2d ago

Realizing Arch isn't for me after updating broke VLC

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?

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267 comments

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!
  
  Yeh. Also, Debian tends to hold back packages like that automatically. It’s just a really obnoxious thing to deal with for me, and Flatpak allows me to circumvent that.
  Though truth be told, I’m thinking of just staying on Trixie once it hits stable. While Testing certainly has its uses and I rather love it, there’s simply times where I don’t want to deal with the odd system maintenance ordeals, as comparatively rare as they are relative to other rolling release distros. I’ve been rather enjoying Bookworm on my laptop for a year now, which makes me think I would enjoy it on desktop.
  
  All the power to ya! Doesn't matter if it's Stable, Testing, or Unstable, if it works for you that's all that matters.

267 comments