Whelp, here I am. Been an Arch user for over 10 years now, and to this date I love it. But something is bothering me lately. Almost two years ago I jumped ship and completely switched to Wayland (using Plasma first, then Sway). I tasted modernism with all its features and it was sweet. But those last two years were a timeframe where I had to troubleshoot quite a lot compared to before where I used XFCE which was a very stable and reliant experience.
I am at a stage in my life where I do not have the time, nor the energy anymore to troubleshoot problems on a regular basis. I am now almost afraid of installing updates, because something new could fail again. But I cannot go back anymore. Wayland is too sweet.
So although I still love Arch, maybe it is time for me to look for something else which gives me more ease-of-mind. I am specifically looking at immutable distros now since the concept seems to be exactly what I am looking for (stable, low maintenance, up-to-date packages, easy rollback). But I am a bit lost with the options and hope that you can help me with some recommendations.
- I mainly browse the web, watch movies, game, do some scripting and run qemu VMs
- I am comfortable with the terminal
- I don’t do fancy customizations
- I don’t like GNOME
Distributions that I find interesting so far:
- Aurora
- Bazzite
- NixOS
I am still trying to wrap my head around what the differences between NixOS and the other two are. Afaik, with Nix you can configure your system once (including what packages you want to use), save this configuration in a file, and load it up whenever I need to set it up again. And it seems to have the same concept of updates, such that you can easily roll back if needed. But it seems to be aimed more at professional users and that I might overshoot at what I was aiming for. So for someone who likes to setup a system once and then just wants to use it indefinitely without too much maintenance what would your recommendation/advice/critisism regarding my situation be?
Edit: thank you guys so much for all your recommendations and thoughts! After some further analysis I decided to install Bazzite for the following reasons:
- shares a lot of similarities with other Atomic distros
- but has all the nice gaming related things pre-installed and configured and it uses a properly pre-installed Steam (not the Flatpak version) (the main reason why I chose it over Aurora, which would have been my next best pick)
- my qemu virtual machines run perfectly fine (also the shared folder)
- some dev stuff already pre-installed (don’t think I need more than there already is)
- fast and the OS feels like made out of one block, very consistent
- I was ready to use my machine like I want to in basically no time
- I already love the atomic way of handling updates
- so far no issues
The only thing left for me to do is to figure out how to properly install SyncThing and Zerotier-One, then I am absolutely set.
Your problem isn’t Arch. It’s the fact that the Weyland experience is still under development and so not stable release to release.
This will be true on any distro.
If your solution is to freeze your distro in a certain point in time, don’t type
pacmananymore.Noooo that’s a terrible idea 😭
If six months from now you decide that you do need updates, Arch won’t like the accumulated six months of updates coming all at once and might throw a tantrum.
Also not updating is a bad idea in general, you do need security updates for stuff like your browser. Please don’t use an out of date system. If you want, install something like debian which will give you only critical updates that won’t break stuff until the next release.
Upgrading an Arch install months or even years out of date is not that big of a deal. That’s one of the benefits of a rolling release platform.
Once after a move, an old desktop sat in a box for at least two years and I had it updated in a hour or so. Yes, you have to review the archlinux.org news feed for breaking changes, but if you follow any steps that pertain to your packages it’ll work fine.
The Linux Unplugged podcast did something similar to an old Arch based server. Only one year out of date, but they had a similar experience.
https://linuxunplugged.com/537
Really? That’s nice to know, I’ve always heard that it would cause problems if you didn’t update for a long time.
Well, updating can cause problems whenever you do it.
Technically, you should check the news feed for breaking changes whenever you update your system. Usually, the worst that happens is pacman just barfs. Then you can figure out why and apply any fixes.
But it still works!
Written on an hp compact from 1997 Running msdos
I wish :)
Well as long as you’re not connecting to the internet you should be fine 😅
Wait… can you actually connect to the internet with MS-DOS?..
The problem is with Arch. Not that it is by design bad, it is just that with software under heavy development will add new issues more easily, especially if you roll out updates very fast, which happens with a rolling distro. And like the other user already said: not updating your system is a bad idea.