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?
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.