this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2023
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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My wife uses Arch (actually). She calls it the internet, when she really means Facebook. She knows it isn't Apple but it gets a bit vague after that!
The last time I had to fire up the Mesh Central client to sort something out on her desktop from work was around three months ago. Every couple of weeks I ssh into it, update it and schedule a reboot for 03:00.
why arch and not something with more stable updates like debian?
I've spent over 25 years with Linux. With multiple distros and a lot of that with Gentoo and Arch. At work I specify Ubuntu or Debian, for simplicity and stability. I always used to use the minimal Ubuntu, because it was tiny with no frills. For quite a few years I managed a fleet of Gentoo systems across multiple customers - with Puppet. Those have quietly gone away. I've dallied with SuSE (all varieties), Mandrake, Mandriva, RedHat, Slackware, Yggdrassil and more.
Arch is surprisingly stable and being a rolling job there are no big jumps. When I replace one of our laptops, I simply clone the old one to it and crack on. I used to do the same with Gentoo - my Gentoo laptops went from an OpenRC job with dual Nokia N95 ppp connections around 2007 to through to around 2018 with systemd and decent wifi when I switched to Arch to allow the burns on my lap to heal. I still have a Gentoo VM running (amongst friends) on the esxi in my attic.
It was installed in 2006 according to some of the kernel config files. I left it for way too long and had to use git to make Portage advance forwards in time and fix around a decade of neglect. It would have been too easy to wipe and start again. It took about a fortnight to sort out. At one point I even fixed an issue following a forum post I made myself years ago.
Anyway, Arch is pretty stable.
USE please.
Each to their own.
The story was divine retribution for blasphemy against arch
I love when that happens lmao, it's the best. Thank you past me.
I know this was a long comment and I'm only reacting to 1 word, so, I'm sorry in advance... But man, your mention of Mandrake really brought me back... I couldn't for the life of me remember the distro I used to use all the time and this just clicked it all back into place. So much nostalgia, switching from like red hat 5 or 6 (not rhel, old plain red hat) to mandrake and being so happy.
Red Hat was a torture device. I do not understand how things shook out the way they did.
Hell, all of Linux was so crude. I don't understand why we didn't all just use BSD, like me!
I tried FreeBSD for awhile about 15 years ago. it was great, a lot of things I liked better than most Linux distros. But what drew me to Linux in the late '90s was the politics of the license and I just was never as comfortable with the BSD licensing. Honestly, it's one of the things that worries me about the way Linux is going these days. Seems to be getting way more popular, yet a lot of the people showing up are just blind consumers.
It is great to have choice. I remember buying a CD with OpenBSD (the one with a yellow pufferfish logo) back in the late 90s/00s and giving it a whirl. I broke my work PC somewhat with it but at the time I worked on a help desk and we used VT200 emulators to access "RMS". I still had a term but graphics was out of the question! I could never get the modes right. I worked like that for six months. Everyone else had DOS and Win 3.114WG and they thought I was being deliberately edgy. I had a hell of a time working out how to map PF1-4 (DEC Vax) to local keys.
I now run around 30 odd pfSense boxes across the UK. They run FreeBSD, with a frisson of PHP n that on top. My office cluster has six internets - two at 1Gbs-1. The two boxes are Dell servers with a lot of NICs (12 each) I will shortly be swapping out a few for 10Gb NICs. They are rock solid and just crack on and do the job. There are several packages that make life so easy: ACME - SSL certs; HA Proxy - proxy lots of sites with one IP; OpenVPN - we run a lot of them.
However, pppd on BSD is single threaded which means that on an APU2 you max out at around 300MBs-1. Linux pppd is multi-threaded and does better (about 400Mbs-1 on the same hardware. Not exactly the end of the world. The real problem was sticking to APU2!
Anyway. Run what you like - you have choice and choice is good.
Mmmm .... RedHat with KDE = Mandrake. I still mostly exclusively use KDE.
You know why
What does this mean lol it feels vaguely threatening towards debian
So he can say his wife uses Arch (btw)
I run Debian on all of my Home Assistant boxes, apart from one where I am trying out HassOS. I also have a test Proxmox two node cluster at work with multiple SAN volumes. Proxmox is Debian based. Sadly, it isn't very iSCSI friendly - you can't do snapshots. I'm looking at possible VMware replacement options here.
Am I threatening Debbie and Ian's distro? I personally consider Ian to be a bit of a hero. He created Debian, and the world + dog has used it everywhere.
Everywhere.
Them Raspberry Pi thingies are certified (well bits are) for space. It used to be called Raspbian but the OS on a RPi is still Debian with knobs on.
Debian is sometimes frustratingly out of date for daily apps like the web browser. I'd rather recommend something with a bit more updates like Mint.
Use flatpack for those then?
Good point, flatpack wasn't widespread when I tried Debian as a workstation years ago.
just use firefox flatpak and you're good
Fuuuuck flatpack. Just run firefox nightly and you'll be fine. Release 118.0a1 for me at the moment.
My dad's PC has ESR with uBlock anyway, so whatever.
After many years of using multiple devices and even servers with Archlinux installed it never broke because of an update (spoiler: I use systemd-boot instead of grub). If a system is to be used by a less experienced user, just install linux-lts Kernel instead.
Unstable does not mean it crashes/breaks often, it just means it does not guarantee to not bump to the newest upstream version and that it does not do backports. This can be a problem when using unmaintaned software that does not like using a recent python/php.
This is also great because if you find a bug in a software you can report it to upstream directly. Debian maintainers only backport severe bugs, not every one of them. It can take over a year for new features to arrive - especially painful with applications like gimp, krita, blender, etc. You can use debian-unstable of course, which is close to upstream as well.
I setup a pacman hook to reinstall grub and rebuild the config file after every grub update. This is apparently how the grub team expect people to use it. They want each distro to setup their own install scripts or something.
So far no issues from grub and I've had it set up that way for half a year.
Arch has rolling releases and is super stable.
How do you define "stable"?
Low occurence of notable bugs during daily use.
"Ability to reboot without breaking a sweat"
I have never had Arch break during an update. I've never had it crash. I've never encountered an issue I couldn't resolve, and for that matter I don't really encounter issues. Usually the only problems are that I haven't installed a service that would usually come standard with another OS, so I have to check the wiki, install, and configure something.
I haven't had Arch break during an update, but I always check the home page first, there are absolutely times my system would have broken during a blind update.
Arch doesn't support blind updates - it explicitly tells you to always check the home page before an update in case "out-of-the-ordinary" user intervention is required. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/System_maintenance
Basically, don't run arch unless you're willing to be a Linux system admin.
Similar, but a little more involved, to Debian testing or unstable. Install
apt-listbugsand when you go to upgrade it'll let you know what issues are floating around. You can choose to work around the issue, or wait a day or two for the wrinkles to be ironed out.Stable doesn't mean that the OS doesn't break, but that the way it functions doesn't change.
I see. I asked because "stable" means different things in different distros. In Debian it means that interfaces and functionality in one version doesn't change. If I set up a script that interacts with the system in various ways, parsing output, using certain binaries in certain ways etc, I should be able to trust that it works the same year after year with upgrades within the same release. To some people this is important, to some people it isn't.
Wouldn't OpenSUSE Tumbleweed be a much better option then?
One of my staff runs Tumbleweed. I will get around to evaluating it one day.
That's torture and is outlawed by the geneva convention (btw)
If she only does basic web browsing, why not something more stable like Ubuntu or Debian?
with arch it's relatively easy given enough experience to build for someone absolutely minimal desktop environment which will run you a browser and that's it and it will be rock solid even with rolling release updates because there's nothing to break.
every time I've tried "out of the box" desktop experience of ubuntu and likes it's been atrocious with a lot of moving parts.
Define stable! Both are non rolling distros so that means that you have the upgrade jolt every few years. I have several VMs that started off life as Ubuntu LTS around 16 so from 2016 and are still running but now on 2022.04. Those are servers so relatively simple - web, PHP, Samba, DBs, etc. PHP is a pain to fix up. Ubuntu doesn't have the rather neat slotting feature that Gentoo has so you get to do quite a lot of detective work to put it back together again. Debian is similar - again I have several systems that I manage that have gone through at least three or four Toy Story names.
Arch is rolling so there is no break and continue point. There have been some packages that have broken or been broken but not the entire system and that suits me. The QA is surprisingly good from the devs. Arch really isn't the bugbear, nightmare super ricer thingie that it is sometimes painted out to be. I find it a very thoughtfully put together distro with an awful lot of moving parts that are well integrated and a great toolset. Choice is paramount and delivered in spades without the micro management that Gentoo requires.
It also helps that I have been doing this stuff for well over two decades so some challenges are no longer the challenge they once were.
Opened the post for this comment, wasn't disappointed!