of a new operating system, not adding a new operating system on top of your old stuff. But well…<p>I had a problem with USB daemon crashing sometimes (probably related to a famous rewrite of the daemon in C++). And most recently - the most shameful M1 related problem with unkillable screen saver wrongfully started when Remote Desktop is in use. (The bug is shameful cause an unkillable screen saver means that design review, code review, QA processes are all broken, and the fact that it was not fixed in a year(!) - means that tech support process is broken too. Looks scary for things to come. M1 is a great processor though).
I ran Archlinux with LTS kernel on my home laptop for 1.5 years and I stopped because of instabilities.
The last issue that I had was the update to pipewire, my bluetooth headset stopped working after suspend. I got fed up of tweaking configuration to make it work.
I could have reverted to pulseaudio.<p>But to be honest, the only major issue was an issue with pam login. I could not log in anymore after an update, had to search on the internet to find a workaround that consisted in updating a pamd.conf file in single user mode boot.
Many breaking updates were Gnome related...<p>Switched back to Windows 10 then 11 for a year, tried WSL2 and found it unstable (some random crashes and tmux freezes), and slow sometimes.<p>Now on Fedora for a few months since I am a Gnome user, I am surprised there are quite frequent kernel updates also. I am little bit less worried that an update will break something, but i'll slowly move away from the bleeding edge.
When I say Arch is not stable, I don't mean that you can't leave it running for a long period of time. I mean that it changes. Debian is not stable because you can run it for a long time without crashing (You sure can, but you can also run Debian with daily crashes, depending on what you're running). Debian is stable because it doesn't change. You get security updates, but you don't get feature updates, because feature updates introduce change, and the way you thought something was done is not the way to do it anymore. Flags change, output changes, inputs change. None of this is bad, but with Debian you know it won't happen until you're ready to move on to the next version. "Unstable" distros can introduce these changes at any time, making it harder to review what will change.
Now try to replicate that Arch setup on another PC. Even if you started from the exact same install, would it turn out the same?<p>I'd really like to see something like a rolling release take on Fedora Silverblue. Rolling release with versioning/immutability and easy rollbacks.
Yeah, this is a thing.<p>To enjoy years of stability on Arch[0]:<p><pre><code> - occasionally upgrade your system
- before upgrading, glance at https://archlinux.org/news/ to see if anything requires manual intervention
</code></pre>
[0] I use Arch btw
That's great! But what it doesn't say is what's actually relevant: how much time you spent maintaining it in that period.<p>Stuff being obviously/"disruptively" broken usually has an undue amount of weight given to it, even though it generally (a) occurs at a time the administrator has chosen and should be planned to minimize the effects of any disruption (i.e. when you're doing updates or potentially problematic config changes), and (b) usually takes significantly less time to deal with, overall, than regular maintenance (upgrades, config changes caused by them, etc).
The issue isn't so much whether a person can keep an arch install stable, it's whether arch is stable for most people, most of the time.<p>As modern hardware and DE choices change and conflict, arch has to be manually tweaked to stay working. Those tweaks (aka config choices) are essentially the entire purpose of a normal distro.<p>Arch isn't designed to do the tweaks. It's just that simple.<p>Saying you kept arch running is either a brag about how well you manage it, how minimalist your environment is, or how simple your hardware is. Not to mention whether your needs drive you to try any of the edgier stuff.<p>Congrats to this guy though.
How would you folks make sure your system is not compromised? That's my No. 1 concern about my system. Like OP, I'm using my arch for many years now, however I cannot tell whether it's running vanilla arch or not. Unlike NixOS I cannot verify the changes to the state of my system over time and I haven't kept a log of any software installed or any config changes. That's why I plan to replace it and keep a log of future changes.
You probably can't update as much as you can with Arch, but any reasonable modern linux distro these days allows the user to have a very stable core and very up to date user space with snaps, flatpaks and AppImages.<p>I was jealous of windows because of exactly this. No longer now. It could still be better, e.g.: .AppImages could automatically be opened by something that mimics an installation wizard with checks for signatures, permissions, installations, periodic updates... it would be much more user-friendly than expecting the user to give "executable rights/flags" to a file that was just downloaded. Nevertheless, it broke the "good enough" barrier for me.<p>Coming from a time that "just released" software required compilation from source and sometimes, compilation of its dependencies which sometimes could simply break the system or worse: add lots of repos that could suddenly disappear or break your package manager in a way that it was simpler to just reinstall your system from scratch than trying to fix it; current situation is much much better. It is good to have a mature and stable distro that one can expect will be maintained for years with software that was released just yesterday.
Mine is around 6-7 years old. Started off as an Antergos on T450s, then moved to T480 and later on I replaced the extra repos and the startup logo with EndeavourOS after the Antergos ones went dark.<p>However, I can see a noticable slowdown and some services occasionally acting weird - once every few months i need to switch to a terminal and use loginctl to unlock my session. I am seriously considering a reinstall, no matter how humiliating that sounds.
I used the same Arch Linux installation from early 2016 until summer 2021, and had a very similar experience to the author's.<p>There was a significant initial setup investment, by modern standards, although not by historical ones; I had used Linux on the desktop continuously since I was a child, around 1997 (I think I started with RedHat 4.0 and kernel 2.0.29), so I remember all initial setup to be fairly burdensome in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Arch seemed a throwback to that. This is not a criticism, to be clear. I was very aware that this was part of the Arch philosophy, and I embraced that in my switch from Ubuntu.<p>However, once that was done, very little of interest happened over the next half decade. It's not that nothing ever broke, ever, but the rate of breakage was impressively low, and much lower than I had the previous 7 years on Ubuntu, or desktop Debian beforehand. Arch Linux was eminently stable.<p>In 2021, I switched to Mac/OSX -- the last of my social group of techies to do so, late to the party by a decade or so. While this has some advantages, my work kinetics will never come close to the raw efficiency and speed of my Arch Linux + i3wm setup.
For me, it was pretty similar...but I was more affected by everything related to mesa and their decision to drop old Intel core generations (basically everything up to Haswell is broken with Vulkan).<p>The worst upgrade bug was around 2016 when mesa had a buffer overflow bug, and I had to apply the patch manually...and well, recompile mesa every time an X update came out or anything related.<p>On top of that the almost monthly archlinux keyring messups that need a repopulate, a different keyserver, or a deletion on the filesystem for whatever reason...oh man, I just hate gpg so much. I wish this piece of crap software would be more reliable. It would make my life so much easier.<p>I always have issues with gpg and pacman complaining about outdated or wrong keys, and then shit happens even when you tell pacman to not delete the package download (and when you start the init, repopulate, and sync of archlinux-keyring again). It messed up my system so often with remnants of packages, where I debugged X for days just to realize that a file was missing and the package got uninstalled automatically.
<p><pre><code> $ head -1 /var/log/pacman.log
[2014-03-24 23:03] [PACMAN] Running 'pacman -S yaourt'
</code></pre>
Eight years so far ...
My last clean Windows installation was in 2007 with Vista, and since then, I ran in-place upgrades to get to the next immediate version. It survived multiple mainboard changes and moved from MBR IDE HDDs to GPT SATA SSDs. (With the help of Acronis/Macrium images)<p>The next big move would be to change to a Mainboard+CPU with Windows 11 support and an NVMe disk. I wonder how feasible this will be.
I tried using arch based distributions but the need for constant manual babysitting has turned me off them.<p>Packages randomly break and require hours of work to fix.
Non-rolling distribution will usually only break when there is major upgrade which can be scheduled for when you have the time to deal with it.<p>Pacman only works in interactive mode so using it on a headless means at least weekly session. Randomly that will use up an hour or two when something breaks, and it will.
Ubuntu based LTS distribution will last a couple of years without needing manual intervention after initial installation, and much longer if you don't upgrade to next LTS until the EOL.<p>Finally, if you need old software to build old version of something, Arch based distribution is useless. On Ubuntu I can download and install version 14.04 without much hassle (and even older with a bit of work) and build that old Android or sdk for device that is no longer supported but with Arch...don't waste your time, its not happening.
This matches my experience as well, been using it since 6 or 7 years ago, and it feels nice to know I can rely on my OS install.
If something breaks I have to learn how to fix it and that knowledge builds up over time. Way better than other operating systems where I'm totally screwed if something breaks up and the only thing I can do is run in circles.<p>I also use i3wm btw
I run Arch™ on all of my production servers since 2016 and never had any real problems or the need to reinstall either. The newer ones use docker with Alpine images, but the hosts still run Arch. Packages are updated every few days or weeks. On most servers I use the LTS kernel, pin it and only update it every couple of months to keep downtime low. That's it. The first ever server still runs fine with all its legacy apps thanks to a couple of custom packages.<p>One of the things I like about arch is that it keeps app config as upstream as possible. Debian's custom app config with all its magic scripts used to cause so much trouble. Yes, I only have <10 servers and the way I maintain them does not scale up too well. But that's something we have the "cloud" for these days anyway.
Hey cheers, I bet I'm around a decade on the same install of Arch too. That spans 3 machines. The trick for me is hot swap backups.
I do an rsync backup of the drive to an identical disk (nowadays a 1TB 980 Evo) and then immediately swap the backup drive to the main drive.
I have little helper scripts to format drives, do backups and automatically update fstab and the boot config.
So new machine no problem, rsync the files into it and boot it up and I have everything exactly as it should be.<p>Now and again I'll do some package spelunking (pacman makes this straightforward) and clean out cobwebs. Next on my list is my emacs config which is like 15 years old and a couple generations out of date. I wouldn't care but startup times are slowing down and there is a lot of great ideas and packages to solve this problem. Just need the time, it's a few hours here and there, but easily enough to keep Arch going forever!
> A few months ago, I copied my complete installation to a ThinkPad X13 Gen 2 using rsync<p>How would something like this work? Is the target laptop running any random linux distro, and rsync replaces all system files etc. effectively "swapping" operating systems? Can the laptop boot into the new system as if it was installed normally?
I had a laptop in storage and went on a trip. I didn't want to bring an expensive MacBook but I did want something that could take a note or two and check my email so I took a very old Dell latitude with me running arch on an intel 2xxx something (ancient)<p>When I booted it up I realized to my surprise I had been running arch not windows...so I checked my email and then decided on the hotel wifi to try and update it.<p>I will admit after about 6 years there was quite a bit of fumbling with pacman sources and keyrings and the delta to upgrade on a laptop that old and hotel wifi wasn't great but after I left it for an hour it finished.<p>I rebooted it and there I was in i3 without a thing wrong. Wild<p>Maybe if I used gnome it would have been a different story but I think the point of the article holds that arch is much more stable than people give it credit for if you are willing to learn a bit about how it works.
I left my computer in storage for a year while I lived elsewhere and I couldn't upgrade through pacman. There was no simple viable upgrade. The constraints just couldn't be met. Fortunately, all I had to do was reformat / and go again since I keep most user config in /home<p>Really enjoyed it otherwise
My home laptop Arch installation is about 8 years old. The only major breakage I've experienced with Arch and Debian in the last 10 years or so has been the switch to systemd, which is understandable. I don't necessarily recommend for everybody to run Linux/Unix on desktop – especially if you need specific hardware or software support – but it's definitely not less stable than Windows or OSX from what I gather observing those around me running other operating systems. To me, the fact that I can likely fix things myself is worth any extra trouble of choosing the less beaten path.
I always love hearing these stories, especially because I'm too fickle to stick with something that long. I've mostly been a Mac user since maybe Puma or Jaguar, but I disto hop every few years. Spent a good while on Debian, Ubuntu, Arch, FreeBSD and OpenBSD. Still have an OpenBSD Thinkpad x1 Gen 6 around somewhere. That OpenBSD install could age like this, but I fat fingered a dd command and nuked the system disk in mid 2020, so it got a fresh install then.<p>Had various Arch installs on desktop and Thinkpad that I used as my day to day for while, but I always just ended up back on my Mac. And I get a new Mac every few years.<p>Any Linux I've had always ends up getting torn down at some point. I get a new computer and do a fresh install.
I was wondering why their system didn't break with the migration to systemd, but it's possible that their system is new enough that it started on systemd. That one was huge pain if I remember correctly. I think I needed to rescue with a bootable usb.
I never quite made it to a decade, but I think I definitely hit 5 years.<p>Yes, there have been breakages, but none very bad and thus not very memorable. Interestingly, some breakages were due to windows update doing something bad since I was dual booting.<p>Before switching to arch, I used ubuntu for years, and that was not nearly as pleasant an experience. Upgrading ubuntu versions always failed in some horrible way for me and I had to just reinstall the new version instead, and the way ubuntu is put together made it a horrible experience if you ever needed to install software that didn't jive with it(like something that required an updated version of some gnome dependency).
I had a similarly great experience with Arch but sometimes the system upgrade would mess up libraries required for the screen locker and I had to use loginctl unlock. I also didn't like that every system upgrade would make a lot of AUR packages broken, waiting to be recompiled.<p>I solved both problems by moving to NixOS and I have been very happy since then. I haven't had any issues with it so far. I've also created a couple of Nix expressions for packages I was missing, but I found most of the software I use in Nixpkgs or NUR already.
The whole discussion over "rolling release is stable" never gets concluded because people are not agreeing upon what they talk about. Here are the basic facts that the discussion should be based on:<p>* "Stable" is not a binary property - it's a scalar. The exact level of stability assumed by the word can be different depending on the context.<p>* By design, rolling releases are <i>less</i> stable than regular releases. You simply can't beat the stability of something that doesn't change.<p>* People have different stability requirements. You don't expect something works on your own laptop to work in every occasion.
All the issues mentioned in these comments would be way too much for me. Sure I could fix them and move on... unless they happened on a very busy day. Then they could tank a schedule.<p>And busy days can show up suddenly. What if I get a super last minute job right after I decided to update my packages and break something?<p>It seems like using Arch or any tech that involves any tinkering requires accepting that the system isn't a total point of trust for your whole life. You have to have an attitude of "I'll make it work" rather than "I know my gear is dependable".
I've had that with a Debian desktop (for over a decade). My current OS on my laptop is Ubuntu, which I also installed a decade ago. Though something went really wrong with an upgrade about 5 years ago, so I had to reinstall. (Keeping all the data, of course.)<p>The only problem (with both debian and ubuntu) is that these old installs tend to drift from what a fresh install would be. And that the GNOME guys keep removing features I use with every release and then it takes a few months (sometimes a year) until someone adds it back as an extension (which will be broken with the next release, for sure).
I've been using the same Archlinux install over the past 12 years or so. Initially installed in 2006 (version 0.7 or so), I only re-installed properly when I switched from 32-bit to 64-bit packages, and from ReiserFS to Ext4 in the same step. Since then I've been using the same install on my personal computer, and just rsync-ed the files between hdds, laptops, etc.<p>It's been pretty stable, had some hiccups a dodgy kernel once I think. Can't remember what it was specifically.<p>> zcat /var/log/pacman.log.1.gz-2018010214.backup | head -1<p>> [2009-02-23 18:14] installed filesystem (2009.01-1)
This is so good, but Arch only annoys me in 1 way - that every week I need to download 500MB of updates. If I go away for a couple of weeks, my computer will most likely have 2 GB of updates pending.
I have the same experience here. I installed Arch on 2011. I've switched laptops multiple times. Once I copied the entire disk as-is into the new one and grew the partition. Another time I rsync'd the entire disk.<p>Things broke probably one or two times throughout this time. I broke things more times while tinkering with internals or startup sequence myself. I've learnt an immense amount doing this too.<p>Arch requires a bit of effort getting into, but honestly, the KISS philosophy really pays off.
I use ubuntu LTS to ease software build with android, yocto, some vendor's SDK,etc as they're all tested on ubuntu LTS, so do many other projects from github etc.<p>Every few years I do a full re-installation (instead of dist-upgrade as I have quite some local installations that made things complex).<p>How Arch cope with that? I like the live-update-never-need-full-reinstall side, meanwhile I don't want to spend time to fix those tested-on-ubuntu-lts-ready-to-go third party software package when Arch is used.
So basically you use Arch Linux? (:<p>btw, I use openSUSE Tumbleweed - more stable rolling release and it's awesome. Never going back to regular release with painful major updates every few years
I have a similar experience. I have a 2005 Fujitsu LifeBook S2110 I keep for sentimental purposes. I installed Arch on it in ~2015, and I've been upgrading it ever since. I've had 2-3 breakages over the years, but every time I've just googled the issue and found an obvious solution to resolve the issue.
I've been so happy with the Arch rolling release that I now use it on my main daily driver desktop. I switched over full time from macOS last year.
I'm fairly certain that my current Debian installation dates from ~2006, whenever I tired of running Gentoo for its amd64 support and returned to Debian, which I had used from 2001-2004.<p>It is wonderful that these distributions maintain an ongoing upgrade path that lets us move smoothly through our computing lives limited disruption. Support your local distros and package maintainers!<p>(Typing this comment reminded me that I hadn't donated to Debian in ages. Just did.)
I bought a samsung np900x3g about 5 years ago for the reason it's too cheap and put archlinux on it. then I used it as my main computer, bought 2 ryzen rtx gaming laptop since then, but only use them to play some games.
it's a 8 years old computer and I suspect with arch I can use it for at least several years more, and I doubt any people here is still rocking a i5-4200u , but it work perfectly for me.
I don't get what the fuss is about.<p>I run several Arch boxes, a couple I believe is on 15+ years. One such installation has even been mirrored from one disk to multiple other disks and put into other machines, just because it was already set up as needed. Only once did a package I ran require manual intervention during upgrade, but as always, that was clearly described on the Arch website.<p>This also goes for Debian, FreeBSD and OpenBSD.
I am running Arch on my server (VPS) for over a decade and therefore haven't even noticed the X and audio issues. The only time something broke was when the Ethernet interface suddenly was named eth0 instead of the vendor specific (?) enXsX or whatever it was. And I had configured systemd-networkd to use the absolute and exact names and not some wildcard like e*. Error was located fixed within five minutes.
I had one of the worst debugging experiences of my life installing Arch (before I knew anything about linux, or programming), followed by probably the most delightful computing experience of my life using that installation for the next several years.<p>I don't use Arch anymore, but I think about going back to it all the time. Hopefully one of these days I actually pull up my socks and install it again.
Having to debug X or audio breaking several times even over 10 years is a non-starter. Had these issues 0 times over 10 years on mac, albeit on several machines, but I think it’s extremely rare for someone to reinstall Mac OS ever. Only time I did it was when I tried to setup a hackintosh and that really broke some things.
So what, I likely had my Arch Linux for a decade as well. Just copying it to the new SSD every time I had a new device.<p>I even have 2 bootloader entries: for intel and for amd devices so I do not need to reconfigure anything. ARM devices such as PineBook or Olimex are a PITA, though. Never had patience with them.
Also a rolling release, I've used the same openSUSE Tumbleweed install for 4 years. The benefit is that if something breaks, I just reboot and rollback, and wait for a few days until they fix it. I've never had to worry about tinkering with failure due to update.
I switched between arch and debian and the only real unstable thing i encountered is KDE.
even before i changed something my whole desktop crashed. I had to login as root and kill my usersession (as root so that every process that belongs to my user is stopped).
Ok? I am using same Win10 installation since ~2016. It survived migration to another SSD, upgrade from Intel to Amd CPU, motherboard and RAMs, migration from MBR to GPT...<p>Only time when it crashed was when I OCed CPU too much and when using insider builds.
I've had the same Arch installation running since Spring 2020 on a desktop from 2012 or so. It's not my daily driver, but still works just fine. Even with some long periods between updates, I don't recall any serious stability issues.
I've had good luck once I get a system going with arch. Only rarely are there manual interventions required for updates, I just run pacman -Syyu every few days. I just try to install very few packages, only what I need for the server.
Did this with Gentoo for a decade, even across two computer changes. boot into a rescue disk, set up grub, then for each partition do ssh oldcomputer "gzip</dev/sda5"|zcat>/dev/sda5, then resize the fs.
totally of topic... as a previous Arch user, I switched to POP-OS with my new laptop, simply because it worked out of box with everything, and I struggled to even make a proper SMB connection to windows network with ARch... not to mention automatical USB stick mounting etc...
However, as someone who would like to get back to Arch because gnome uses so much power, and I am missing the simplicity of Arch, is there some good tutorial to make it a decent distro right after installation including the sound, nvidia graphic, network settings, display (with external usbc connected display) etc...
I reinstalled Arch once since 2009, and it was to resolve a long-standing bug that I could not fix for the life of me. FWIW, it worked. (This was probably 6-ish years ago, I don't remember what the bug was.)
I don't think I've <i>ever</i> done an Ubuntu release upgrade without having at least one thing break. Admittedly, my sample size is rather small because I stopped using Ubuntu for that very reason.
I tried to use Centos long term, that was a disaster. Ubuntu and Fedora both broke a few times but I was able to recover them. However, Manjaro / Arch feels the most stable in my experience.
I stopped using Arch when I went to a meeting after upgrading the night before and realizing my audio is not working during the call. You don't have time to RTFM then.
I've been using Arch for 7 years, I only destroyed it once with python packaging ... and it took 5min to repair it, its the most stable OS I've ever used
I’m in the same boat. Never saw a need to reinstall, there’s been hiccups where after an untimely upgrade the system won’t boot. But it’s a 30min fix every 3-4years.
One of my systems, a public-facing server:<p><pre><code> Server status at 2022-08-16 11:39:24
System status: Database up for 1644.44 days.</code></pre>
have an Arch install that's been running for ~8 years. It's solid.
Went through the same growing pains as others. Most recently the pipewire change.<p>Love Arch.