To be fair, arch could look like that after a few days.
Read the Arch news before clicking “yes”.
people laughed at me for choosing debian. they asked why i chose to have ancient runes running in my computer
who’s laughing now?
We are still laughing, no worries.
p.s. Debian is great, I am just a “kind of new” void converted.
went looking for it. “stable rolling release” sounds really interesting, but i’m scared of installing it and being mistaken for a systemd hater
Yeah, systemd hater or not, runit is quite fabulous Imo.
Some software with a hard requirement on systemd will not work, of course. I believe it is possible to run void using systemd, I’ve never tried though.
I really like runit, but once it’s configured, like systemd, I mostly just don’t see it anymore - you know what I mean…
Give it a shot, for me it’s the packaging system, take a look at it and at the github “void-repository”.
I really like how it’s working, the simplicity of it, create your own package, your own repository, etc.
The killer features, for me, isn’t really runit, but the stability of a rolling distro with the xbps package system.
I have an Arch laptop that I didn’t update for 3.5 years. The system update took a while when I finally went through with it. Amazingly it didn’t break anything!
Yes, I am amazed that quite a few people in this thread are saying they ‘had to completely reinstall the os’ and that it broke everything after not much time. As long as one doesn’t rely on the AUR for system critical packages or much in generel, it is incredibly hard to break an Arch system (Manjaro and other Arch-based distros don’t count). This is due in part to Arch being quite reproducible but it also having very good maintainership.
It doesn’t hurt to apply new package configs by going through pacdiff once in a while though.
Edit: Typo
I switched from Windows to EndeavourOS a few months ago and haven’t had any issues on my personal computer, it’s amazing.
I also have EndeavourOS as a VM on my work laptop and I somehow managed to break systemd-boot when trying to do a system update though. The system update died halfway through and I defaulted to the classic solution of rebooting, which definitely made things worse because my boot partition in the VM broke. The great thing about Linux, and especially Arch, is the tools and knowledge readily available to fix things and everything was working again (with no data loss) in under 15 minutes. I’ve dealt with similar problems on Windows and either had to accept data loss or deal with significant headaches trying to resolve what should be a simple issue because the operating system refuses to provide basic information.
Sometimes I wish someone would make a an Arch box and come back to it years later to see the updates it has missed.
But that’s assuming an Arch box would be reliable enough to stay alive that long lol.
Always heard of 20+ year old bsd and debian machines chugging along with no issue.
It won’t rise much beyond that, since you only get one update per package. Whether it’s upgrading Firefox from version 120 to 121 or to version 130, it doesn’t change much in terms of download size, nor the number of updates.
At least, I assume, Arch doesn’t do differential updates. On some of the slower-moving distributions, they only make you download the actual changes to the files within the packages. In that case, jumping to 121 vs. 130 would make more of a difference.
If you do want lots of package updates, you need lots of packages. The texlive-full package is always a fun one in that regard…
I have updated arch systems that had not been powered on for years before. It was fine. No issues what so ever. Arch is not some flaky distro that breaks if you look away for a minute. My main system has had had the same install for over 5 years now and I regularly forget to update it for months at a time. Again, no issues.
