To be fair, arch could look like that after a few days.
Read the Arch news before clicking “yes”.
people laughed at me for choose debian. they asked why i chose to have ancient runes running in my computer
who’s laughing now?
I have an Arch laptop that I didn’t update for 3.5 years. The system update took a while when I finally went through with it. Amazingly it didn’t break anything!
Yes, I am amazed that quite a few people in this thread are saying ‘they had to completely reinstall the os’ and that it broke everything after not much time. As long as one doesn’t rely on the AUR for system critical packages or much in generel, it is incredibly hard to break an Arch system (Manjaro and other Arch-based distros don’t count). This in due part to Arch being quite reproducible but it also having very good maintainership.
It doesn’t hurt to apply new package configs by going through pacdiff once in a while though.
I switched from Windows to EndeavourOS a few months ago and haven’t had any issues on my personal computer, it’s amazing.
I also have EndeavourOS as a VM on my work laptop and I somehow managed to break systemd-boot when trying to do a system update though. The system update died halfway through and I defaulted to the classic solution of rebooting, which definitely made things worse because my boot partition in the VM broke. The great thing about Linux, and especially Arch, is the tools and knowledge readily available to fix things and everything was working again (with no data loss) in under 15 minutes. I’ve dealt with similar problems on Windows and either had to accept data loss or deal with significant headaches trying to resolve what should be a simple issue because the operating system refuses to provide basic information.
You see, this is why atomic desktops aren’t a bad idea.
Well in an immutable distro, there is little to no chance for the system to end up in an unusable state (I guess it is the same for distros which apply the updates atomically). Traditional distros are far more likely to bork when so much shit is updated at once
I don’t think this is true. The package manager is there for a reason to prevent that. If you have more updates to install at a time, then the chances are the same as if you would have installed the problematic update one at a time. Just read the manual intervention information from Arch and see if there is something to do, then it won’t bork. If people don’t know what they are doing and do not read the additional information (that is required to do so on Arch), well yes, then you could end up borking your machine. But not because so many updates are installed at a time. The package manager and operating system and their maintainer designed it in a way that you can install ton of updates at a time without borking. This is fine.
