Fedora has been rock solid for a few years (minus Zoom + Nvidia), as my primary work OS. I'm always nervous to jump to an Arch-based distro as my daily driver, for fear of having to regularly fix issues. Is this a legitimate concern in 2025? Would my experience (especially with graphics) be improved on something like Cachy?
Arch being unstable is a myth. I’ve had far more issues with major upgrades between versions of Debian, fedora and Ubuntu than I ever had on arch. I think my install is almost 6 years old now.
Same. My first Linux was Ubuntu 9.x, every time I upgraded the major version something broke. Eventually ignored the "Arch is unstable" as I saw my co-workers having zero issues, and been using Arch since 2017 now with zero breakages that I myself wasn't responsible for.
Same here as well, using arch as daily driver for 10+ years now. I think just twice I've had major headaches due to package/kernel upgrades which required a few hours troubleshooting. Otherwise, smooth sailing and a pleasure to work with. Love the AUR (w/ pikaur)!
Never heard about pikaur before (Rua gang here), but judging by the screenshots, does it not allow you to review the PKGBUILD before building the package? Seems to me like the most basic feature a AUR helper has to have, since AUR is all user-contributed without reviews. Is pikaur really letting you install packages blindly like that?
You are probably using some annoying pedantic definition of unstable. Most people mean it to mean “does stuff crash or break”. Packages hang out in arch testing repos for a long time. In fact, Fedora often gets the latest GNOME release before Arch does, sometimes by months.
> You are probably using some annoying pedantic definition of unstable. Most people mean it to mean “does stuff crash or break”.
English has a specific word for that: reliable.
Pedantry aside, having a complex system filled with hundreds (thousands?) of software packages whose versions are constantly changing, and whose updates may have breaking changes and/or regressions, is a quick way of ending up with software that crashes or breaks through no fault of the user (save for the decision to use a rolling release distro).
This isn't true in practice. It turns out incrementally updating with small changes is more stable in the long run than doing a large amount of significant upgrades all at once.
Have you ever had to maintain a software project with many dependencies? If you have, then surely you have had the experience where picking up the project after a long period of inactivity makes updating dependencies much harder. Whereas an actively maintained or developed project, where dependencies are updated regularly, is much easier. You know what is changing and what is probably responsible if something breaks, etc. And it's much easier to revert.
> Have you ever had to maintain a software project with many dependencies? If you have, then surely you have had the experience where picking up the project after a long period of inactivity makes updating dependencies much harder. Whereas an actively maintained or developed project, where dependencies are updated regularly, is much easier. You know what is changing and what is probably responsible if something breaks, etc. And it's much easier to revert.
Have you ever had situations where Foo has an urgent security or reliability update that you can't apply, because Bar only works with an earlier version of Foo, and updating or replacing Bar involves a significant amount of work because of breaking changes?
I won't deny that there's value in having the latest versions of software applications, especially for things like GPU drivers or compatibility layers like Proton where updates frequently have major performance or compatibility improvements.
But there's also value in having a stable base of software that you can depend on to be there when you wake up in the morning, and that has a dependable update schedule that you can plan around.
I have been running arch for about 5 years now, and I think there were about 3 or 4 instances where I'd have to do some manual intervention to fix an update, but those interventions were generally all fixable by commands posted on arch linux's blog (which, for some weird reason, the arch devs expect you to check every time you run `sudo pacman -Syu`)
Arch devs know how much friction manual intervention updates cause, so they try to keep them to a minimum.
Honestly, I've had more problems running windows than running arch.
> Honestly, I've had more problems running windows than running arch.
Worst thing with Windows isn't the occasional "wtf, how do I undo this change Microsoft forced upon me?" but more "Damn, it's that time of the month where Windows force me to do X", most recently being upgrades that you cannot shutdown or restart your computer without doing. Used to be you could run some command to avoid it, but literally all the hacks stopped working.
So now I'm slightly afraid of booting Windows which I do sometimes, because I don't want to end up in the situation where I need to boot Linux for five seconds to do something quickly, but Windows is refusing to do so without first doing a 20 minute upgrade. Fucking disrespectful of people's time!
As another commenter said, sometimes upgrades require manual intervention. You can fix this using a tool like informant which shows you all the interventions you have to do before you upgrade.
Also, you can use a tool like snapper + btrfs-assistant (both of which come pre-installed on Cachy IIRC) which lets you fully revert your filesystem (snapper rollback) or partially (snapper undochange) if something breaks. Just make sure to use a btrfs filesystem for that.
I've used Arch Linux (always with a nvidia GPU no less!) since 2017 sometime, moved over to CachyOS just this year, and had no issues that weren't caused by myself in all this time.
I initially moved away from Ubuntu at that time, as I got so tired of dist-upgrade breaking my system every single time I tried to upgrade, so figured I'll at least understand the breakages better when they happen with Arch. But I never got Arch to break something by itself, it always end up being my fault.
Yes, dist-upgrade was the biggest pain with the Ubuntu based KDE neon too. I'd wait for multiple months after a new version was published before I'd upgrade, and still would often encounter issues that broke the boot. I made sure to reserve at least half a day for each dist-upgrade -- multiple times I fixed issues with a bootable USB image and mounting the full-disk encrypted partition to fiddle something.
I was always able to recover with some insights from random forum or Reddit posts, but I can't say this was the type hacking I wanted to do.
I'm hoping a rolling release is easier in the long run, but we'll see. Also this time I used a separate SSD for /home so that at least I could do a full reinstall and still keep my data.
There is nothing draconian about a rule requiring vaccination for a disease responsible for a global pandemic with the 5th highest death toll in human history. [0]
It is draconian if you cannot show that the vaccines are working against transmission. You need to vaccinate about 80-120 people to prevent one more covid case and that is based on old data[0], pre-Delta and pre-Omicron. Now the efficacy is worse. It is draconian if you cannot show that the rules are not arbitrary. There was another player at the court who was playing while having covid symptoms[1], but this one was fine, because he was playing by the rules.
Transmission isn't the only thing to optimise for - hospitalisations, which were and remain the main limit to how much Covid we can handle, are significantly lowered by vaccination. That's a giant win whatever way you look at it.
> optimise for - hospitalisations, which were and remain the main limit to how much Covid we can handle, are significantly lowered by vaccination.
There are other things that lower that risk significantly, such as having recovered from covid previously, having no co-morbidities, healthy diet, being young, having a sufficient vitamin D level and many more. Why does everyone need to get the same medical treatment? Not all people are the same. The risk to get myocarditis from the mRNA vaccine is higher than getting it from covid for males under 40. This is a large share of a population.
> The risk to get myocarditis from the mRNA vaccine is higher than getting it from covid for males under 40
Citation required. That's been debunked IIRC. And even if it were true, myocarditis isn't the only thing a male under 40 can get as a negative effect from Covid.
> myocarditis isn't the only thing a male under 40 can get as a negative effect from Covid.
This is true, and the vaccine has some potential to mitigate that, but there are other factors that need to be considered too, such as trying to keep laws undraconian.
It is when that rule completely ignores natural immunity. It is illogical and unscientific. I will never understand why natural immunity continues to be ignored in these discussions.
