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Arch Stability (lemmy.world)

submitted 5 months ago by Maragato@lemmy.world to c/linux@lemmy.world

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I have always been afraid to install Arch because they tell you it is difficult to install and unstable. I want a simple system following the KISS philosophy and install only what I need, which is little. I don't need anything from the aur repository, for now. Just a year ago I installed Arch and there it is, no problems and doing every day pacman -Syu. It has been a real discovery for me, it's the only distribution I've had this last year that hasn't crashed. I didn't expect it, but Arch has made me change my opinion and pay less attention to the opinions of "youtubers" and more to my own experience. In your experience of use, has Arch been stable in its operation?

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[–] Max_P@lemmy.max-p.me 2 points 5 months ago

The stability of a distro usually has more to do with API and ABI stability than stability in terms of reliability. And a "stable" system can be unreliable.

That's why RHEL forks are said to be compatible bug for bug. Because you don't know if fixing the bug could have a cascading side effect for somebody's very critical system.

Arch has been nothing but reliable for me. Does it doesn't need fixing sometimes because the config format of some daemon changed, or Python or nodejs got updated and now my project doesn't build? Absolutely not. But for me usually newer versions are better even if it needs some fixing, and I like doing it piecemeal rather than all at once every couple years.

Stable distributions are well loved for servers because you don't want to update 2000 servers and now you're losing millions because your app isn't compatible with the latest Ruby version. You need to be able to reliably install and reinstall the same distro version and the same packages at the same versions over and over. I can't deal with needing a new server up urgently and then get stuck having to fix a bunch of stuff because I got a newer version of something.

I use multiple distros regularly, for different purposes. Although lately Docker has significantly reduced my need for stable distros and lean more on rolling distros as the host.