I realized my VLC was broke some point in the week after updating Arch. I spend time troubleshooting then find a forum post with replies from an Arch moderator saying they knew it would happen and it’s my fault for not wanting to read through pages of changelogs. Another mod post says they won’t announce that on the RSS feed either. I thought I was doing good by following the RSS but I guess that’s not enough.
I’ve been happily using Arch for 5 years but after reading those posts I’ve decided to look for a different distro. Does anyone have recommendations for the closest I can get to Arch but with a different attitude around updating?
You must log in or # to comment.
So to be clear, you are willing to upend your entire system and potentially your workflow because a single package update was mishandled and because somebody was a little too direct on a forum?
Have you considered Mac OS? Yes, I’m being snarky, but the Linux world isn’t fully user friendly. If you’re unwilling to roll with the punches, it may not actually be for you.
EDIT: I guess tough love from somebody who ran slackware from a stack of physical representations of save buttons is unwelcome. Noted.
You’ve got it right. I appreciate the directiness of the forum moderator because it was a clear signal to me that the Arch community doesn’t value my experience at the level I would like.
Supporting iMacs for 8 years taught me Apple doesn’t value my experience either. I’m happy to upend my system and workflow if it means I’m a step closer to living in the world I want to exist. Most of my life is chosen for me so I want the decisions I have control over to be meaningful to me.
I’m truly sorry that’s the takeaway you got from all this. My (attempted) point was along the lines of “Linux is still the wild west.” If you’re looking for appreciation from random people on the internet, you might be in the wrong place.
Most of my life is chosen for me so I want the decisions I have control over to be meaningful to me.
I get it, probably more than most (my handle isn’t random). But from that very perspective, IMO you have to be able to withstand a few assholes and pick your battles. An asshole in a forum that isn’t even replying to me specifically doesn’t exceed that threshold.
If this is upendable, im sure the next distro will be fun for this user.
Heck, I’m feeling that vibe through this whole thread. I weep for the time these folks get to Senior or Associate levels - if they manage to.
i have no problems with assholes on the internet i find them very entertaining i like the wild west. but i would also like for my computer to work. it just seems the wrong attitude to have for the situation. there not fucking windows with an almost monopoly i find it just very counterproductive and maybe just don’t be like windows in any way. its very bad for first time users that don’t know there is more then 1 place to find info or a solutions. i just don’t respect anybody that sniffs there own farts its just funny.
I’m being snarky, but the Linux world isn’t fully user friendly. If you’re unwilling to roll with the punches, it may not actually be for you.
I guess you’re an Arch user, but this is exactly the wrong thinking. Yes, stuff sometimes break for pretty much every distro, but that doesn’t mean we should dismiss people who want stuff to “just work” (which OP went above and beyond). We should absolutely strive to not break stuff, and if it does be humble and polite. Unless you literally want Linux to never become mainstream…
And btw I’ve been using Fedora for ages now, don’t have to follow anything, and when stuff breaks they are generally apologetic about it and try to fix stuff.
Yes, I’m an arch user. But that’s not the point. Even using something like mint, you still have to pay attention. Someone who’s not willing to do that needs a curated operating system. Simple as that.
I also like to watch locally hosted videos from time to time. I also had the problem with VLC. 10 minutes later I had my answer, the problem was fixed, and I went on with my day. I didn’t need to whine about the attitude of someone providing free tech support to someone else, and I didn’t whine about a simple package adjustment.
I’ll say it again. Linux isn’t for everybody. Not yet. It still takes a little bit of grit.
i don’t really care about being rude. but just saying Linux isn’t for everybody seems stupid to me because this has nothing to do with Linux itself. its about the people you depend on to get your information and no Linux user benefits from making Linux smaller because of attitude on a forum i never got this. i liked arco linux because you had a video for every problem you don’t need a forum moderator to tell you anything if you can see the problem and the solution. seems the best way for everybody to learn and that should be the whole point the rest is just people sniffing there own farts. https://www.youtube.com/@ErikDubois
Fedora, great blend of bleeding edge and stability. Plus Linus uses it, so what better praise could you get.
Can definitely recommend Fedora too. Software updates are at a good pace, and the system has a lot of polish all around. For example, all you need to do for updates is to press “update” in Discover and it’ll do everything for you, applying on reboot for stability. Most things “just work”.
that’s exactly how updates should work in every desktop distro. as an option of course.
systemd made it possible to install updates on shutdown.
packagekit enabled kde software to automatically obtain and prepare the updates.
plasma does the final touch nowadays to ask you on the reboot/shutdown dialog whether you want to install them.Basically all the system is in place, with code from widely used parties. packagekit can even integrate with your filesystem to make a snapshot before install. It’s wonderful. yet, it seems as if only fedora supports this full setup right now? or is there anything else?
I’ve tried quite a few distros (openSUSE, Ubuntu, Solus, Arch, so on) and none seem to offer this feature. It’s a shame, as it’s quite useful to have since updating a live system can sometimes cause some trouble. Even just the updating from Discover can be broken on some systems (I know openSUSE at the very least acts a bit funny when it comes to PackageKit, I think Arch as well).
The only issue is that you provide free testing for IBM, so it’s a no go if you try to boycott/avoid US companies. If you don’t it’s indeed a great choice.
How are you providing free testing by using something if you don’t actively file bug reports and such?
arch is for people who want to play linux. if you actually want to use linux, go with something else
Off-topic: A meta-analysis if you will, but I’m just astonished by the engagement this post has received. I wonder what this tells us about the Linux community on Lemmy.
On-topic: OP, honestly, others have chimed in and left very good answers already. So perhaps you won’t find anything within my comment that hasn’t been said. But, as I’m a latecomer to this thread, I might have an advantage that some didn’t (try to capitalize on). To be blunt, the original post didn’t reveal much about what you liked and didn’t like about Arch. As such, my initial impression would have been to suggest Gentoo. But, you’ve since provided the engaging community crucial insights that help us in grasping the full picture. Below you may find my own notes on your distro preferences based on what you said:
- care-free updates
- repo packages receive updates shortly after upstream
- rewards effort put into initial setup
Furthermore, I’ll take the liberty to assume that (native) package availability is expected to be vast. And that you wish for the process of updating to be snappy.
Based on the above, I recommend NixOS.
If jumping ship to NixOS seems too daunting, then consider installing Nix[1] on Arch. Consider to slowly but surely expand its usage within your system. And, then, when you’re comfortable, embrace NixOS as a worthy successor to your Arch installation.
To be clear, I meant the package manager. Determinate System’s installer is probably your best option. ↩︎
IMHO the actual problem here is the Arch moderator being an ass.
This happens in all operating systems from time to time. An update kills an app. Usually, the app is wildly out of date and hanging on to the last vestiges of a deprecated call that finally gets removed. I recently experienced this with V4L (for OBS virtual camera) and a kernel update in NixOS. Had one hell of a time tracking it down. It was one of the twice-yearly OS upgrades. Luckily, I had only updated one of my devices, and it still worked on the old one. After tearing apart the changes, I was finally able to specify V4L and a Linux kernel version. Immediately, the problem popped right out. The new kernel now needs a specific value passed for the expected video stream, where it used to use a default if it wasn’t specified.
Apple breaks apps all the time. Windows does, but less so. The difference is usually before an update happens, Windows and Apple have had TONs of people testing on their own teams and their insiders people.
In the end, I just needed to roll back the kernel one revision until the V4L guys make the change, or I needed to recompile V4L myself with the option defaulted to something useful.
I don’t think you can safely get away from this kind of issue. (app incompatibility on upgrade, not mods being an ass)
Debian or Mint seem to be pretty welcoming and easy going to get rid of the asshole issues, but chances are, you’re going to break something eventually, and it’s going to be super hard to figure out why and how to get around it.
Based on what you describe, I would strongly recommend going with OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. It’s just as bleeding-edge as Arch, but all packages go through automatic testing to ensure they won’t break anything, and if some manual actions are required, it will offer options right before update. Moreover, snapper in enabled by default on btrfs partitions, and it makes snapshots automatically before updates, so even if something breaks somehow, reverting takes a few seconds.
One small footnote is that you’ll need to add separate VLC repo or Packman for VLC to have full functionality - proprietary codecs are one of the rare things official repos don’t feature for legal reasons.
On Arch rant: I’ve always been weirded out by this “Arch is actually stable, you just have to watch every news post for manual interventions before every update, oh, and you better update very often” attitude.
Like, no, this is not called stable or even usable for general audience. Updating your system and praying for it not to break while studying everything you need to know is antithetical to stability and makes for an awful daily driver.
I upvoted you, I am a fellow openSUSE fan and contributor.
But I need to point out that if you install VLC from a repository outside of Factory, then it’s not auto-tested.
Moreover, Packman is external to the openSUSE project altogether. If you use it, you are supposed to “just trust” that everything will be fine.
You are better off installing VLC through Flatpak.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_least_astonishment
Someone should inform whoever made that change. If a package is split in a new release, the initial state should match the final as closely as possible, in this case by installing the new optional dependencies automatically. (Although I’m not sure why they’d want to split everything out like that anyway; no other VLC distribution does that, so splitting is itself a violation.)
Maybe Manjaro might be an alternative? I haven’t personally used it. I don’t like this kind of surprise, so I stick to boring distros like Debian. I used to use CentOS but it was too boring.
Manjaro is significantly worse with updates breaking.
I used for a little while in 2018 and again in 2019, both times ended because it once became stuck in a boot loop after updates, and another time couldn’t boot after updates.
This is what drove me to Debian. I like stability, I don’t need cutting edge, simple as.
The same thing happened to me. The package was split into separate packages. Install the package vlc-plugins-all.
sudo pacman -S vlc-plugins-allProblem solved
OpenSUSE TUMBLEWEED, always updating, but they have an OpenQA tool that checks the builds for success, and if for some reason something did go bad you just reboot and pick the previous (automatic) snapshot. Lots of GUI tools to manage the system and packages via the various Yast2-GUI apps.
Plus, their equivalent of the AUR, the open build system, can actually be used to build packages for any system.
+1 for Tumbleweed. It’s a rolling release distro without (most of) the hassle and YaST is a fantastic utility which you can use to do many things. Nice graphical stuff to help you configure things like backup. Never had any breakages so far with Tumbleweed :)
Another +1 for Tumbleweed. It’s an simple setup, easy to roll back if needed, and has solid tools like Yast that help manage most aspects of your os.
Thanks! This wasn’t a distro I knew much about but it’s looking like one I will try out. The way they test packages is exactly the kind of choices around updates I’m looking for.
I like how many options Yast exposes. I enjoyed learning how to do most of what I need in the terminal with Arch but being able to do everything I need through GUI helps when I’m not able to recall a lot in the moment but still need to do a thing.
https://endeavouros.com/ https://garudalinux.org/ both arch based maybe you will like the forum style better and they will probably also give you this information.
+1 for Garuda. It’s nice that they have their own way of updating (garuda-update), which also handles situations like this one. It was very satisfying to not have to do anything when the linux-firmware change happened a couple of weeks back.
Oh, also snapshots by default are a chef’s kiss
i used arco linux and they just linked the word update to the arch command to update and that made it very easy to update i don’t remember the correct name for this. i do not know if garuda does the same or if they have there own program to do this.
Garuda works differently. You use garuda-update instead of pacman, and it takes care of just about everything for you. So, for example, if you have something like needing to uninstall a package because it was split (like linux firmware), garuda-update just takes care of that for you (after they update the scripts, which takes at most a week usually)
ah ok good to know.
I doubt the forum style is really the issue.
EndeacourOS, one of my favourite distros, uses the same packages (the real Arch ones). So everything he says here applies.
i mean the communication style on the forum.
Ah yes, the issue with modern Linux, the community.
I feel the shift to the current “git gud” style of blaming the user in any support has done more damage to Linux then any part of the software.
the community is the worst part of most things, the RTFM attitude is better than toxic positivity though
Sure, but when I am looking for an answer toxic positivity and RTFM are often the same thing. The number of times people jump up to defend the manual and glaze the program without even checking if the info is in the manual (or if the manual even makes sense at all) is way too high.
I used to have to work on new stuff all the time and would have to read whitepapers or engineering change docs on the daily, and no the tangled mess most Linux documentation is in does not count as a functioning source of information.
The part that still grinds my gears is why bother to type out nothing of value like RTFM at all? Forums are filled with terrible posts belittleing the question instead of just answering the question. Its not helping anyone and at least to me makes little sense.
omg you guys are fragile af
I just had this exact same issue. I installed the package. Done.
No whining. It’s one fucking line of code.
They are not tech support. Maybe call applecare.
Why even type this?
Do you feel better doing so?
This is not a support forum, this is not tech support, this is lemmy and other then giving a great example of what the OP is getting at what does your comment address?
I’m amazed at the idea that in any technical community, an urging to gain more skill in your chosen environment could somehow be seen as negative.
I would make a joke here about arch and gatekeeping but its not just an arch issue.
It is most certainly not. (He says, as he comes fuming out of yet another meeting about a ticket that could have been solved at Tier 2 if support would learn how to read a log)
Oh pebkac is alive and well, no doubt about it. But expecting any level of expertise from an non commercial end user while simultaneously shooting down their questions is not going to help.
I absolutely agree, but here’s the problem in this context:
- OP isn’t non-commercial. By their own words, they’d been doing desktop support for MacOS - plastic-wrapped and glittery, but still a *nix. Five years in, one’s search-fu and tolerance for reading docs should be well developed.
- Their question was answered by the page they found. OP’s argument is they didn’t like the tone used to reply to THAT post’s OP and concluded from that tone that their expertise wouldn’t be valued “in the way they would like”. There’s room to develop some grit here.
- Arch isn’t intended for inexperienced users, and that is made clear in the docs. “It is targeted at the proficient GNU/Linux user, or anyone with a do-it-yourself attitude who is willing to read the documentation, and solve their own problems.” (https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Arch_Linux#User_centrality) Getting this upset over a single package readjustment, no matter how badly it was communicated, tells me OP doesn’t have a ton of experience with bare metal linux. There’s just no way to sugarcoat that.
Arch gatekeeps on occasion, yes, but this isn’t that. This is the simple rules of that particular distro. OP is free to find something that better fits their needs; and it appears they have.
