Realizing Arch isn't for me after updating broke VLC

Based on what you describe, I would strongly recommend going with OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. It's just as bleeding-edge as Arch, but all packages go through automatic testing to ensure they won't break anything, and if some manual actions are required, it will offer options right before update. Moreover, snapper in enabled by default on btrfs partitions, and it makes snapshots automatically before updates, so even if something breaks somehow, reverting takes a few seconds.
One small footnote is that you'll need to add separate VLC repo or Packman for VLC to have full functionality - proprietary codecs are one of the rare things official repos don't feature for legal reasons.
On Arch rant: I've always been weirded out by this "Arch is actually stable, you just have to watch every news post for manual interventions before every update, oh, and you better update very often" attitude.
Like, no, this is not called stable or even usable for general audience. Updating your system and praying for it not to break while studying everything you need to know is antithetical to stability and makes for an awful daily driver.
- I upvoted you, I am a fellow openSUSE fan and contributor.
  But I need to point out that if you install VLC from a repository outside of Factory, then it's not auto-tested.
  Moreover, Packman is external to the openSUSE project altogether. If you use it, you are supposed to "just trust" that everything will be fine.
  You are better off installing VLC through Flatpak.
  
  Fair point! Honestly, that's exactly what I ultimately went for, I just know there are people around who strongly prefer native packages.
  Flatpak contains all codecs etc., and works flawlessly.
- I'm running Arch for a very long time. I agree this is not a distro for general audience. I disagree, however, that it is not stable. When I'm doing work I don't update my system. I enjoy my stable configuration and when I have time, I do update, I curiously watch which amazing foss software had an update. And I try them. I check my new firefox. I check gimp's new features. etc.. or if I have to do something I easily fix it, like in no time because I know my OS. Then I enjoy my stable system again.
  Do you want to know what's unstable? When I had my new AMD GPU that I built my own kernel for, because the driver wasn't in mainline. And it randomly crashed the system. That's unstable.
  Or when I installed my 3rd DE in ubuntu and apt couldn't deal with it, it somehow removed X.org. And I couldn't fix it. That's also something I don't want. Arch updates are much better than this.
  
  Guess we simply apply different meaning to the word "stable". (you do you, though, and if it's alright with your workflow, yay!)
  To me, stable means reliably working without any special maintenance. Arch requires you to update once in a while (otherwise your next update might get borked), and when you update, you may have to resolve conflicts and do manual interventions.
  Right now, I run OpenSUSE Slowroll (beta, not released yet) on one of my machines and EndeavourOS on the other. The former recently had to update 1460 elements, and one intervention was required - package manager asked me if I want to hold one package for a while to avoid potential dependency issues. Later, it was fixed, and otherwise it went without a hitch. This is the worst behavior I've seen on this distribution, and so to me it renders "acceptably unstable" for general use (although I wouldn't give that to my grandma).
- In the last three years there's been a single time I can recall pacman telling me I needed to do a thing.
  I copy pasted that warning into google it took me right to the news post. I threw in the commands that the news post said I needed to do.
  Nothing broke. So this isn't like it's a weekly problem.
  
  Nice to know!
- The VLC thing can be solved relatively easily by installing opi with zypper, and then running opi codecs, which will add all the necessary repos and install everything. After that VLC (and h.264 etc) will work like a charm.
  
  True!
  Although, as another commenter pointed out, this will use Packman repo which is not official and apps there are not going through the same testing as in official repos.
  So Flatpak is generally a better option. Still, if you want VLC as a native package, opi is indeed an easy and reliable option.
- you just have to watch every news post for manual interventions before every update, oh, and you better update very often
  You have to watch the factory mailing list and make any manual interventions for Tumbleweed, and frankly, you should be watching the news and taking any action required no matter the os.
  
  A decent daily driver distro for regular user should not break on blind update - at most, it should warn the user automatically before applying updates. If user is expected to check news every time they want to update their system - it is not a good fit for anyone but enthusiasts.
  
  taking any action required no matter the os
  This is not really true for fixed release distros. I can’t remember when was the last time I had to read through the release note before Ubuntu version upgrade, or upgrading any package.
  
  Well… not really. My current installation of Tumbleweed is three and a half years old, and back in 2022 the only reason I re-installed it was changing the NVMe drive. I’ve never read factory mailing list and don’t ever recall having made manual interventions. I’ve just booted it, updated (zypper ref; zypper dup), rebooted and continued working.

OpenSUSE TUMBLEWEED, always updating, but they have an OpenQA tool that checks the builds for success, and if for some reason something did go bad you just reboot and pick the previous (automatic) snapshot. Lots of GUI tools to manage the system and packages via the various Yast2-GUI apps.
- +1 for Tumbleweed. It's a rolling release distro without (most of) the hassle and YaST is a fantastic utility which you can use to do many things. Nice graphical stuff to help you configure things like backup. Never had any breakages so far with Tumbleweed :)
  
  Another +1 for Tumbleweed. It's an simple setup, easy to roll back if needed, and has solid tools like Yast that help manage most aspects of your os.
- Thanks! This wasn't a distro I knew much about but it's looking like one I will try out. The way they test packages is exactly the kind of choices around updates I'm looking for.
  I like how many options Yast exposes. I enjoyed learning how to do most of what I need in the terminal with Arch but being able to do everything I need through GUI helps when I'm not able to recall a lot in the moment but still need to do a thing.
  
  The repos have a lot of stuff, but if you ever get stuck for q package you can install debs with alien command, or find community repoes here https://software.opensuse.org/ They typically offer 1 click installs, or direct rpm downloads
- This is probably the best answer.
- Plus, their equivalent of the AUR, the open build system, can actually be used to build packages for any system.

I've been an Arch user for about 15 years now, and I've never posted to the forums. Not because I'm great at this and don't break things. I constantly break things and need to fix them. I don't ask questions there because before you'll get any help you are going to get sat down and explained (in great detail sometimes) how you are the stupidest piece of shit on Earth.
- I posted on the Arch forums ONCE. Didn't get a single reply, lol. Actually had to open an issue on the upstream git repo to get any info.
  
  Interesting. Been an Arch user for about 12 years now. Your posts made me curious to check my forum post history. I have 4 Topics I started where I never got any reply or the only reply is from myself stating that I found a solution and what it is. Then I have 3 Topics where people actually engaged with me, asked for some more info gave some tips and pushed me in the right direction.

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.
- 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).
  
  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".
  
  I’m sorry, I thought about it more and remember the reason I had trouble with arch the last time.
  It was that I could not get hardware decoding to work when playing videos in Firefox.
  Everything reported that it should be working, but it didn’t.
  
  I sometimes forget or delay updates because of life and have over 500 updates. Skim through them if they are patches, minors or majors, and just run. In any case, my disk's are brtfs and I have timeshift for backups. If anything breaks horribly a live USB can restore it, if anything is weird I can restore it via UI. It autoruns every time I run Pacman and stores 5 copies of the "before" state. It also creates a daily copy for the last 5 days so 10 copies in total.
  It's more than enough that if something fails I'll have something to go back to, and since it internally works with something akin to hardlinks snapshots don't take that much space.
  I've not had issues since setting it up, so, great.
- 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...
  
  I'd go for an atomic distro if it weren't for the AUR. It's too comfy.

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
- 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.
  
  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.
- I'm curious as to why the package manager doesn't fix this automatically?
  
  They will probably get to there. It's just not that important for the developers rn. They are working on a pacman rust rewrite and hopefully we can see more contributions to the project. I already considered contributing but C deterred me.
  You can see the milestones here: https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/alpm/alpm/-/milestones
- Thanks for this. My VLC broke similarly, but I use it rarely enough that I hadn't looked into it yet.
  
  Happy to help!

Fedora, great blend of bleeding edge and stability. Plus Linus uses it, so what better praise could you get.
- Can definitely recommend Fedora too. Software updates are at a good pace, and the system has a lot of polish all around. For example, all you need to do for updates is to press "update" in Discover and it'll do everything for you, applying on reboot for stability. Most things "just work".
  
  that's exactly how updates should work in every desktop distro. as an option of course.
  systemd made it possible to install updates on shutdown.
  packagekit enabled kde software to automatically obtain and prepare the updates.
  plasma does the final touch nowadays to ask you on the reboot/shutdown dialog whether you want to install them.
  Basically all the system is in place, with code from widely used parties. packagekit can even integrate with your filesystem to make a snapshot before install. It's wonderful. yet, it seems as if only fedora supports this full setup right now? or is there anything else?
  
  Discover is a KDE thing, not a fedora thing. Not fedora exclusive.
- Linus is about as far from a normal user as you can get and using him as a measuring stick if anything should be indication of the worse option for normal users...
  
  ¯(ツ)/¯ In this case, my personal experience and the dozens of other people who have agreed with me beg to differ.
- The only issue is that you provide free testing for IBM, so it's a no go if you try to boycott/avoid US companies. If you don't it's indeed a great choice.
  
  How are you providing free testing by using something if you don't actively file bug reports and such?
  
  Turn off telemetry?

I can totally understand that. In case you still want to give it a chance, I can highly recommend EndeavorOS. It's basically pre-styled, pure Arch. But it has a welcome dialog, where you have a warning banner at the top if you need to be careful regarding an update. This directly links you to their Gitlab and forum with the steps you'd need to take to not break anything. This saved me multiple times already and I never broke my system, despite not even reading the Arch RSS feed or changelogs.
Besides the EndeavorOS forum is waaaay friendlier compared to the Arch one.
- Endeavour forums helped when I upgraded during the 24 hours when Arch removed Amdgpu firmware. It did kind of make me wonder how many issues like that were present but that I've just dodged by random upgrade timing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_least_astonishment
Someone should inform whoever made that change. If a package is split in a new release, the initial state should match the final as closely as possible, in this case by installing the new optional dependencies automatically. (Although I'm not sure why they'd want to split everything out like that anyway; no other VLC distribution does that, so splitting is itself a violation.)
Maybe Manjaro might be an alternative? I haven't personally used it. I don't like this kind of surprise, so I stick to boring distros like Debian. I used to use CentOS but it was too boring.
- Manjaro is significantly worse with updates breaking.
  I used for a little while in 2018 and again in 2019, both times ended because it once became stuck in a boot loop after updates, and another time couldn’t boot after updates.
  
  I started using Manjaro in 2018. I can't remember any significant break.
  
  Mate it's been six years. Half a decade. Manjaro hasn't exploded a single time in at least the last three and beyond that has had only minor issues related to their website in that time.
  You have to be dense to be holding something that happened six years ago against a project.
- You just gave me words for something that was previously just vague internal grumbling and emotions.
  Manjaro knows how to aesthetically please me with their color choices and background art. I've got a negative impression from various podcasts and forum posts but I'm realizing I need to look into that more because I can't recall specifics besides something about a past issue with package distribution.
  
  i would recommend against manjaro or endeavorOS and such similar arch based distributions. they’re neat and more stable but have similar issues sometimes, for example the manjaro maintainers are generally known as pretty egregiously irresponsible.
  arch is kind of a clusterfuck. the user experience is really poor for a modern linux distribution and the community has an insular attitude of calling everything a skill issue.
  i used and maintained a bunch of arch systems for a long time. if you do this you inevitably end up using AUR packages, as some utilities a normal person would use for home and server shit are only available through AUR. updating gets fucky and it’s way more annoying bc you end up needing to constantly read long ass changelogs bc some dude changed the formatting in one UI element and pushed to main at 3AM and it won’t just updated with -Syu or similar args.
  i was talking about this earlier on lemmy as an example of terrible UX and all the arch fanboys came to downvote me and write paragraphs in droves talking about how it’s actually just the user’s fault for using the AUR and that i don’t know how pacman works. one guy claimed it’s like Debian PPAs. uh no, the AUR is far less optional lmfao. and i do know how yay and pacman work, i had no trouble, i was just pointing out it was annoying to deal with constantly when using a system like a normal person.
  when an OS has no user in mind when designing it… it’s kind of a shit OS and apparently forms a shit culture around it too, in my experiences the past few years on the internet.
- the initial state should match the final as closely as possible, in this case by installing the new optional dependencies automatically
  Sometimes. Some of us out there have use cases where we really, really don't want our systems making choices for us and would rather read the notes every time. One could equally well argue that an OS whose entire purpose is letting the user make the choice suddenly doing something automatically without asking for input is the break in state that users would find astonishing.
  
  I'd say you want Linux from Scratch then, but even then the Linux kernel maintainers are making choices for you.
  But Linus is very firm in that they never break userspace, so you should never see an issue like this when updating the kernel.

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.

Sorry for not answering your questions, I haven't used arch before. But dang that sucks I've been wanting to try arch for a little while but I didn't know they would happily push updates they know will break certain programs.
- It's more like they expect you to do more reading than I would like to do. If I had been reading more of what they would like, I would have known I was expected to make a decision before updating and install an additional package. So from that view, they didn't push a breaking update.
  
  When an upgrade spits out that much text, you should bat an eye.
- Been that way since the beginning. It's an experimental distro, not for production systems.
  
  Arch is definitely not "an experimental distro". It doesn't just break, and all the software in their repos is considered stable.
  If you have been using Arch for any meaningful amount of time, the massive output from OPs upgrade should be glaring.

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!

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.
- 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.
  
  Not wanting to help would be better then this, its like they just want to "win" the support ticket. Its so terribly counterproductive.
  
  I agree, people were telling me to RTFM in support chats on irc 30 years ago.

I use Debian, for the stability.

https://endeavouros.com/ https://garudalinux.org/ both arch based maybe you will like the forum style better and they will probably also give you this information.
- I like Garuda community.
  
  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.
- 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.
- +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

I'd recommend opensuse tumbleweed. Codecs can be a little weird, so I recommend installing a flatpak for VLC and your browser. Otherwise, I've found it to be a very similar experience.
- If it is the rolling aspect OP likes about arch. Then absolutely. OpenSUSE Tumbleweed is amazing. But I do think something like Gentoo is more arch like in the sense that you got to do most things your self.

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.
- 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.

The closest to Arch, a rolling cutting edge distro, is probably openSUSE Tumbleweed. openSUSE has excellent snapper integration that takes a snapshot before and after you touch zypper, so it's easy to undo changes that might ruin your system. CachyOS also has that same great snapper integration, but that's still Arch.
- You can install snapper on normal Arch and it'll snapshot before and after package installs
- The closest to Arch, a rolling cutting edge distro, is probably ~~openSUSE Tumbleweed~~ Void Linux.

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-all to 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.

I prefer Debian-Testing. Basically, a rolling release, but not unstable. Arch is akin to Debian -Sid, which is unstable. The latest packages are brought in to -Sid after some rudimentary testing on -experimental. But only the stuff that make it and are solid on -sid, make it to -testing. Basically, Debian has 2 layers of siphoning bugs before they even make it to -testing. And that's why the -stable branch is so solid, because whatever makes it there, has to go through the 3 branches.
So if you like rolling releases with much newer packages, consider -testing. The easiest way is to wait for the Trixie release, and then do the manual update to -testing by changing the repository names (there are online tutorials about it). The other way is to get a -testing iso, but these usually are broken because most people "upgrade" their installed distro to testing instead of just install it outright.
I've been using -testing for over a year now with 0 problems. Even Google is using -testing internally! I also have had Arch installed and endeavouros, and have had 3 problems that I had to fix in 5 months.
- What do you do for security updates?
  
  There are security updates on testing. Maybe not as fast as they're on Sid, but they are.
  
  What do you mean? They are included in the updates to -testing.
- The other way is to get a -testing iso, but these usually are broken because most people “upgrade” their installed distro to testing instead of just install it outright.
  I’ve installed Debian testing from ISO a handful of times and never had any issues.
  
  Very often it's broken. I had two such instances. Even Debian recommends that you just upgrade from stable.
- The old preferred way is to run testing/unstable with apt-pin (testing repos with higher priority). This way, if a package causes breakage, it's a quicker fix from unstable than from testing. Also, security patches come to unstable first.

Gentoo, honestly.
The community is much more friendly, the system is probably more arch than arch. The downside is compiling, but big packages have binaries now, and small packages build and install just about as fast as a binary distro.
Good hunting!
- Thanks for the suggestion. I enjoyed how much I learned from picking out packages to get Arch working. I'm getting a similar excitement reading about Gentoo use flags. Giving it serious consideration.
  
  The problem with Gentoo is that you can't install anything in a hurry.
  Run VMs on Arch:
  pacman -S virt-manager
  Done.
  Run VMs on Gentoo?
  Read the Wiki
  Find out which USE-Flags you will want
  Fnd out the dependencies it's based on (QEMU), read that Wiki entry too
  See what USE-Flags you want
  See what Kernel options are needed. Recompile Kernel if changes were necessary.
  emerge -av app-emulation/virt-manager
  See if you have read the Wikis of all dependencies.
  Install.
  Read the dependencies wikis for how to set things up.
  Done
  Yes, this is an extreme example, but many large packages are a bit like this.
  That's why you will tripple-check if you really need sonething before installing it on Gentoo, or you are like me and install Boxes in a Flatpak instead.
  Personally i like Gentoo more than Arch because of all the buttons and knobs, and once it's set up it does not need more time than Arch, but installing stuff is sometimes hard.
  
  Gentoo certainly teaches you a lot, but I would never recommend it to an average user. If you want to get any benefit from use flags for any packages, you will be compiling them from scratch and possibly their dependencies as well. Small packages are pretty fast, sure, but if you try to do something like compile Firefox, you could be waiting all day for that if you don't have a Threadripper or similar.
  Practically, unless you run exotic hardware you're unlikely to get any actual tangible benefits from tweaking most use flags on most packages. Which begs the question of why you're using such a low-level distro in the first place...
  Idk maybe I just didn't get it, but my month of running Gentoo was mostly just annoying. Again, great learning experience, but didn't make sense to me as a daily driver. It feels like it's for people who want to pore over the detailed patch notes for every package on their system, which is clearly not OP.
  NixOS gives me enough control over how individual packages are configured if I really want it, but in a way that stays entirely out of my way until I specifically want to fiddle. I'm not saying NixOS is any better for a new user, but as a pretty experienced one I found it more rewarding once I understood the ecosystem.
- This might be the answer really, Gentoo is my favorite distro in theory. In practice I'm a lazy ass that just ends up installing binary packages for everything and missing the AUR.
  
  I'm lazy too!
  Gentoo stable scratches that itch quite effectively.
  Front loading though, that'll take some work!

This is what drove me to Debian. I like stability, I don't need cutting edge, simple as.
- Debian is my go to for setting up a new server because of the stability and project longevity.
  The excitement of features from the cutting edge gives me free energy to start new projects that I don't experience if I wait for the stable release.
  
  The excitement of features from the cutting edge
  I don't understand how Debian limits that. You can use Debian for your distribution BUT for whatever you want to be cutting edge, use whatever alternative method you want. It can be alternative package managers, e.g. am but if you want the absolute bleeding edge, go on the repository of the project, get a specific branch, build, install, use. That's absolutely no problem with even Debian stable.
  I'm genuinely confused at comments implying that have a stable distribution means having outdated software.

If you don't want to get into the rabbit hole that is NixOS (which is a distro i also like), then i would say void linux, if you still want that arch minimalism. Void is a rolling release, but it's more like a slow roll if that makes sense and focuses on stability. It's package manager is also rock solid, fast, and can update even when the system hasn't been updated in ages. If you've done a manual install of arch before, you'll probably breeze through the install process as well, since it is a guided ncurses installer.
- I second that, void is a solid and stable rolling distro.

Honestly NIXos. Run it impermanent or traditional OS style. If your coming from Arch and want less breakage and more declarative configuration. Immutable or not. Pick almost any DE and all you maintain is your nix config. Nix config is your master file its not huge and the machine runs from it as you tell it. The machine does the rest. No system drift, no cruft. Just works and if you break it. Select your previous generation at boot and your back exactly as you were before.
- Downside: it requires knowing a new coding language, Nix, to maintain your laptop.
  If you don’t understand it, it’s going to be painful to fix anything that doesn’t work.
  
  The syntax is cake but your point is entirely valid. If your config is commented and plain. There's not much of learning curve. I came from windows to mint, now to NIX. I did a full custom install luks, all my apps and settings pretty much loaded, settings and all, from my mint machine to make the transition easy as I could. Damn near like I never left and even more so now that I have backups, systems in place and working on impermenance and using a golden USB to boot my machine from any device, anywhere. Once I got gen 1 running the rest was simple. The day to day is zero fuss. It's totally mental burden free. That's what I wanted. To finally be stable and out of the way.
- I don't mind trading upfront effort for stability. I enjoyed setting up Arch and I'm still benefiting from insights gained from choosing my setup packages there.
  Having nearly latest versions of packages is important to me because I can get into a flow after the initial excitement of a new feature being released but if I have to wait long to get my hands on it that won't happen. In this case, a smaller loss of my excitement to watch a video happened in the time it took me to figure out what was up with VLC.
  
  One thing I appreciate about NixOS is the ability to use overlays and override package sources. For example, overlays can be used to selectively install unstable and stable packages alongside each other:
  https://discourse.nixos.org/t/mixing-stable-and-unstable-packages-on-flake-based-nixos-system/50351
  While there may be caveats, this approach has been working for me just fine, as I can install VSCode from unstable to get the most recent monthly releases as they roll out, but then pin the rest of my desktop environment to stable to limit anything else shifting underneath me unexpectedly.

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.
- 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?
  
  I've run tumbleweed for quite a while with no issues. I've never had to reinstall it.

Rule of Thumb: if your use case is not satisfied by your current Distro, then move to the one that does.
Arch or rolling release distros are great if you want latest version of software/packages as soon as possible. Downside is you need to put more effort/time to maintain it by yourself.
On the other hand, fixed release distros (e.g. Debian) doesn't offer latest packages immediately. But, given that packages are tested for distro release, so you will have a more stable (in relative term) system for yourself with minimal effort.
I used to like rolling release distros on my college days as I had plenty of time back then. Now, I'm settled on fixed release ditro as it suits my current use case.

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.

Opensuse tumbleweed or if you want to keep the arch featureset but with the rollback-ability of BTRFS check out CachyOS
- Opensuse Tumbleweed has made my list to try out.
  Thanks for CachyOS. This is my first time hearing of it so I've got some reading to do.
  
  CachyOS and Endeavour OS are the two common Arch derivatives - basically “Arch in easy mode”. They’re both very good.
  Manjaro is another but it brings its own set of problems that I never have the time or patience to deal with.
  I’m using CachyOS now since October. I’m enjoying it and haven’t come across any issues yet that weren’t easily fixed.
  This is the first time in 5 years I haven’t been on opensuse.

People are not gonna like this at all but I've been using manjaro for years and it's been pretty solid for me.
- I encountered this same VLC issue on Manjaro this week, so YMMV.
- Manjaro has been pretty quiet for a long time. There's gotta be a point where we forgive and forget. I like Manjaro and used it as my entry point to Arch. It sets a lot more up for you out of the box and has manjaro-specific package bundles that just work on install.
  According to Manjarno, its been just under three years since their last mistake, and that was just forgetting to renew the SSL cert for their archived forums. Probably about time we let it back into the Arch family.
  
  If we all can love steamOS then there's zero reason to hate on Manjaro. They basically do the same thing.
  They are both arch at the end of the day.
  Least till Manjaro fucks up again. lol
- I was going to say that Manjaro will have the same issue in a short while because they delay the updates a little bit but follow them, so VLC will get split in Manjaro too, but someone already commented that it has already happened
  
  Yup, it happened to me, installing necessary vlc plugins fixed the issue.

I had the same problem, i did start with arch ,but man i remember doing a update after 4 days(4Gb of new updates) and my system faild to boot. From that moment i went debian route.

vlc was already like this on arch for a long time, literally took just a moment to look at the optional dependencies and grab the latest "actually give me everything lmao" package group
- Yeah I can't believe he's been using Arch for 5 years and didn't even bat an eye over the massive pacman output

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

You can mitigate this with Timeshift
- Snapper!
- I like having Timeshift in place for if I can't figure out what went wrong.
  In this case, I didn't use VLC until days after I had updated so my mind didn't go to an issue from updating right away. I make a high amount of accidental inputs while using laptops and I don't always notice so a lot of my issues end up being unintentional configuration changes from weeks or months ago.

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?

Debians testing branch might be a good shout. Packages stay pretty up-to-date and usually stuff doesn't break. Worst case you can pull a package from unstable when needed.
- debian testing is for testing purposes only. you should never daily drive debian testing (unless you know what you're doing)
  also, we're about to get a new debian release (trixie), this is literally the worst time you could choose to daily drive debian testing
- I second Debian Testing. The only issues I have are updates slow down during package freezes and sometimes, a package you are using becomes a victim of a package transition. Both are symptoms of Testing being exactly what it says, so I can't blame them, but still a valid annoyance.
  The worst example was FreeCAD had a dependency being transitioned, so FreeCAD disappeared from Testing for a while, meaning my system wouldn't update if I wanted to keep FreeCAD. In the end, I just gave up and used the Flatpak. (I probably could have installed from Unstable, but whatever.)
  Truth be told, I kind of wish there was a project to keep some new packages flowing to Testing users during freezes. I get why Debian themselves doesn't do it - it would be a nightmare to maintain - but an outside community project would be amazing. It wouldn't exactly be easy, but such a project wouldn't need to necessarily do every package (just desired ones), and they would only need to maintain them a couple months until new versions start flowing into Testing again. I think the biggest difficulty is not going too far ahead of what will end up in Testing post-freeze.
  
  There is a way to "pin" package versions isn't there?
  I wonder if that would prevent this kind of thing from uninstalling a package that is in transition. Ofc, it wouldn't get any updates, but I'd take that over just not having the package.
  Flatpak works though!

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 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.

I've been using Ubuntu/Kubuntu since 2004 and I've always been happy and had very little problems.
It's a good, no hassle distro that works and is fairly up to date, especially if you use the non-LTS ones. I prefer staying with LTS though. At least my OS is stable and I don't have to spend my free time troubleshooting anything.
- My first experience with Linux was Ubuntu back in 2007! I thought it was interesting but didn't become a Linux user until 12 years later when I realized gaming was possible without dual booting.
  Something I experience a lot is getting excited for new features. It gives me an energy I can use to start a project I wouldn't have done otherwise. I need to be able to start soon after hearing about the new feature or I risk losing the excitement and missing out on the energy it would have provided.
  
  I used to be like that. I just get so tied from work, seeing computers and software all day and having to constantly learn new technology that at home I'm just looking for something that doesn't change too much and is familiar.

Fedora if you do not gain joy from troubleshooting
Debian sid if you do.

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

Cachy OS has been treating me very well. Perfect all around. Very helpful people and very nice. I am not going anywhere

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.

I recently switched to Void after making runs with Arch and Fedora.
I'm not anti-systemd. I just like Void. Rolling release model. Light weight. Minimalistic. I've read how the package manager is small but for me everything I need is there. That's the first time that's happened for me as with other distros I would have had to install via flatpak, snap by source, appimage and by the package manager.
Not sure if that would work for your use case or not.

you should be good after installing the optional dependencies
- Installing the dependencies did fix it.
  I decided I wanted to switch because in the time it took for me to figure that out I lost the excitement for what I was about to watch.
  
  New optional dependencies also happen in other distributions, just happens a lot less as they aren't rolling release distributions.
  Learning to parse terminal output for what's relevant is a good and sometimes necessary skill.

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.

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

Maybe it's me, but while you have outlined the events that got you to this point, I don't understand either the 'attitude' you find problematic or what it is about Arch you would hope to find elsewhere. Hard to make a recommendation without those.
- You're right, I was leaning heavily on the events to give context for defining the attitude (maybe policy would be a less loaded word for me to use). I don't like the expectation that I would have to look for information in multiple places before updating. I'd prefer to be able to update often without needing to take in a lot of information.
  
  If your upgrade says anything out of the ordinary, which it most definitely did here, that should probably trigger something in you. This is the case for any distro.
- Did you forget your ‘btw’?

How about NixOS unstable?
- Yeesss come to the dark side

NixOS might not be for you, it is horrible if you don't want to adapt to it. But if this happened on NixOS, you would just reboot into the state of your computer before you ran the update. Or if it's just a program like VLC you could just close VLC switch to the previous generation and open VLC again

Would a flatpak would survive this update? I do use arch on some computers but with several flatpaks for some applications that I feel will be safer - but i don't really know.
Maybe i just update and see what happens.
- The whole point of the update is to avoid the silly Windows-like mentality of flatpack. It splits the package up so you can choose what you want instead of installing a bunch of crap you won't ever use. If OP had been awake while doing a full upgrade on his bleeding edge system, he would have noticed.
  
  Surely that can be OPs choice.
  If a user has a large number of programmes they might not want to hand hold updates of all of them each time.
  If they choose only the handful they want from arch repo or aur then they might have a quicker update and find it easier to stay awake.
  I'd think it should be up to them if they want to trade off bloat vs the burden of an update.
  I find, especially for AUR stuff the update can become vexatious.

I mean it's not your fault, btw sudo downgrade vlc then reboot and uninstall vlc and install the required vlc plugins
- Luckily just installing the plugins worked. Thank you for offering advice.
  
  I mean I don't read news before upgrading too, but since I switched to mpv with custom skins, I'm linking it so far.

This is why I do not use a rolling release distro.
- this is an arch linux problem, not a rolling-release problem. tumbleweed doesn't have issues like that

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 😁)

Rocky or AlmaLinux