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?

  • bitwolf@sh.itjust.works
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    13 days ago

    I use Fedora its a good reliable in between distro if you like fast updates but want tested updates.

  • Zetta@mander.xyz
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    14 days ago

    Fedora, great blend of bleeding edge and stability. Plus Linus uses it, so what better praise could you get.

    • seralth@lemmy.world
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      14 days ago

      Linus is about as far from a normal user as you can get and using him as a measuring stick if anything should be indication of the worse option for normal users…

    • Tattorack@lemmy.world
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      14 days ago

      I hope we’re talking about that Linus, and not that Linus. You know, the one that works with computers, and not the other one that works with computers.

    • Philamand@jlai.lu
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      14 days ago

      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.

        • Philamand@jlai.lu
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          13 days ago

          Telemetry, but I don’t know if many Linux user doesn’t turn it off. But I also don’t know if many Linux user doesn’t fill bug reports.

          Also, if you use Fedora you may recommend it to people that will leave telemetry and/or file bug report. And you also contribute to make the red hat ecosystem relevant, potentially bringing paid customers for RHEL. It’s a drop in the ocean of course, but personally I don’t want to contribute to it.

    • heythatsprettygood@feddit.uk
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      14 days ago

      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”.

        • heythatsprettygood@feddit.uk
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          14 days ago

          It is a KDE thing, but Fedora is the distro on which it works best. On a lot of other distros it often runs into problems.

          • qaz@lemmy.world
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            13 days ago

            I can attest to that. It’s remarkable on how few distros updating through Discover actually works reliably. I always update through the terminal because at least that works. I’ve noticed this issue on Kubuntu (apt), Debian (apt), and OpenSUSE (zypper). I think these issues are related to the PackageKit integration.

      • ReversalHatchery@beehaw.org
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        14 days ago

        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?

        • heythatsprettygood@feddit.uk
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          14 days ago

          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).

    • makeitwonderful@lemmy.sdf.orgOP
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      15 days ago

      Installing the dependencies did fix it.

      I decided I wanted to switch because in the time it took for me to figure that out I lost the excitement for what I was about to watch.

      • Derin@lemmy.beru.co
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        14 days ago

        New optional dependencies also happen in other distributions, just happens a lot less as they aren’t rolling release distributions.

        Learning to parse terminal output for what’s relevant is a good and sometimes necessary skill.

        • makeitwonderful@lemmy.sdf.orgOP
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          14 days ago

          You’re probably right, this is a issue that isn’t unique to Arch. In this case, I would have been fine if a default had been chosen for people who didn’t do the reading. Something like installing a plugin that will keep basic functionally of the app working.

          I agree that reviewing terminal output is a valuable skill. I’m often lacking the attention or energy to pay attention to every update. I wish that wasn’t the case because I believe I have higher than average emotional reactions when things go unexpectedly but the lack of attention -> unexpected event -> emotional reaction loop is a pattern of my life I’ve come to accept.

          • Derin@lemmy.beru.co
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            14 days ago

            Please note that I wasn’t passing judgement with my comment, I’m just stating that it will happen with pretty much all Linux distributions.

            For example, when upgrading major Debian versions, the same will happen - but you’ll usually get thrown into a full screen TUI with interactive buttons asking you how to proceed. So it isn’t really possible to leave the system in a non-functional state.

            Definitely check out a different, stability first distro. However, note that you will then have the problem of software being old when you want a new feature!

  • BCsven@lemmy.ca
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    15 days ago

    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.

    • Stewbs@lemmy.world
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      15 days ago

      +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 :)

      • ElectricEelPoweredAxe@piefed.social
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        15 days ago

        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.

    • makeitwonderful@lemmy.sdf.orgOP
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      14 days ago

      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.

  • propter_hog [any, any]@hexbear.net
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    14 days ago

    I’d recommend opensuse tumbleweed. It’s still a rolling distribution, it still has more bleeding edge software, but its package manager, zypper, does atomic updates, so if something doesn’t install right it rolls it back.

    • MangoCats@feddit.it
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      14 days ago

      That’s the real thing for me: how painless is it to live with long term? After I’ve installed a couple of weird things, and configured some stuff custom - is this a distro that keeps rolling into the future, or is it one that makes me wish I had the time to re-install from scratch every 6 months?

  • rumba@lemmy.zip
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    13 days ago

    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.

  • Marn@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    13 days ago

    If that happened to me I’d not want to deal with that again either.

    What has made arch work for me is BTRFS filesystem with the grub module grub-btrfs. It gives you BTRFS snapshots you can load into at grub and with snapper and auto snap it will automatically create a restore point before updating.

    It’s worked flawlessly and thanks to BTRFS black magic the snapshots don’t take up much storage space. I also recommend BTRFS assistant in the aur if you don’t mind using a gui.

    If you want an easy arch setup + friendly community forums + easy BTRFS setup I can’t recommended EndevourOS enough.

  • ses hat@lemmy.ml
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    14 days ago

    I had the same problem, i did start with arch ,but man i remember doing a update after 4 days(4Gb of new updates) and my system faild to boot. From that moment i went debian route.

  • RedSnt 👓♂️🖥️@feddit.dk
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    14 days ago

    The closest to Arch, a rolling cutting edge distro, is probably openSUSE Tumbleweed. openSUSE has excellent snapper integration that takes a snapshot before and after you touch zypper, so it’s easy to undo changes that might ruin your system. CachyOS also has that same great snapper integration, but that’s still Arch.

  • rolandtb303@lemmy.ml
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    14 days ago

    yeah i had that happen to me too, didn’t look in the update screen because updates before went with a breeze but i took another look after VLC wouldn’t play anything, it was something with the VLC plugins and i needed to reinstall those, just had to do sudo pacamn -S vlc-plugins-all to get VLC to play video files back, but man, that should have been in the news imo.

    • Nibodhika@lemmy.world
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      13 days ago

      I had the same issue, hadn’t found the solution yet (also didn’t looked too hard) and while I sort of agree that it should have been in the news I also understand why it’s not (it only affects people with VLC, and not everyone uses VLC, if every time a package gets split it was in the news the news would be all about that). That being said I think that there were other solutions that would have been much better, namely split the package with a mandatory dependency on vlc-plugins-all and convert that to optional dependency in a month or two, that way everything keeps working as is for people during the transition, but after a short while it can be modularized.

      • SheeEttin@lemmy.zip
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        13 days ago

        Even better would be to automatically install vlc-plugins-all for people upgrading, so that it preserves the existing behavior.

  • Eugenia@lemmy.ml
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    14 days ago

    I prefer Debian-Testing. Basically, a rolling release, but not unstable. Arch is akin to Debian -Sid, which is unstable. The latest packages are brought in to -Sid after some rudimentary testing on -experimental. But only the stuff that make it and are solid on -sid, make it to -testing. Basically, Debian has 2 layers of siphoning bugs before they even make it to -testing. And that’s why the -stable branch is so solid, because whatever makes it there, has to go through the 3 branches.

    So if you like rolling releases with much newer packages, consider -testing. The easiest way is to wait for the Trixie release, and then do the manual update to -testing by changing the repository names (there are online tutorials about it). The other way is to get a -testing iso, but these usually are broken because most people “upgrade” their installed distro to testing instead of just install it outright.

    I’ve been using -testing for over a year now with 0 problems. Even Google is using -testing internally! I also have had Arch installed and endeavouros, and have had 3 problems that I had to fix in 5 months.