so a common claim I see made is that arch is up to date than Debian but harder to maintain and easier to break. Is there a good sort of middle ground distro between the reliability of Debian and the up-to-date packages of arch?
so a common claim I see made is that arch is up to date than Debian but harder to maintain and easier to break. Is there a good sort of middle ground distro between the reliability of Debian and the up-to-date packages of arch?
I hate when people insist that Arch isn’t easier to break. There was an incident a couple of years ago where a Grub update was rolled out that required that
grub-mkconfigbe re-run manually, and if you failed to do this the system would brick and you’d need to fix it in a recovery environment. This happened to my laptop while I was on vacation, and while I had luckily had the foresight to bring a flash drive full of ISOs, it was a real pain to fix.Yes, Arch offers a lot more stability than people give it credit for, but it’s still less reliable than the popular point-release distros like Fedora or Ubuntu, and there’s not really any way around that with a rolling-release model. As someone who is at a point in life where I don’t always have the time nor energy to deal with random breakage (however infrequently), having the extra peace of mind is nice.
And I hate when people take a single case and extrapolate it as a general statement.
By that argument Ubuntu is equally unstable as they have rolled out updates that broke grub resulting in unbootable systems - not during a full distro upgrade, but as Ubuntu specific patches to LTS.
In the end, we have choice, and choice is a good thing.