Alt text: O’RLY? generated book cover with a donkey, navy blue accent, header: “It’s only free if you don’t value your time”, title: “Handling Arch Linux Failures”, subtitle: “Mom, please cancel my today’s agenda!”
Alt text: O’RLY? generated book cover with a donkey, navy blue accent, header: “It’s only free if you don’t value your time”, title: “Handling Arch Linux Failures”, subtitle: “Mom, please cancel my today’s agenda!”
I really don’t get these memes. In about 9 years of daily use on multiple systems I never had anything break beyond a multitude of failures to update with pacman - all of which could be fixed within minutes - and in the early years having to restart my system every couple of months because it stopped recognizing USB devices - after many rounds of updates mind you. I’ve had more frequent troubles with windows. How did Arch get this bad rep?
Maybe your “could be fixed within minutes” is someone else’s “took hours to figure out how to fix when I was actually supposed to be working”?
Nah, I usually find the solution on the arch website. If that doesn’t work, it’s in the forum - which is usually the first search result on all major search engines for any given pacman problem. Once you’ve found the solution it’s hardly more than just copy-pasting it.
No it’s actually very simple stuff. Arch is surprisingly stable and easy to manage, and had been for the better part of a decade
Same here. 10 years on my laptop and it broke only once: I accidentally closed the terminal where the initramfs was installed. So my mistake. I could fix it by using an arch install on an USB and my knowledge of how to install the system, since I did it myself, by hand.
well in this particular case it’s initramfs’ fault for not designing for all-or-nothing atomicity (a operation either completes fully or not at all). which you can work around with a terminal multiplexer where a session can be re-attached later in such cases btw.
Thanks, the multiplexer idea is actually really good.
Having Said that, In my particular case it was actually my fault.
That’s because arch is very old and back in the days it was prone to breakage. Ironically, it is now much more stable and easy to maintain than an Ubuntu derivative but people will still recommend Mint to beginners for some reason.
Because beginners have no idea about OS architecture concepts. If they are a true beginner coming from Windows or MacOS they may not understand things like the Linux boot process. Of course they can read the Arch install procedure which I’ve heard is excellent, but many people are easily intimidated by documentation and often view computers as a tool that should just work out of the box without them needing to understand it. Mint is an attempt at making that happen. Obviously, once you start to modify your Mint install alot you are going to run into issues, and a highly modified or customized system is where distros like Arch and Tumbleweed actually become easier to maintain. I’d argue Mint is a natural first step to the Linux pipeline. People who only need a web browser will probably stop there, while others will continue to explore distros that better fit their needs.
Good distros:
Agree?