yoevli
I’m not familiar with the specific install/upgrade process on Gentoo so maybe I’m missing something, but what’s wrong with forcing new installations to use time64 and then forcing existing installs to do some kind of offline migration from a live disk a decade or so down the line? I feel like it’s probably somewhat uncommon for an installation of any distro to be used continuously for that amount of time (at least in a desktop context), and if anyone could be expected to be able to handle a manual intervention like this, it’s long-time Gentoo users.
The bonus of this would be that it wouldn’t be necessary to introduce a new lib* folder - the entire system either uses time64 or it doesn’t. Maybe this still wouldn’t be possible though depending on how source packages are distributed; like I said I dont really know Gentoo.
The fact remains that Arch generally requires more work to maintain an installation than a typical point-release distro. I’m speaking from experience - I had two systems running Arch for over 2 years. I switched away when each system separately had a pacman update somehow get interrupted resulting in a borked install. I was using Mint before and Fedora now, and both are a lot more hands-off at the cost of some flexibility.
Also, just to be clear, I’m not trying to disparage Arch at all. I think it’s a really cool distro that’s perfect for a certain type of user; I just don’t think it’s great to lead people to believe it’s more reliable than it is in the way that I’ve been seeing online for a while now.
I hate when people insist that Arch isn’t easier to break. There was an incident a couple of years ago where a Grub update was rolled out that required that grub-mkconfig be re-run manually, and if you failed to do this the system would brick and you’d need to fix it in a recovery environment. This happened to my laptop while I was on vacation, and while I had luckily had the foresight to bring a flash drive full of ISOs, it was a real pain to fix.
Yes, Arch offers a lot more stability than people give it credit for, but it’s still less reliable than the popular point-release distros like Fedora or Ubuntu, and there’s not really any way around that with a rolling-release model. As someone who is at a point in life where I don’t always have the time nor energy to deal with random breakage (however infrequently), having the extra peace of mind is nice.
I mean, technically there’s nothing preventing that, but in practice it’s a fairly uncommon mistake to make and it’s immediately obvious that there’s an issue the first time that path is taken. If something like that makes it to production, it clearly points to an issue with test coverage rather than code paradigm.
As another user mentioned, package managers are specific to distributions rather than DEs. The main difference between them is that they’re developed by the respective distribution teams, but there are some practical differences too. For example, apt supports versioned dependencies while pacman doesn’t because of the different distribution models between Debian and Arch (monolithic vs. rolling release). This affects their dependency resolution strategy with each being better suited for it’s respective distribution.
To address your point about package managers being the main difference between distros, this isn’t quite true. As mentioned, different distros have different distribution models, priorities, and overall biases/opinions that affect the user experience in a variety of ways and make them better suited to different use cases. I would never dream of putting Arch on one of my servers in the same way that you’d probably never catch me installing Debian on my gaming machine.