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?

  • freewheel@sh.itjust.works
    0·
    11 days ago

    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.