[gbrown]

Can an Arch person explain to me why their approach is worth it over something with a more comprehensive package manager like apt or dnf? I don’t mind compiling programs myself when needed, but for most things I’m happy to not have to hand-hold my OS when it comes to updates.

From the wiki:

> Before upgrading, users are expected to visit the Arch Linux home page to check the latest news, or alternatively subscribe to the RSS feed or the arch-announce mailing list

Like… why?

[apetresc]

I think you're confusing Arch with Gentoo or something - the Arch package manager is not from-source, it ships binaries just like apt. Perhaps you're thinking of the AUR, which does usually just host the PKGBUILD which you run makepkg on directly to compile, but that's analogous to something like an Ubuntu PPA, not the core package manager.

The main thing that people like about it is the rolling release model; new packages for virtually everything are updated within hours or days of an upstream release, with incredible practical stability.

> > Before upgrading, users are expected to visit the Arch Linux home page to check the latest news, or alternatively subscribe to the RSS feed or the arch-announce mailing list > Like... why?

That's very much a "cover-your-ass" type disclaimer, like a ToS that says you have no right to expect anything to work. In practice, 99.99% of upgrades work completely unattended, and in the .01%, you see a failure, you go to the News site and it says "sorry, we made a backwards-incompatible push, please delete this path before upgrading" or something like that, you do it, and then everything is fine again for another 18 months.

Arch still has the vestiges of this reputation as a wild-west distribution for reckless code cowboys, but in practice it is the de-facto "set it and forget it" distro. I spend literally 10x less time worrying about my distribution and package manager when I'm on Arch then on any other computing system I've ever encountered.

[lgunsch]

I have used Arch Linux for the past 8 years. I've had 3 installations on four different laptops (I migrated one installation to a second laptop).

Your comment would be a really great description of my experience.

[pxc]

> The main thing that people like about it is the rolling release model; new packages for virtually everything are updated within hours or days of an upstream release, with incredible practical stability.

Fedora Rawhide and openSUSE Tumbleweed are both nearly as up-to-date[1] as the Arch repos but they have package managers with correct dependency solvers and continuous integration pipelines with tests produce their repos. NixOS Unstable is more up-to-date than Arch Linux[1], and its package manager never breaks your system on upgrades and features automatic rollbacks no matter what filesystem you use.

‘I want a rolling release’ doesn't really explain the choice to use Arch in particular, imo, and it's weird that this extremely common answer to ‘why Arch’ talks about a feature that isn't really specific to Arch

—

1: https://repology.org/repositories/statistics/pnewest

[II2II]

It is probably a reference to the AUR, but its use is not as common as some people seem to think and is somewhat discouraged (since, like PPA, the packagers are not necessarily trusted). I would also have a hard time claiming that programs from the AUR are compiled yourself. Yes, the software is usually compiled on your own hardware. On the other hand, the compilation process is handled by makepkg or an AUR helper. With an AUR helper, the process is remarkably like installing a program with pacman since it will handle dependencies.

[simion314]

>That's very much a "cover-your-ass" type disclaimer,

This is not true for all hardware configurations or true for all packages combination(including weird AUR ones) in the world. For sure if we Google if this really happens in the real world you will see that indeed update break things.

Also keeping up with upstream does not mean you only get the new features but also the new bugs, especially if you were using GNOME3 a fee years back at each new GNOME release the forums and reddit was filled with new memory leaks issue, new plugin/extension breakage issues and even GNOME not starting up.

[gbrown]

> I think you're confusing Arch with Gentoo or something - the Arch package manager is not from-source, it ships binaries just like apt. Perhaps you're thinking of the AUR

Sorry, what I meant was: when I need to manage the version of something carefully, I just compile it from source and that's OK with me. My understanding is that people use the AUR for this on Arch, and the pains don't seem worth it.

> The main thing that people like about it is the rolling release model

Fair enough, though I've been pretty happy with the pace of update from, for example, Fedora.

> That's very much a "cover-your-ass" type disclaimer, like a ToS that says you have no right to expect anything to work.

Fair enough

[alexarnesen]

Arch is the first system I have been able to support, fully. As in, 100% of the issues I run across with my distro, I can resolve. I used to run Ubuntu as my gnome desktop distribution, and when it worked (99% of the time), it was a superior experience to Arch. However when running Ubuntu I would inevitably run across some issue that seemed to require a level of sysadmin chops that I never have possessed. For the past year I've been running an Arch desktop, I have resolved every issue by using the Arch wiki and Google/ stack overflow. I suspect that partly, the Arch approach is appealing to those of us who prefer a simpler system, because those are easier to grapple with in a support context.

[Enginerrrd]

This has been exactly my experience as well. Ubuntu would have fewer issues initially, and almost no setup, but after setup it would break more often and always find ways to break in new and interesting ways that were very difficult to resolve, and I never could understand what was wrong.

With Arch, I was able to fix every issue that came up, full stop. But it required much more setup. It also breaks way less often. Prior to Arch, I never really felt that "full-empowered linux-user" feeling. It was always voodoo. Now I DO get that feeling and I really feel in charge and in control of my system. Interestingly, I still run ubuntu server for a couple servers, (I generally prefer debian for servers, but that's a separate discussion.) and I still find the occasional issues that come up to be difficult-to-resolve voodoo, despite having a much greater level of understanding of how linux works and does things.

[stonemetal12]

Would you recommend Arch to someone without a lot of Linux experience? Ubuntu has me thinking of switching to a different OS.

[pxc]

This is the best reason I've heard stated for preferring Arch. Thanks for sharing!

[matheusmoreira]

> a more comprehensive package manager like apt or dnf

I don't see how apt or dnf are any more comprehensive than pacman. What do you mean by that?

Before Arch, I used Fedora. It used yum as its package manager. That thing managed to corrupt its own databases at least twice during normal usage. Distribution major version upgrades always caused problems.

I never had problems like these after switching to Arch.

> I don’t mind compiling programs myself when needed

You only need to compile user packages. Official Arch Linux repositories host binary packages. You can download the PKGBUILD if you want.

> for most things I’m happy to not have to hand-hold my OS when it comes to updates.

99% of the time updates just work for me. Sometimes they introduce a few .pacnew files, I diff and merge them with my local files and that's it.

> Like… why?

Sometimes manual intervention is necessary. Usually it's not a big deal. The news tell you what to do and most importantly why you must do it.

The most complicated maintenance I ever experienced with Arch was when it switched /bin to /usr/bin.

[diffeomorphism]

Not PP, but to me it means much less manual intervention/more hooks etc. .

For instance, for debian I can just turn on automatic updates and basically never need manual intervention.

For arch I am not supposed to use automatic updates and have to (!) read the news.

Why? Why does arch need more manual intervention? Sure, I can do that but it just seems like a pointless waste of time.

[pxc]

> I don't see how apt or dnf are any more comprehensive than pacman. What do you mean by that?

In terms of the core functionality of package managers, they both have more robust dependency resolvers (and dnf's is actually complete[1]).

In the case of dnf, it's also more ‘comprehensive’ in the sense that the singular CLI tool handles more package management functionality (e.g., it includes repo management), and in the sense that it supports plugins.

They're also both more comprehensive in the sense that you don't need to resort to one of a dozen third-party ‘wrappers’ in order to use the bulk of packages available in those distros' ecosystems.

—

1: See the discussion of completeness here: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2011.07851.pdf

[MegaDeKay]

As another plus, the Arch wiki itself is absolutely fantastic. People will point to the Arch wiki even when running other distributions. For example, it is the place to go when doing something like GPU passthrough to another OS running on qemu/KVM.

[evol262]

Which, honestly, is grating.

It's great that the Arch wiki is as good as the Gentoo wiki was in 2002, but it would be even better if the Arch wiki actually acknowledged the people doing the work. For GPU passthrough, for example, the initial author/current maintainer of VFIO published a development blog which has a [multi-part series explaining VFIO and passthrough from the bottom up](http://vfio.blogspot.com/2015/05/vfio-gpu-how-to-series-part...) six years ago.

This is not referenced anywhere in the Arch wiki, despite the fact that it's the literal author, most of the steps in their wiki haven't changed in the intervening years, and it's almost certain that whatever place the authors of that wiki page eventually cribbed it from probably came from the original blog.

The Arch wiki contributors, in this sense, aren't great netizens. Worse, the Arch wiki (and various subreddits) are almost as bad as the Arch/Ubuntu forums were in 2005. They often lead to a bunch of "shotgun debugging" where users are copy and pasting things they don't understand at all in the hopes that it will fix whatever problem they're encountering for reasons they won't understand.

Arch is fine, and it has its place. There are some brilliant people using Arch. The community in general is full of people who intentionally shoot themselves in the foot and are then proud that they find superglue for the wound on the Arch wiki instead of using a distro with better engineering practices where they never would have had these problems at all. The mistaken belief that doing any of this somehow "teaches" you meaningful things about Linux as opposed to solving real problems (since 99% of the "problems" Arch users encountered will never be seen on other distros, due to the fact that the maintainers carefully ensure there are limited footguns out of the) is terrible.

[foxfluff]

> Can an Arch person explain to me why their approach is worth it over something with a more comprehensive package manager like apt or dnf?

Can you explain to me how dnf or apt is more comprehensive than pacman? I use all three: arch on my laptop, fedora on my desktop, ubuntu on my work laptop. I do not see the difference in comprehensiveness.

There are some house cleaning tasks pacman won't automatically do for you because doing so could break things you rely on. The same is true on fedora. It'll leave configs untouched, unless you run rpmconf which might then just break your stuff:

> If you use rpmconf to upgrade the system configuration files supplied with the upgraded packages then some configuration files may change. After the upgrade you should verify /etc/ssh/sshd_config, /etc/nsswitch.conf, /etc/ntp.conf and others are expected. For example, if OpenSSH is upgraded then sshd_config reverts to the default package configuration. The default package configuration does not enable public key authentication, and allows password authentication.

(From https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/quick-docs/dnf-system-u...)

The problem is ultimately one of churn, and how the system deals with it. Anecdotally Ubuntu tries to deal with it harder than the others, and my experience is that Ubuntu breaks (or suddenly stops behaving the way you had it configured) the most during updates. The others break less but require some attention from you.

Some of the churn is caused by distros, some of it is caused by the upstream projects. Churn is big in the Linux world.

[guerrilla]

> Can an Arch person explain to me why their approach is worth it over something with a more comprehensive package manager like apt or dnf? I don’t mind compiling programs myself when needed, but for most things I’m happy to not have to hand-hold my OS when it comes to updates.

It sounds like you may be confusing Arch with some other distro. You rarely if ever need to compile anything yourself. Pacman works just like apt or dnf, i.e. resolves dependencies, downloads and installs packages for you, unless you have something specific in mind.

[cturtle]

In the last two years I’ve been on the arch-announce mailing list I think I have only needed to respond to breaking updates twice.

I choose arch for three reasons. 1. The official repos and the AUR have nearly every package I have ever needed. And usually packages are updated soon after a release. 2. Being rolling release, I never need to reinstall arch, just run updates periodically. 3. I love learning, and I have learned more about Linux and system maintenance from arch than anything else. While there might be a slightly larger cost of time spent setting up (and maintaining when I break something) arch, I have decided that the tradeoffs are worth it to me.

[nonameiguess]

I'm honestly not sure what you mean by apt or dnf being more comprehensive. The feature set of all Linux package managers are pretty similar. The major difference with Arch is you're heavily recommended not to do partial upgrades, but pacman will do it if you really want to. That's a difference in update philosophy between batched releases and rolling releases, not a difference in the package managers.

If you mean comprehensive in terms of available software, corporate and commercial software seems to often offer debs and rpms but not tarballs installable by pacman. On the other hand, for anything open source, the Arch official repository plus AUR has way more packages available than the Debian/Ubuntu and Redhat official repos, and having everything in one AUR for third-party packages is much more convenient than the apt/dnf way of adding a repo per vendor.

As for checking the home page every time you upgrade, you really don't need to. I think that's to stave off complaints if something breaks, because it might since you have full freedom to set things up however you want and Arch can't guarantee the standard packages with standard settings are going to work for the combinatorial explosion of possible individual setups everyone might have. But in five years of daily Arch use (I have it as the OS on 8 devices in my house right now), I've auto-upgraded daily and experienced one breakage I can think of, two days ago when certain graphical apps stopped showing a visible window. It was annoying and I still don't know why it happened (guessing something about the Wayland/NVIDIA combo is still creating issues), but it fixed itself on the next ugprade 7h hours later or so.

[ubercow13]

> package managers are pretty similar. The major difference with Arch is you're heavily recommended not to do partial upgrades, but pacman will do it if you really want to. That's a difference in update philosophy between batched releases and rolling releases, not a difference in the package managers.

No it’s a difference in package managers. Pacman doesn’t take into account library versions when resolving dependencies, it’s why partial upgrades aren’t supported because the only way to ensure every package you have installed is linked against the version of its dependencies you have installed is to have every package on your system come from a snapshot in time of the whole repo package tree.

Better package managers don’t have this problem and understand how to not break your system with partial upgrades. This matters as soon as a new version of a package has a bug and you want to downgrade it, or you build and install a package from the AUR which, when you later update your system, could need rebuilding to continue working, but pacman has no way to tell you when this is the case.

[schleck8]

Sometimes when visiting arch forums the undertone is a little gatekeep-ey and people asking for more beginner friendly ways to install software like GUIs or AUR helpers are responded to with answers like 'You don't. You compile it yourself from the command line'.

[cyber_kinetist]

For a more beginner-friendly approach to Arch, try Manjaro. The user experience is much better: you can choose one out of several desktop environments and get sane defaults, has its own system that can easily swap between different drivers and kernels, and generally very robust overall. Also the forums are more friendly towards beginners, so I view it as Arch without the elitism. The package updates are usually several weeks behind from Arch (since it uses a curated snapshot of Arch), but I view this as a plus (in reality you don’t need that much bleeding-edge updates).

[swasheck]

i say this as a windows user for my workplace, but that's not being gatekeepers, it's upholding the ethos of the distribution. i've used arch quite a bit as a hobby linux and the reality is that i've learned more about linux via arch documentations and by being curious about how to resolve things instead of demanding an easy path. the knowledge gained produces the easy path.

[pxc]

> Can an Arch person explain to me why their approach is worth it over something with a more comprehensive package manager like apt or dnf? I don’t mind compiling programs myself when needed, but for most things I’m happy to not have to hand-hold my OS when it comes to updates.

People who like Arch because they think the AUR is actually good hate doing repo management. What they like about the AUR is that it's One Big Repo, and it (unlike the barren Arch repos themselves) is pretty comprehensive.

> > Before upgrading, users are expected to visit the Arch Linux home page to check the latest news, or alternatively subscribe to the RSS feed or the arch-announce mailing list > Like… why?

Because Arch's interpretation of ‘keep it simple, stupid’ means they are allergic to engineering in their distro tools. As a result, their package manager has deficient dependency resolution behavior. This is exacerbated by the fact that the devs make relatively little use of things like transitional packages, for some reason. But Pacman is fast, because by choosing not to have a complete dependency solver, it avoids tackling a problem with high computational complexity. For some people, that part of the user experience is good enough that it allows them to forgive Pacman for doing insane things like pointlessly breaking installed software every now and again.

[javier2]

You don't have to run arch if you are happy with your Ubuntu or whatever other distro. I run arch because I like trying out new software when its released, not when maintainers of ubuntu decide to include it in the next release cycle. You are pretty much always on the latest kernel, for good or bad. aur also is a gem compared to apt when it comes to modifying in-tree packages and maintaining those with the system package manager.

But well, if you are happy with your distro you don't have to use anything else.

[jimjimjimjim]

Sometimes there are some manual interventions that you may have to perform.

[gbrown]

Yeah, exactly. Why?