I was Nobara user, then I am using Fedora right now. I want to use things like Hyprland etc. and ya know, Its damn cool to say I am using arch btw. So I’ve decided to use Arch Linux. But everyone says its always breaking and gives problems. That’s because of users, not OS… right? I love to deal with problems but I don’t want to waste my time. Is Arch really problemful OS? Should I use it? I know what to do with setup/ usage, the hardness of Arch is not problem for me but I am just concerned about the mindset “Arch always gets broken”.
Arch never broke for me.
Unless you seek trouble and do stuff without knowing what you are doing (like blindly copy pasting commands from internet into your terminal), it generally just works.
It’s not as good as those distros where all packages come preconfigured for you to work nicely together, so if you want to build a custom system (like, choose your DE/WM/panels/widgets etc), you have to configure all of that to intergate nicely. But you could always just install KDE and everything is pretty stable there, same as in any other KDE based distro.
A distro that ships KDE in not a vanilla form and with some pre-installed custom configuration/fixes by default I think. Stuff like Kubuntu, Arco XL, Manjaro KDE etc
Ah ok. So basically any bigger distro.
I haven’t actually found one that doesn’t have kde.
AFAIK Next OS was discontinued about 30 years ago. Although some of it was used in OSX.
I just switched from Nobara to NixOS on my gaming PC. I’ve had NixOS on my laptop for almost a year and decided I’m comfortable enough with it to use it full time, and it works great for gaming.
Before NixOS, I was a die-hard Arch user. The only reasons it would break were because I was trying a bunch of stuff from AUR to play around with Wayland + Nvidia when that was brand new, or when I would forget to update for a while.
It breaking was primarily due to me tinkering around and not fully undoing those changes. Now I can do that with no fear on NixOS, and it’s fabulous.
My Linux journey started when Ubuntu was in its single digit versions. I don’t remember the exact version I used first, but it was >15 years ago.
Of course I had a long distro hopping phase, that got finally ended by Arch. Because Arch breaks less, at least if you don’t molest it. Upgrades of versioned distros always had hickups or problems, and I grew tired of having to do a larger troubleshoot session once or twice a year. Arch has only very minor hiccups once in a while, and they’re typically always the same. 99% when the update doesn’t run through the keyring changed and you have to update it first, .9% is a bug with like a new release of the DE or something that gets fixed upstream in a couple days. And .1% is you have to look at the news because some manual intervention is required, like removing a package and going for something else or whatever. That is when you keep your system free of cruft and go with a popular DE.
Just 1.5 years ago I finally left Arch after a loong time. For something that is very new and different: fedora atomic (silverblue). Technology wise it is superior in my mind, and in my last years of using Arch I had most things in Flatpaks and containers anyways. But if you want a classical distro, Arch is definitely amongst the very well working ones.
Thanks so much for your detailed and helping answer. I can say that I’m a bit newbie. Only have used linux for 1 years. But I think I learned so much. Then I wanted to use Arch for its fame and the mindset “Arch is hard”. I’m using Arch in my virtual pc to learn how to use it. And I liked its gaming performance, features of Hyprland. But whenever I see something about Arch, everyones mouth full of “Its easily breaking”, “It gives error when you have an important job” etc. And that made me worry about Arch. I trust your experience and decided to use Arch. You helped so much. Thanks again. I wish you a nice day.
So if I understand you well, I just have to check news always to keep my system up to date and stable, and use popular DE. (I choosed Hyprland :)) And not to play with its settings/ packages too much because of the confidence that Arch gave. Right?
You do not have to check the news.
What he is saying is that mostly Arch updates just work, 99% of problems are keyring related, and ( when there is a problem ) you can check the news to find an easy fix.
I personally have not had to resort to the news but I will not refute his experience.
The keyring issue is real but it just prevents updates, it does not break your system, and it will not happen at all if you update frequently enough.
Arch is great
NixOS
