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?

  • neon_nova@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    0·
    1 month ago

    Arch is really for those who like to troubleshoot and actively maintain things when they break.

    I’m pretty decent with linux and for the most part, I can fix arch when it breaks, but I don’t have the time for that. For that reason, I use Fedora and recommend mint.

    • GraveyardOrbit@lemmy.zip
      0·
      1 month ago

      I don’t understand this, I’ve been using arch for 3 years, I update every couple of days and I’ve never had anything break, is it an aur thing? I tend to stay away it

      • PrivateNoob@sopuli.xyz
        0·
        1 month ago

        I did break my endevaourOS after I was unlucky enough to upgrade when grub got a huge non-bootable bug and probably there may have been some app bugs since which are minor tbh. Like currently I can’t run the bauh app, because it misses “bauh” in the python packages (lol).

        • fushuan [he/him]@piefed.blahaj.zoneEnglish
          0·
          1 month ago

          Good for you that EOS now runs on systemd-boot, not grub lol. It grabs the EFI lines automatically from the boot partition and it just works. Personally, booting should be as simple as possible, as little personalisation as possible, make it just work.

      • Derin@lemmy.beru.co
        0·
        1 month ago

        I’ve been using arch for almost a decade, and haven’t had the system break.

        I also don’t use aur helpers as I don’t like or trust them - I do tend to read PKGBUILDs before using them.

        Still shocked that OP thought a new opt-depends was “lost in pages and pages of changelogs”.

    • MalReynolds@slrpnk.netEnglish
      0·
      1 month ago

      Yup, OP has done his time in Arch meaning now competent, probably, time to go to Fedora and relax, close enough to the edge but not bleeding, good QA, For extra chill go atomic, check out uBlue…

          • fushuan [he/him]@piefed.blahaj.zoneEnglish
            0·
            1 month ago

            Can you install an app with GUI in a distrobox that then shows up on the app list? That’d be amazing but I doubt it since it’s using containerization, I wonder what “tightly integrated” really means. Anyway, I’ll look it up, thanks!

  • paequ2@lemmy.todayEnglish
    0·
    1 month ago

    I’ve been enjoying Guix for the last 8 days. You declare your OS and home config in a file and you can check them into source control. It was originally a fork of NixOS, but has diverged a lot.

    The CLIs and APIs are pretty nice. They have a concept of “channels”, which are git repos you can download software from. The default official channel only hosts FOSS software, but you can trivially add non-FOSS channels and they work just as well as the first-party channels.

    Each channel update and package install, removal, update get put on a log, which you can trivially jump between. guix package --switch-genereation=28 and boom you’re at that generation (it’s like a git commit). The software and config changes get saved in the generation so the jump is clean and atomic. I actually bisected my OS yesterday to track a bug! That was cool. You can also create and share isolated, reproducible environments.

    Guix works with Flatpak and distrobox as well, in case some software isn’t available in existing channels. I got HiDPI, Zoom, Logseq, Syncthing, and Tailscale working.

    The biggest drawback for me so far is that it doesn’t use systemd. Not sure if it’s a dealbreaker for me yet. Systemd does way more than just manage system services, so GNU Shepherd (which Guix uses) isn’t a real replacement.

  • ragas@lemmy.ml
    0·
    1 month ago

    Use Gentoo, as it is way more stable and can do anything that Arch can.

  • pyssla@quokk.auEnglish
    0·
    1 month ago

    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.

    1. To be clear, I meant the package manager. Determinate System’s installer is probably your best option. ↩︎

  • KiwiTB@lemmy.world
    0·
    1 month ago

    LMDE. Debian stability with the usability of mint. It works… That’s it. No gimmicks.

  • Bogasse@lemmy.ml
    0·
    1 month ago

    After having a similar feeling as yours I went for NixOS.

    My thoughts then : if it breaks I can rollback, and the unstable channel is quite comparable to what arch offers.

    Now : I’ve moved to stable channel, because it’s updated enough and allows me to only deal with breaking changes twice a year. Moving to NixOS was time consuming (but fun) because it required to rewrite all my dotfiles and learn something new.

    • verdigris@lemmy.ml
      0·
      1 month ago

      What issues did you have? One of the many awesome things about NixOS is that you can write overrides for any particular package if you need an older version, or even to change some options.

  • theparadox@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    1 month ago

    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.

  • bitwolf@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    0·
    1 month ago

    I use Fedora its a good reliable in between distro if you like fast updates but want tested updates.

  • Admetus@sopuli.xyz
    0·
    1 month ago

    I also noticed vlc has broken (installed last week apparently)

    Using the pacman syntax:

    pacman -Q -i -d vlc

    showed a conflict with the vlc-plugin (which appeared to be uninstalled already) and no vlc-plugin-#### installed.

    The dependencies were fully explained in the list, including the vlc-plugins-all dependency. I’m lazy so that’s the dependency I installed on my EndeavourOS.

  • youmaynotknow@lemmy.ml
    0·
    1 month ago

    I’ve tried Endeavour (after failing miserably to do stuff in Arch) and ended up breaking it really bad.

    I just went back to Fedora, and haven’t looked back (in 3 months, until the distro-hop urge kicks in again 😁)

  • daggermoon@lemmy.world
    0·
    1 month ago

    The same thing happened to me. The package was split into separate packages. Install the package vlc-plugins-all.

    sudo pacman -S vlc-plugins-all

    Problem solved

    • sudo@programming.dev
      0·
      1 month ago

      I don’t want to fault people for avoiding Arch’s instability in general but this is a very minor issue.

      VLC is not a system critical package. I absolutely understand the mods choice to not put it in the RSS. At most they could put a notice in the pacman logs when it updates.

      • daggermoon@lemmy.world
        0·
        1 month ago

        I like Arch because of the AUR and Pacman. Debian and Ubuntu had me adding a bunch of PPA’s which I found way more annoying. Debian probably would be my second choice though. As for the VLC thing, it took me less than 5 minutes from noticing there was a problem, to finding the solution online. Then I was watching The Whitest Kids U’ Know in VLC.

    • LeFantome@programming.dev
      0·
      1 month ago

      I doubt the forum style is really the issue.

      EndeacourOS, one of my favourite distros, uses the same packages (the real Arch ones). So everything he says here applies.

      • Lonewolfmcquade@lemmy.world
        0·
        1 month ago

        I do too. Though to be fair to OP, Garuda didn’t advise about the vlc problem either. I had to go hunting on my own to figure it out. But anyway, still loving Garuda and it is much less painful than any other OS I’ve ever used.

    • Xeno@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      0·
      1 month ago

      +1 for Garuda. It’s nice that they have their own way of updating (garuda-update), which also handles situations like this one. It was very satisfying to not have to do anything when the linux-firmware change happened a couple of weeks back.

      Oh, also snapshots by default are a chef’s kiss

      • BETYU@moist.catsweat.com
        0·
        1 month ago

        i used arco linux and they just linked the word update to the arch command to update and that made it very easy to update i don’t remember the correct name for this. i do not know if garuda does the same or if they have there own program to do this.

        • Xeno@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
          0·
          1 month ago

          Garuda works differently. You use garuda-update instead of pacman, and it takes care of just about everything for you. So, for example, if you have something like needing to uninstall a package because it was split (like linux firmware), garuda-update just takes care of that for you (after they update the scripts, which takes at most a week usually)

  • propter_hog [any, any]@hexbear.netEnglish
    0·
    1 month ago

    I’d recommend opensuse tumbleweed. It’s still a rolling distribution, it still has more bleeding edge software, but its package manager, zypper, does atomic updates, so if something doesn’t install right it rolls it back.

    • MangoCats@feddit.itEnglish
      0·
      1 month ago

      That’s the real thing for me: how painless is it to live with long term? After I’ve installed a couple of weird things, and configured some stuff custom - is this a distro that keeps rolling into the future, or is it one that makes me wish I had the time to re-install from scratch every 6 months?