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?

  • dajoho@sh.itjust.works
    252·
    1 day ago

    I got burned by something like this on Manjaro when a rolling update completely borked my graphics card. The devs reacted in a similar way and it made me realise that my priority is stability over bleeding edge and tinkering.

    On that day I moved to Fedora. Stable as hell, no fuss. My main OS should just work and not kill itself.

    I still love it but jumped over to Bazzite Gnome recently, which is like Fedora with a few bells on top, coupled with having a read-only root-filesystem (stability, man!). It also comes with distrobox, which will let you run arch natively in a container if you need the AUR.

    • No1@aussie.zone
      2·
      14 hours ago

      I had a similar moment of clarity after troubles with Manjaro and a couple other Arch based distros.

      I really like the idea of a rolling release, but definitely nedd stability first.

      I swung back the other way, and jumped on Ubuntu LTS. And gradually over time I ended up having to get updates from external repos etc, and ended up in the same position where updates broke things or didn’t work.

      Currently running Ubuntu, and I just do an upgrade to the latest release each 6 months - after waiting a month after release date for everything to settle down. The upgrades to new releases have gone smoothly, I get updates to newer versions of software, and it’s been very rare anything breaks. Being a popular distro also means a big community to help with any issues as well.

      Dammit, it’s like I just wrote an ad for Ubuntu!