Arch is fun, let's have something stable.

A

Aremis

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I had a week in arch, and I am a happy user of arch to this day, though I do have issues with it's dependability. With one update it is easy enough to break, and already virtual boc broke substantially in the last update.

I'll put ubuntu on my main laptop again, but on another hard drive. Arch however will be giong on a netbook OR on my desktop, effectively replacing the hard drive that is in there if arch says that it doesn't work on my netbook.

Sad as it is for me to say, I just need the dependability of debian. I can;t have things break in the morning because I need stuff for class.

While it does depress me that I need to use the windows of linux, I need that stability. :C
 
I have personally not have any issues with stability (except those issues I created myself when I was a complete newbie). Of course, Arch is a distro that generally requires more maintenance than most other distros since it aims to always have the latest stable upstream releases avaialble. This often means you can experience upstream bugs in new versions.

My virtualbox is working without issues, but I do recall seeing a forum post about people having issues when having enabled DirectX if I remember correctly. Everyone affected seemed to get everything working again by downgrading to the previous version from their pacman cache. Most likely this is an issue that will be fixed when the Virtualbox devs release a new version where the problem is fixed.

Until such a time, you could simply set virtualbox updates to be ignored in your /etc/pacman.conf
 
I thought Manjaro was created for the very purpose of being both user-friendly and overall a more tested Arch-based distro.

OpenSuse, Ubuntu variants, Fedora, Debian stable or jessie (which I'm using on a netbook at the moment and it's rocksolid) take your pick. I moved to Kubuntu recently because I wanted to do LESS maintenance and focus on my stuff, it has worked charms for me. Hopefully when I acquire a laptop I'll nuke it with Debian jessie (hoping it'd be stable) or Netrunner (they have a rolling release arch-based afaik)
 
I like arch. Probably too much. Every time I update I cringe. I really do hate that feeling.

My resolve is that my netbook turns out to be 32 bit so the hard drive will go to my desktop. When I remember what the name is I will just boot into that hard drive through bios when I want to. I'll probably boot to it more often as Netrunner is taking a gigantic shit on me and it annoys the hell out of me.

While I do like it, I need practice with it until I get the hang of it. I'm never going to have a machine without it though :P
 
I run Arch on my notebook. I've tested a lot of different distros on my notebook but Arch fits the most!
On my desktop I run Manjaro because it was important for me to have a Linux running ootb on it due to the little time I had at that week and I also don't want to miss the Arch experience.
For me Manjaro is doing the things I want quite well but I think at the long term I will switch to Arch.
After some years with Ubuntu, this is my way to go ;)
 
I can really relate to the cringing when updating, the first couple of months on Arch were like that for me as well. But one important thing to remember, older packages are available in /var/cache/pacman/pkg so if an update seem to break something (and the front page news on the Arch Linux home page does not mention required intervention during update, and you didn't ignore any .pacnew files) you can always do a

pacman -U /var/cache/pacman/pkg/previous-package-version

The pacman cache can get rather large over time, and if you are confident that your system is stable in its current state (if stuff works, and you can reboot safely), then a pacman -Sc will clear the cache, but will leave all packages currently installed so you have current versions available if you need to downgrade after a future update.
 
Ok cool. I think I will just do arch on my desktop when I need it though ^^ Matter of fact I think I'll pop it in now and have that running instead.
 
Hey there Aremis! I'm glad to see you really are excited about your Arch Distribution! I actually run both Ubuntu Studio and Arch (64 bit of course) on my same hard disk. I keep 3 partitions on my hard drive:

  • Arch Root System
  • Ubuntu Root System
  • Shared Home Directory (for both systems)

I agree Arch does have a tendency to break itself upon updating as it has the newest of everything but you can still have the best of both worlds. Also, if you feel that Ubuntu is the Windows of Linux you could run Linux Mint Debian Edition instead! :)
 
Sharing home between such different distros might cause problems. Since your home directory is used to store configuration files for programs, this could cause a conflict when the version difference is big for a program in Arch and Ubuntu. Config file syntax or even options can be different between some versions. It does not always cause problems, but it is important to be aware of it in case a program might start acting up.
 
Conveniently, most softwares (unrelated to DE) don't break, but the desktop environment software may have specific configurations files that will give you a lot of headaches (let's say you jumped from a modern distro to Debian stable then some of the settings in the DE will cause conflict)

My only advice as someone who has jumped from modern(semi-rolling and full rolling) to stable, and stable to modern. If you use KDE, wipe KDE related configuration folders for best experience. OpenBox almost never changes, most Windows Manager use the same configurations it might ignore two or three feature specific configurations, GNOME imho, give it a good scrubbing.

That's my 2cents on it.
 
ganbare said:
Hey there Aremis! I'm glad to see you really are excited about your Arch Distribution! I actually run both Ubuntu Studio and Arch (64 bit of course) on my same hard disk. I keep 3 partitions on my hard drive:

  • Arch Root System
  • Ubuntu Root System
  • Shared Home Directory (for both systems)

I agree Arch does have a tendency to break itself upon updating as it has the newest of everything but you can still have the best of both worlds. Also, if you feel that Ubuntu is the Windows of Linux you could run Linux Mint Debian Edition instead! :)
Click to expand...

HA! I do that all the time when I do my default set up, windows and linux (whatever I feel like having about).
 
I almost forgot, there is something called the Arch Rollback Machine. Basically it stores a lot of older package versions. Maybe you cleared your pacman cache, but really need to downgrade because of a critical bug that was just discovered in a program, or maybe you have a new install so you don't have any older packages in your cache.

Arch Rollback Machine got packages back to 2013. So it is just a matter of picking a date, and then going into the appropriate repository. It is also important to ensure you pick the correct architecture to match your system, especially since some software is in extra or community repo for 32-bit systems, but in multilib repo for 64-bit systems, Steam is one program that comes to mind.

It is always ideal to keep your Arch current, but holding a program back from updates for a while is also easily done if something breaks. Just download the package version you want and install with pacman -U

Edit: The Arch Rolback Machine is also accessible via ftp: ftp://seblu.net/archlinux/arm
 
Aremis said:
Sad as it is for me to say, I just need the dependability of debian. I can;t have things break in the morning because I need stuff for class.

While it does depress me that I need to use the windows of linux, I need that stability. :C
Click to expand...

My experience with Manjaro is that it's extremely stable, even with 3.16 kernel and the testing repositories.
 
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