I realized my VLC was broke some point in the week after updating Arch. I spend time troubleshooting then find a forum post with replies from an Arch moderator saying they knew it would happen and it’s my fault for not wanting to read through pages of changelogs. Another mod post says they won’t announce that on the RSS feed either. I thought I was doing good by following the RSS but I guess that’s not enough.
I’ve been happily using Arch for 5 years but after reading those posts I’ve decided to look for a different distro. Does anyone have recommendations for the closest I can get to Arch but with a different attitude around updating?
Ah yes, the issue with modern Linux, the community.
I feel the shift to the current “git gud” style of blaming the user in any support has done more damage to Linux then any part of the software.
the community is the worst part of most things, the RTFM attitude is better than toxic positivity though
Sure, but when I am looking for an answer toxic positivity and RTFM are often the same thing. The number of times people jump up to defend the manual and glaze the program without even checking if the info is in the manual (or if the manual even makes sense at all) is way too high.
I used to have to work on new stuff all the time and would have to read whitepapers or engineering change docs on the daily, and no the tangled mess most Linux documentation is in does not count as a functioning source of information.
The part that still grinds my gears is why bother to type out nothing of value like RTFM at all? Forums are filled with terrible posts belittleing the question instead of just answering the question. Its not helping anyone and at least to me makes little sense.
I’m amazed at the idea that in any technical community, an urging to gain more skill in your chosen environment could somehow be seen as negative.
I would make a joke here about arch and gatekeeping but its not just an arch issue.
It is most certainly not. (He says, as he comes fuming out of yet another meeting about a ticket that could have been solved at Tier 2 if support would learn how to read a log)
Oh pebkac is alive and well, no doubt about it. But expecting any level of expertise from an non commercial end user while simultaneously shooting down their questions is not going to help.
I absolutely agree, but here’s the problem in this context:
- OP isn’t non-commercial. By their own words, they’d been doing desktop support for MacOS - plastic-wrapped and glittery, but still a *nix. Five years in, one’s search-fu and tolerance for reading docs should be well developed.
- Their question was answered by the page they found. OP’s argument is they didn’t like the tone used to reply to THAT post’s OP and concluded from that tone that their expertise wouldn’t be valued “in the way they would like”. There’s room to develop some grit here.
- Arch isn’t intended for inexperienced users, and that is made clear in the docs. “It is targeted at the proficient GNU/Linux user, or anyone with a do-it-yourself attitude who is willing to read the documentation, and solve their own problems.” (https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Arch_Linux#User_centrality) Getting this upset over a single package readjustment, no matter how badly it was communicated, tells me OP doesn’t have a ton of experience with bare metal linux. There’s just no way to sugarcoat that.
Arch gatekeeps on occasion, yes, but this isn’t that. This is the simple rules of that particular distro. OP is free to find something that better fits their needs; and it appears they have.
omg you guys are fragile af
I just had this exact same issue. I installed the package. Done.
No whining. It’s one fucking line of code.
They are not tech support. Maybe call applecare.
Why even type this?
Do you feel better doing so?
This is not a support forum, this is not tech support, this is lemmy and other then giving a great example of what the OP is getting at what does your comment address?
I don’t feel like this is a terribly recent attitude. It’s definitely one I’ve encountered repeatedly over a decade or more of dipping my toes in the pool. It’s not incorrect in a lot of circumstances, but it’s very difficult to find support when no one wants to help you improve. There’s always been a significant degree of ego in Linux user communities.
I agree, people were telling me to RTFM in support chats on irc 30 years ago.
Not wanting to help would be better then this, its like they just want to “win” the support ticket. Its so terribly counterproductive.
IMHO the actual problem here is the Arch moderator being an ass.
This happens in all operating systems from time to time. An update kills an app. Usually, the app is wildly out of date and hanging on to the last vestiges of a deprecated call that finally gets removed. I recently experienced this with V4L (for OBS virtual camera) and a kernel update in NixOS. Had one hell of a time tracking it down. It was one of the twice-yearly OS upgrades. Luckily, I had only updated one of my devices, and it still worked on the old one. After tearing apart the changes, I was finally able to specify V4L and a Linux kernel version. Immediately, the problem popped right out. The new kernel now needs a specific value passed for the expected video stream, where it used to use a default if it wasn’t specified.
Apple breaks apps all the time. Windows does, but less so. The difference is usually before an update happens, Windows and Apple have had TONs of people testing on their own teams and their insiders people.
In the end, I just needed to roll back the kernel one revision until the V4L guys make the change, or I needed to recompile V4L myself with the option defaulted to something useful.
I don’t think you can safely get away from this kind of issue. (app incompatibility on upgrade, not mods being an ass)
Debian or Mint seem to be pretty welcoming and easy going to get rid of the asshole issues, but chances are, you’re going to break something eventually, and it’s going to be super hard to figure out why and how to get around it.
LMDE. Debian stability with the usability of mint. It works… That’s it. No gimmicks.
If that happened to me I’d not want to deal with that again either.
What has made arch work for me is BTRFS filesystem with the grub module grub-btrfs. It gives you BTRFS snapshots you can load into at grub and with snapper and auto snap it will automatically create a restore point before updating.
It’s worked flawlessly and thanks to BTRFS black magic the snapshots don’t take up much storage space. I also recommend BTRFS assistant in the aur if you don’t mind using a gui.
If you want an easy arch setup + friendly community forums + easy BTRFS setup I can’t recommended EndevourOS enough.
I switched from Manjaro to Bazzite on my gaming PC. I don’t have time to read changelogs.
Things went fantastically so I put Kinoite on my laptop. I do a lot more random shit on the laptop so it’s a bit more complicated but so far so good. Atomic distros take getting used to but it still feels less stressful than coming back to my computer after a few days and digging through like 100+ package updates and eventually saying “Fuck it” and just updating blindly.
I left Arch for the same reason but in relation to my system’s graphics. If you are an end user, an operating system should work for you, not you for the system. I installed Tumbleweed 5 years ago and its snapper tool gives great peace of mind when using a rolling system. My advice, try Tumbleweed, its package manager (zypper) already supports parallel downloads and although it is slower than pacman, it is more complete in package and repository management (an example is what has happened in Arch recently with firmware packages and that requires manual user intervention because pacman cannot make those changes automatically).
I use Fedora its a good reliable in between distro if you like fast updates but want tested updates.
Off-topic: A meta-analysis if you will, but I’m just astonished by the engagement this post has received. I wonder what this tells us about the Linux community on Lemmy.
On-topic: OP, honestly, others have chimed in and left very good answers already. So perhaps you won’t find anything within my comment that hasn’t been said. But, as I’m a latecomer to this thread, I might have an advantage that some didn’t (try to capitalize on). To be blunt, the original post didn’t reveal much about what you liked and didn’t like about Arch. As such, my initial impression would have been to suggest Gentoo. But, you’ve since provided the engaging community crucial insights that help us in grasping the full picture. Below you may find my own notes on your distro preferences based on what you said:
- care-free updates
- repo packages receive updates shortly after upstream
- rewards effort put into initial setup
Furthermore, I’ll take the liberty to assume that (native) package availability is expected to be vast. And that you wish for the process of updating to be snappy.
Based on the above, I recommend NixOS.
If jumping ship to NixOS seems too daunting, then consider installing Nix[1] on Arch. Consider to slowly but surely expand its usage within your system. And, then, when you’re comfortable, embrace NixOS as a worthy successor to your Arch installation.
To be clear, I meant the package manager. Determinate System’s installer is probably your best option. ↩︎
I got burned by something like this on Manjaro when a rolling update completely borked my graphics card. The devs reacted in a similar way and it made me realise that my priority is stability over bleeding edge and tinkering.
On that day I moved to Fedora. Stable as hell, no fuss. My main OS should just work and not kill itself.
I still love it but jumped over to Bazzite Gnome recently, which is like Fedora with a few bells on top, coupled with having a read-only root-filesystem (stability, man!). It also comes with distrobox, which will let you run arch natively in a container if you need the AUR.
I had a similar moment of clarity after troubles with Manjaro and a couple other Arch based distros.
I really like the idea of a rolling release, but definitely nedd stability first.
I swung back the other way, and jumped on Ubuntu LTS. And gradually over time I ended up having to get updates from external repos etc, and ended up in the same position where updates broke things or didn’t work.
Currently running Ubuntu, and I just do an upgrade to the latest release each 6 months - after waiting a month after release date for everything to settle down. The upgrades to new releases have gone smoothly, I get updates to newer versions of software, and it’s been very rare anything breaks. Being a popular distro also means a big community to help with any issues as well.
Dammit, it’s like I just wrote an ad for Ubuntu!
I’m running EndeavourOS and waiting for something like this to happen.
I ran Endeavour OS for 3 years, and it had a habit of breaking to no return every couple of months. I still liked it, but just got tired of that issue. Cachy OS has been much better
Is Cachy also Arch based?
Yup.
Cachy OS has been treating me very well. Perfect all around. Very helpful people and very nice. I am not going anywhere
yeah i had that happen to me too, didn’t look in the update screen because updates before went with a breeze but i took another look after VLC wouldn’t play anything, it was something with the VLC plugins and i needed to reinstall those, just had to do
sudo pacamn -S vlc-plugins-allto get VLC to play video files back, but man, that should have been in the news imo.I had the same issue, hadn’t found the solution yet (also didn’t looked too hard) and while I sort of agree that it should have been in the news I also understand why it’s not (it only affects people with VLC, and not everyone uses VLC, if every time a package gets split it was in the news the news would be all about that). That being said I think that there were other solutions that would have been much better, namely split the package with a mandatory dependency on vlc-plugins-all and convert that to optional dependency in a month or two, that way everything keeps working as is for people during the transition, but after a short while it can be modularized.
Even better would be to automatically install vlc-plugins-all for people upgrading, so that it preserves the existing behavior.
Yes, that’s what I said, but AFAIK the only way to achieve that is to make it a mandatory dependency.
I’ve been an Arch user for more than a decade and I’ll usually be first in line to defend it from dodgy claims about unreliability.
But that forum response is bizarre. Literally the last two RSS items right now are about how splitting packages will require intervention for some users (plasma and Linux firmware). VLC is an officially supported package, and surely this change would impact almost every VLC user?
New opt-depends is a nice pacman feature, but it hardly implies that things have been removed from the base package.
Literally the last two RSS items right now are about how splitting packages will require intervention for some users (plasma and Linux firmware).
Maybe a nitpick, but the linux-firmware situation is different, it’s not about needing to install extra packages (they turned the existing package into a meta package or whatever it’s called), but about that coinciding with some changes that can break the upgrade process and require you to force uninstall a package before proceeding.
But yeah, good point about plasma, the only differences I can even think of are that plasma is probably more popular, and definitely more important to have working.
It didn’t break my system. I refused the update, installed qt6-phonon-backend-mpv, updated the system, and uninstalled everything VLC related. Even though I don’t use the backend there are no VLC packages that I don’t need
Use Gentoo, as it is way more stable and can do anything that Arch can.
