[ofalkaed]

I learned linux by using Arch back in the days when pacman -Syu was almost certain to break something and there was a good chance it would break something unique to your install. This was also back in the days when most were not connected to the internet 24/7 and many did not have internet, I updated when I went to the library which was generally a weekly thing but sometimes it be a month or two and the system breakage that resulted was rococo. Something was lost by Arch becoming stable and not breaking regularly, it was what drove the wiki and fixing all the things that pacman broke taught you a great deal and taught you quickly. Stability is not all that it is cracked up to be, has its uses but is not the solution to everything.

[assimpleaspossi]

>>Something was lost by Arch becoming stable and not breaking regularly

Only a Linux user would consider the instability of a Linux distro to be a good thing.

[badgersnake]

If your goal is to learn how it works this was great, a new challenge every day.

Perhaps we need a chaosmonkey Linux distro.

Also FreeBSD did this well recently, migrating libc and libsys in the wrong order so you have no kernel API. That was fun.

[encom]

You don't become a mechanic without fixing broken down cars. So in that sense, the shittier the car, the better.

My Linux story is similar. In retrospect I learned it on hard mode, because Gentoo was the first distro I used (as in really used). And Gentoo, especially back around 2004 or so, really gave you fully automatic, armour-piercing, double-barreled footguns.

[gosub100]

If you choose not to upgrade, it is stable. There is no QA department for Linux (or windows, they were let go around 2015) so someone has to endure the instability if there is to be any progress. We should all thank those who run nascent software so those who run stable distros can have stability.

[ofalkaed]

It is the sort of mentality required to reach the place in computing which linux has. Decent chance you have linux running on something you own even if you do not run it on your computer and even if you don't, you do use the internet.

[keysersoze33]

I've contributed 32 edits (1 new page) in the past 10 years, so despite being stable, there are still many things to add and fix!

Sadly, the edit volume will likely drop as LLMs are now the preferred source for technical Linux info/everything...

[resonious]

At the same time, I suspect resources like the Arch Wiki are largely responsible for how good AI is at fixing this kind of stuff. So I'm hoping that somehow people realize this and can continue contributing good human-written content (in general).

[bdavbdav]

They may be preferred, but in a lot of cases they’re pretty terrible.

I had a bit of a heated debate with ChatGPT about the best way to restore a broken strange mdadm setup. It was very confidently wrong, and battled its point until I posted terminal output.

Sometimes I feel it’s learnt from the more belligerent side of OSS maintenance!

[vladvasiliu]

I think it all comes down to curiosity, and I dare think that that's one of the main reasons why someone will be using Arch instead of the plethora of other distros.

Now, granted, I don't usually ask an LLM for help whenever I have an issue, so I may be missing something, but to me, the workflow is "I have an issue. What do I do?", and you get an answer: "do this". Maybe if you just want stuff to work well enough out of the box while minimizing time doing research, you'll just pick something other than Arch in the first place and be on your merry way.

For me, typically, I just want to fix an annoyance rather than a showstopping problem. And, for that, the Arch Wiki has a tremendous value. I'll look up the subject, and then go read the related pages. This will more often than not open my eyes to different possibilities I hadn't thought about, sometimes even for unrelated things.

As an example, I was looking something up about my mouse the other day and ended up reading about thermal management on my new-to-me ThinkPad (never had one before).

[fragmede]

Depends on how AI-pilled you are. I set Claude loose on my terminal and just have it fix shit for me. My python versions got all tuckered and it did it instead of me having to fuck around with that noise.

[shevy-java]

I learned linux on debian first. The xserver (x11 or what as its old name) was not working so I had to use the commandline. I had a short debian handbook and worked through it slowly. Before that I had SUSE and a SUSE handbook with a GUI, which was totally useless. I then went on to use knoppix, kanotix, sidux, GoboLinux, eventually ended up with slackware. These days I tend to use manjaro, despite the drawback that is systemd. Manjaro kind of feels like a mix between arch and slackware. (I compile from source, so I only need a base really for the most part, excluding a few things; I tend to disable most systemd unit files as I don't really need anything systemd offers. Sadly distributions such as slackware kind of died - they are not dead, but too slow in updates, no stable releases in years, this is the hallmark of deadness.)

[ofalkaed]

Slackware only does long term stable releases but Slackware current is a rolling release that does not really feel like a rolling release because of how Slackware provides a full and complete system as the base system. I avoided Slackware current for years because I did not want to deal with the hassle of rolling release, but it is almost identical in experience to using the release.

[grundrausch3n]

I actually got a lot of Linux knowledge from the Suse handbooks, but when I was still buying a box in the book store because of slow internet connection in the beginning of the 2000. For Linux content nowadays the Arch wiki is still one of my most used resources although I did not use Arch in years.

[jampekka]

> The xserver (x11 or what as its old name)

It was XFree86 until around mid 00s after which the X.org fork took over.

[doubled112]

> Arch becoming stable and not breaking regularly

I believe this to be the entire ecosystem, not just Arch. It's been a long while since something like moving to 64bit happened. Or swapping out init systems.

[VorpalWay]

Other good examples: Linuxthreads to NTPL (for providing pthreads), XFree86 to Xorg.

I was using Gentoo at the time, which meant recompiling the world (in the first case) or everything GUI (in the second case). With a strict order of operations to not brick your system. Back then, before Arch existed (or at least before it was well known), the Gentoo wiki was known to be a really good resource. At some point it languished and the Arch wiki became the goto.

(I haven't used Gentoo in well over a decade at this point, but the Arch wiki is useful regardless of when I'm using Arch at home or when I'm using other distros at work.)

[ofalkaed]

Most distros were stable well before Arch because Arch worked out most of the bugs for them and documented them on their wiki. Arch and other bleeding edge distros are still a big part of the stability of linux even if they don't break all that often anymore, they find a lot of the edge cases before they are issue for the big distros. In 2005 it was not difficult to have a stable linux install, you may have had to hunt a bit for the right hardware and it may have taken awhile to get things working but once things were working they tended to be stable. I can only think of one time Slackware broke things for me since I started using it around 2005, it taking on PulseAudio caused me some headaches but I use Slackware for audio work and am not their target so this is to be expected. Crux was rock solid for me into the 10s, nearly a decade of use and not even a hiccup.

[streetfighter64]

> back in the days when pacman -Syu was almost certain to break something and there was a good chance it would break something unique to your install

This was still the case when I switched to arch in like 2016 lol

[Pay08]

Not to mention that they broke EAC only a few years ago.

[Erenay09]

About a year ago, when I installed Arch, my first Linux distro, most things were great. However, while testing some commands in pacman, there were a bunch of Python-related packages (even though I hadn't downloaded them). Since I needed some disk space, I figured deleting them wouldn't hurt. Unfortunately, I couldn't boot again. I guess the ones related to Python were related to Hyprland and Quickshell.

[binsquare]

This brings back memories, same here!

I even bookmarked a page to remember how to rebuild the kernel because I can always expect it breaking.

[ofalkaed]

I didn't really get into custom kernels until I started using Crux. A few years after I started using Arch I got sick of the rolling release and Arch's constant breakages, so I started looking into the alternatives, that brought me to Crux (which Arch was based off of) and Slackware (which was philosophically the opposite of Arch without sacrificing the base understanding of the OS). Crux would have probably won out over Slackware if it were not for the switch to 64bit, when confronted with having to recompile everything, I went with the path of least resistance. Crux is what taught me to compile a kernel, in my Arch days I was lucky when it came to hardware and only had to change a few things in the config which the Arch wiki guided me through.

Crux is a great distro for anyone ok with a source distro and I think it might be the best source distro, unlike the more common source distros, it does not do most of the work for you. Also love its influence from BSD, which came in very handy when I started to explore the BSDs and FreeBSD which is my fallback for when Patrick dies or steps back, Crux deserves more attention.

[estimator7292]

Arch linux will still happily blow itself up if you skip updates for too long.

It's to the point where if I see 'archlinix-keyring' in my system update, I immediately abort and run through the manual process of updating keys. That's prevented any arch nuclear disasters for the last couple years

[kalterdev]

I have started using Arch in 2016 and it was stable back then. Are you describing an earlier era?

[charleslmunger]

Not OP, but used Arch for a while in 2011, and at some point doing an update moved /bin to /usr/bin or something like that and gave me an unbootable system. This was massive inconvenience and it took me many hours to un-hose that system, and I switched to Ubuntu. The Ubuntu became terrible with snaps and other user hostile software, so I switched to PopOS, then I got frustrated with out of date software and Cosmic being incomplete, and am now on Arch with KDE.

Back then I used Arch because I thought it would be cool and it's what Linux wizards use. Now Arch has gotten older, I've gotten older, and now I'm using Arch again because I've become (more of a) Linux wizard.

[Semaphor]

> This was also back in the days when most were not connected to the internet 24/7 and many did not have internet

That does sound significantly longer ago then 2016 ;)

[benoliver999]

The switch to systemd is the last time I FUBARed my system. 2012 it looks like?? I simply did not even remotely understand what I was doing.

[ofalkaed]

This would be back in the 00s. I would guess that Arch got stable around 2010? I was using Slackware as my primary system by then so don't know exactly when it happened, someone else can probably fill in the details. I started using Arch when it was quite new, within the first year or two.

[ambicapter]

I had somebody’s pgp key break something yesterday :) learned about arch-key ring.

[thr0w4w4y1337]

> Something was lost by Arch becoming stable and not breaking regularly

...a smooth sea never made a skilled sailor