Arch is different…
Every hero has a journey.
Yours has just begun.
I warn you, this is not the easy path.
But I urge you to heed the call.
For though there will be trials and tribulations,
soon, my friend, you will own new socks.
What happened with Arch?
Wait, let me update real quick and reboot, brb
the fact that they wrote “be right back” 5 hours ago and then never came back is telling
This hasn’t been a thing in years at this point
Yeah i had this happen with devices that originally came with Windows sometimes, mainly laptops. It must be a combo of BIOS, firmware and hardware that increases the chances of update instability. Its just not feasible for every distro to have the same kind of hardware config testing support that Microsoft has for Windows.
Windows spying on you is not just for marketing, they grab your current environment and sanitize the result so they can get a nice list of hardware and application configurations for when they need to test.
That’s why I completely eliminated Windows from my life and switched to Linux.
Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
Idk, I’ve had installs of Kinoite, Bazzite, and NixOS bork themselves unrecoverably. Arch, if something goofs, more often than not I can work my way back to a working system without wiping.
How’d you get NixOS borked without a working generation to boot into
Nothing’s perfect. NixOS has worked it self for me more then once. Just like every distro ever has.
It’s difficult to take people shitting on arch in here seriously. I’ll take 1h per year fixing whatever broke over a whole weekend upgrading Debian.
Oh and god forbid you need to compile yourself a package and maybe a few of its dependencies from scratch because that 6 years old bug didn’t make it through the freeze last release.
Whole weekend upgrading debian? I am confused. That’s not how debian works?
Upgrading major versions, e.g. Debian 12 -> Debian 13
Yes? Same thing… aptitude upgrade, aptitude dist-upgrade, edit /etc/apt/sources.lst to point to the new major version (s/bookworm/trixie), aptitude upgrade, aptitude dist-upgrade Done. Typically takes 1 hourish at most.
As someone who gave up on linux years ago, this sounds like one person driving a broken old alfa romeo shitting on someone else driving a broken old fiat. Whilst I watch on from a modern EV.
Hah, here come the downvotes.
Debian can take a week to upgrade? Apparently I’m yolo’ing it and just the upgrade. However I have just done one major update, so u might just be lucky
i have often found myself needing to manually update packages on distros like fedora or debian because i need a newer version that hasn’t landed in dnf/apt yet. arch doesn’t have that problem. ymmv, obviously, it’s not going to be an issue for everyone.
I probably don’t mess around my system too much and don’t install too many things outside Debian repositories to make issues with the upgrades.
Debian isn’t the only alternative to Arch. There are rolling-release distros where being a guinea pig is opt-in, not forced. Like Gentoo, where brave users test packages before they reach the wider audience
It’s absolutely true. And that my outdated Arch system is likely still more fresh than Debian.
That said yeah I would like something that can update itself whenever without breaking*, certainly if it expects me to update frequently. And manual interventions (ideally used for things that actually have a choice/fix, not just what ends up being a pasted command or two) should be a warn-step/update-blocker (depending on situation).
Though what the image is probably about (2025-12-20, nVidia 10-series turned legacy, legacy driver put onto AUR) is a bad situation in its own right particularly later when the AUR issues started happening. And it is really an update-or-don’t (or get an AMD card somehow) issue.
Other distros likely do solve the issue of updating, though from what I can see aren’t as good with packaging (dependency handling, lacking optional dependencies) and package availability. Which can be worked around somewhat too, but still needs more trial/input.
Annoyances are also multiplied for me by having non-fiber internet (also shared).
* TBC I also mean the act of updating itself (outdated keys etc), not just the outcome
Except the last arch news post is a month ago about virtualbox. I’ve blindly run pacman -Syu for years without issue
Just did it on two machines this morning actually…
Me three
“No way to prevent this” says only distro where this regularly happens
To be honest, I’m a firm believer that if it’s considered required to read the news file for updating then the update tool should be printing that information for you. I used to have a hook that did it, but it was flaky. Also, I saw the creator mention that due to the design of the hooks, it happens too late in the process for some manual intervention to be done properly. But because everyone in Arch has such an obsession with “no bloat” I doubt we’ll ever see pacman have that feature.
News from this year:
- virtualbox-ext-vnc >= 7.2.12-2 requires manual intervention (package won’t install)
- Active AUR malicious packages incident (the AUR is locked)
- Arch Linux 2026 Leader Election Results
- Breaking changes for all users of
varnish, which is renamed tovinyl-cache(it’s a proxy, only affects servers) - kea >= 1:3.0.3-6 update requires manual intervention (dhcp server, affects routers)
- iptables now defaults to the nft backend (affects pretty much nothing)
Repost.
Also, my Mint install broke, uh, shit I don’t remember, 5 times? Arch broke zero times. Zero times not my own fault for forgetting I was installing something and shutting off the computer, of course. Except for the times I tried the fucking installer python script, but since I never even booted the install it doesn’t count.
If you’re running Virtualbox on Arch you deserve everything you get.
Mint broke for you? That’s the first I’ve heard of it.
Also if you have a habit of shutting down the PC during updates, check out atomic/immutable distros. They are almost impossible to break. You can pull the power during an update and it’ll be fine.
Mint breaks weirdly often but also it’s inconsistent in my experience. It’s a great example of it explodes for some people and others it’s a god like entity of perfection. Never in-between. Lol
this year
And one post earlier (2025-12-20) that the image likely could be about:
NVIDIA 590 driver drops Pascal and lower support
Install nvidia-580xx-dkms from the AUR
Impact: Updating the NVIDIA packages [without manually changing to AUR packages] on systems with Pascal, Maxwell, or older cards will fail to load the driver, which may result in a broken graphical environment.
If Nvidia deprecates your driver you’ll be up shits creek on just about every distro unless you already used nouveau.
Yes, that was a while ago, so it’s a repost. Also, NoVideo deprecations affect all distributions.
Iptables change actually fucked me because I’d tweaked something stupid 12 years ago and forgot. Took lime 45-60 mins to fix
I dont get the bad press arch got. I use arch (btw) and can’t remember last time it wont boot after an update. It maybe happened to me twice in 20 years and at least once was my fault and the other was because i didn’t read the pacman post warning me
Once it happened to me because 6 years prior I’d made a change thinking ‘hah. That makes more sense’ and then things changed under me and I had to read journalctl in a tty. Low key enjoyed dealing with it. But here’s the thing: most ppl are dead at that point. No idea what to do. Arch is for nerds.
Edit: this is a completely different thing. I had two issues.
Active AUR malicious packages incident (the AUR is locked)
🤭 heh
To be fair, adoption as a concept is the problem not the actual aur.
The fundamentals of the aur was fine though that entire ordeal. It’s just one optional choice layered on top that wasn’t
Blaming the aur fundamentally for that choice is like blaming the city planner for when a idiot turns down the wrong way on a one way street.
We kinda just accepted the risk because the upsides were worth it. But some people are assholes and gotta ruin it for everyone.
This isn’t the first type of problem that the AUR has had. A few years ago it had problems staying up, because it had no scalability to speak of.
“Best hopes and wishes” is not an accepted engineering design strategy. If something can be abused, it will be. Not planning for it is just that, poor planning.
The AUR has been poorly put together and this wave of malware is just another symptom of a deeper problem.
Foot-guns are my PROTECTED SECOND AMENDMENT RIGHT.
Arch explicitly says “never do this”
Well yeah and cigarettes tell you not to smoke them
Lol. Care to explain how your analogy stands?
Arch will give you cancer
Hasn’t yet. Ubuntu, on the other hand, managed to piss me off completely
Ubuntu pissed me off back when Shuttleworth said, “This is not a democracy!”
Arch can be traded for sex and murders in prison.
I have been using arch linux. And I havent gotten cancer yet. How do i have to be using arch linux to get it?
I smoke since 20 years and I haven’t gotten cancer yet too. How do I smoke to get cancer? /s
Cigarettes work for me perfectly well, other users must be doing something wrong.
You need to be wearing striped thigh-highs I think
No no no, that’s how you prevent it. Striped thigh-highs and fursuits isolate against the cancerous effects.
Exactly
Hasn’t yet. Ubuntu, on the other hand, managed to piss me off completely
Edit: sorry, wrong thread
Damn I thought you were about to say Ubuntu gave you cancer
Lol. Care to explain how your analogy stands?
It stands as written.
Reminds me of my try of Nobara. I do clean install, it installs and starts updating itself for a long while. Afterwards it tells me to reboot, and that the update has failed. I am??? Since I am a noob, so I reboot. And the whole system fully breaks, and no trouble-shooting helps, so I have to re-install. No biggie, just mildly annoying, it was a clean install after all. Then I do some searching to figure out, what went wrong, and find out, that updates failing and the system fully breaking, and having to re-install it if you reboot, is apparently normal behavior for Nobara.
I’ve had Nobara on my PC for several years and not had a problem, though I know others have
Having said that, if I could be bothered I would probably just return to regular Fedora again so that I could have a decent package manager and updater…
Why would anyone want to use a distro that can break at any update unexpectedly or have to read articles first to see if it’s safe is beyond me.
It’s too much of a hassle.
Some crazy people do this for fun.
I mean, I get the appeal. But I’m to old for this shit now. I have a life I need to take care of.
That’s literally every distro ever. Fuck even debian can break on an update. Things happen.
No.
I don’t have to go read articles about the latest update to see if it’s going to break and have to sift through documentation for a fix or a workaround and troubleshoot on nearly every update on Debian. Or Redhat, OpenSUSE, etc.
Man even me mint broke once because of an update and i had to format the PC
I wish arch didn’t have that reputation because I seldom have issues with it
Its like that subway meme where it goes “my brother in Christ you made the sandwich”
If arch breaks it’s 99% of the time user error, and that’s ok. But to say it’s the distros fault is incorrect imo.
I mean, they earned it…
It just doesnt though. I’ve used it for almost a decade at this point and it just doesnt.
yeah windows do be like that
I’ve yet to have one of my windows systems brick itself. Several of my Linux systems have.
Same, at-least everything past Windows Vista era of operating systems. I guess Microsoft has the resources to test and deploy to most types of hardware configurations so the chances of getting a borked update is rarer compared to other OS’s like Arch and Mint which have a smaller user base but more diverse hardware configurations.
I haven’t had a Windows install completely brick itself, but I have seen Windows go into a try to update->update fails->rollback->updates are available->tries to update again… etc. infinite loop.
It’s been a while since I’ve had a Linux system brick that wasn’t me doing something stupid, though I’ve gotten a lot better at handling the occasional minor hiccup.
It’s a problem regardless of what OS it happens to. I’ve personally/professionally found it much more frequent that an update breaks something on linux vs. windows, but it’s also much easier to fix those issues & they’re rarely the kind of critical failure you get with a M$ OS.
(and if you truly crave stability, Debian is always happy to welcome you back into it’s big soft embrace)
Any distro can break at any update. If you’ve ever done a major upgrade on any fixed-release distro, you have very likely experienced some sort of issue.
And the solution is very simple (and the same for all distros): Enable Snapshots, roll back if important stuff breaks.
Any distro can break at any update.
Not atomic distros, at least not nearly the same risk. Every update is like a fresh install.
And that fresh install can also just fuck up. Have you never had a clean install go screwy? I know I sure the fuck have a few times over the years.
I’ve had bazzite kill it self twice so far on an update.
Well if a fresh install fucks up, then that means the distro itself has an issue. It’s very different from how updates fail on traditional systems, which are failures of the update system and not the distro itself.
In other words, any distro can be broken, or simply incompatible with your hardware. But atomic distros get rid of an entire class of failures, where the package manager’s update system bugs out and breaks the OS.
I’ve had bazzite kill it self twice so far on an update.
I’m very curious how this happened since I’ve never heard of an atomic distros borking on update. I’ve heard of atomic distros failing to install because of hardware incompatibility, but usually after it installs successfully, it’s smooth sailing after that.
Flashbacks to when I bought a Winblows Surface Pro 3 tablet that broke on every single update they released for the first year i owned the damned thing
Yeah, idk bro, it’s weird to me too.
It’s can be fun to plumb the limits of computing and Arch’s gimmick is living entirely on the bleeding edge of computing - it’s where all the exciting issues are being actively identified and worked on. However, if you’re not into tinkering, I agree - Arch is ‘C tier’ for average users - specifically because of the dangers of playing in deep waters. As an enthusiast myself, I have Arch on my daily driver, but only because I have a NAS, home server, backup strategy, and other Linux machines running Debian, Fedora, and SteamOS at the ready in case I hit one of Arch’s infamous ‘Bad Days’.
Why, what news? What I need to be careful this time?
Nothing. OP is imagining an idiot for imaginary internet points.
https://archlinux.org/news/virtualbox-ext-vnc-7212-2-requires-manual-intervention/ dont worry you only need to shit your pants if you are using virtual box and dont read (sorry OP)
Who uses virtualbox on Linux having KVM, QEMU and virsh/virt-manager?
It’s gonna be slower, proprietary, and it’s not even as easy to install
It’s not slower.
proprietary
Only the extension pack, the app itself is GPL.
not even as easy to install
How do you mean? You simply install virtualbox (and virtual-guest-iso if you want). All the relevant packages are available from official repos, at least on Manjaro, including a linux-virtualbox-host-modules-meta package that maintains the required linux*-virtualbox-host-modules as needed automatically.
Also, I prefer virtualbox because it makes a lot of stuff easy to do.
File sharing with the host for example, it’s a matter of simply pointing at a dir in settings, as opposed to having to set up Samba on the host (which I don’t have and don’t want) and deal with wierd networking issues, or deal with virtiofs.
Don’t even get me started on selecting locations for the vm files. Whatever you think it should work like, virt-manager’s way ain’t it.
So, I use it on my workstation because I have to also use windows and virtualbox’s cross system integration is far more mature. I really only use it as necessary and it isn’t running all the time.
I would prefer to use qemu, but I’m not doing anything serious with it. I’m just sometimes running a windows instance that I need to be able to easily share files with, and copy/paste across. Once virt-viewer gets there, I’ll switch.
Though, to be honest, it actually uses kvm as its backend so it really isn’t any less performant than qemu for this.
Nice bait there, I nearly started writing an actual answer.
That’s why I go for boring distros like Fedora
If you want really boring, go for Debian.
It’s a peaceful life
Hell yeah – I do want my OS to be boring.
Hello from Mint :)
Mint based on Ubuntu or Debian? Debian mint is probably the most boring … and stable and great for anyone who just wants a computer to work.
Isn’t it based on Ubuntu which is based on Debian? It’s my first time using Linux and I switched a couple of weeks ago so I’m not sure to be honest but the website[1] states:
Based on Debian and Ubuntu, […]
Which leaves me just as confused.
LMDE is the version of linux mint based on Debian rather than Ubuntu. It is missing a few features over the main version but it wont randomly shit the bed because of a bad ubuntu package.
What the other person wrote isn’t quite true: there is a current version of Linux Mint based on Ubuntu (which is itself based on Debian) and another current version based directly on Debian for those who want to avoid Ubuntu.
Originally it was based on Ubuntu, which is itself based on Debian. But recently they based directly on Debian. There are some differences. Debian based is more stable with older packages and kernel.
What? No, there are two versions: the main one, based on Ubuntu, and an alternative one based directly on Debian (Linux Mint Debian Edition)
Just wanted to add a clarification that both editions are offered currently.
Indeed. or fed. the only drama i want in my life is the stuff going on IN the game. not some OS cockblocking me.
Gnome or KDE ? I like gnome over KDE in general but the top bar in gnome seems to create a blank bar in games at top of screen.
Haven’t figured out how to fix it.
You fix that by not using gnome. Or butchering gnome with enough extensions to functionally be a reverse lobotomy.
Since gnomes entirely shitck is that you don’t get to decide how gnome works. It’s out of the box or fuck off.
It’s why it needs a billion extension and mods to be remotely functional
Yeah, lol. Arch people keep telling me that this never happens, and yet here it is.
Nah. Debian is fine for me.
I’m definitely lucky that I’m pushing 3 years on my desktop arch install and have never had any updates break it. Had some issues with Nvidia and Wayland over 2 years, but that wasn’t really an arch thing, more an Nvidia thing.
My laptop is the same, but I use it far less, so really a fair of a comparison, although I do update every time I use it, which is every couple of days.
You just need to keep an eye on the news and it won’t happen 99% of the time. Ive got it set up so news updates go to my email in a specific folder. That means i get the notification on my phone as well. Or just get into the habit of checking the page before updating
I don’t need more shit to remember to do. I need a computer that works without me micromanaging it
Thats fine, then arch just isnt for you. Use what you want, but if someone installs arch then complains that it broke because they didnt check the news (something that the maintainers recommend you do) then the blame/fault shifts to the user, not the system.
but if someone installs arch then complains that it broke because they didnt check the news (something that the maintainers recommend you do) then the blame/fault shifts to the user, not the system.
The question is though why pacman does not display these news during the update. Gentoo has been doing this for decades.
Thats a separate issue, but i do agree with you that it would be extremely helpful if it did
then the blame/fault shifts to the user, not the system
Nah, lol. Not when lots of other systems manage to not break userspace on random updates.
You can claim that blame shifts to the user, but I’m still blaming the shitty system.
In a good system, you can trust that updates are well-vetted already before they’re pushed to average users, and you don’t need to check the news or anything else before updating. You can even set updates to be automatic with a high degree of confidence that it won’t mess anything up for you. (Imagine that, the computer automatically updating itself, saving you the trouble of doing it manually… What a thought!)
Literally every distro ever even Debian. Has broken user space on updates. It just happens. It’s a fact of life. If your distro hasnt done it to you at least once you are either very new to Linux or you are lying though your teeth.
Youre right for most systems that are advertised as stable. Arch however is rolling release, so this doesnt apply. You get package updates as soon as theyre available pretty much. So no, the fault lies with the user when it comes to arch 99% of the time
Edit: i also said the blame shifts to the user if they don’t do something the maintainers specifically say you should do before every update. If you check the arch news, update, and it breaks then yes, the fault is with the maintainer. However this rarely happens nowadays. Ive been on arch for almost 6 years and have not had to do a reinstall ever.
“Good” means different things in different contexts. Here you mean it as something like “user friendly”. Of course, there are other priorities that someone else could call “good”. It’s not a helpful word for honest debate, but it’s very convenient for hiding a bunch of semantic puns and confused reasoning behind.
That is why I am using Tumbleweed, rolling release without the expectation of reading news before hitting zypper dup and stuff still being fine. The price for that is a few days of delay for testing, so that major stuff does not break.
Manjaro has also shown how an Arch distro can achieve this as well, by releasing tested sets of updates slower.
But OP is correct in that’s not the point of vanilla Arch and people who use vanilla should assume the risks.
What’s annoying is people who use vanilla and tell everybody “oh don’t worry nothing ever breaks”. Something always breaks. You have a couple thousand packages installed on the average desktop system, dozens are updated to bleeding edge every day, something will break.
Manjaro maintains a crowd-sourced list of the most egregious defects (+ their fixes) that crop up in popular packages, suffice to say it’s never empty.
Many of them are not system-breaking and may not impact everyone, which is where I’m guessing the “nothing ever breaks” dissonance is coming from.
Fair enough. I am all for choosing a distro that aligns with the own reqirements. It is strange to use a misaligned distro and then complain about it.
That seems like a pain in the ass. like the sort of shit why i left windows behind. noted: will not touch arch. thanks for the heads up.
It comes from a very different place than Windows, and the data here is very transparent, unlike your average Microsoft KB.
dont care. It’s still going into my “places i will never go.” box. dont need an OS cockblocking me from my games. that shit can fuck right off.
Besides, some of is use our OS for work. cant afford telling a job “wahh im too stupid to use a reliable OS” just doesnt fly.
Ya then you need an application and you need to jump hoops or have certain versions of packages not available in your package manager, and on arch, here we go.
Back when I started Linux, poking at the system was fun and exciting (also you had to poke at the system anyway if you wanted to run anything). Now, I just want it out of the way and convenient.
I understand that newcomers might feel that they want to touch everything because it’s all new and shiny, but I think the OS ought to be a creature of the shadows.
Hm… btw, I hate fedora.
Lemmy always seems downvote heavy. Why don’t you like fedora?
The upvotes mean some other people too don’t like Fedora like me. Nothing more than that.
A distro can be perfect for some and, at the same time, hated by some others. That’s normal.
Why it’s not for me. Reasons:
Maintained by a corporation. Probably it’s their testing ground.
Too much bloatware is preinstalled.
Too many updates, just like Arch. But arch feels more cleaner and faster anyway.
Require rpm fusion.
Crashes often.
There is always a connectivity issue on RPM Fusion servers.
Heavily depended upon flatpak.
Many applications don’t have native Fedora packages or repos.
Nobara has also been stable. Underrated distro.
i use arch btw
this happened to me once in 6 years. it was my own fault.
Really? It happens this often?
In 26 years, I’ve seen this happen in two occasions with enterprise Linux. One of them was my own damned fault for using a marginal config. The other was an update that added a new dependency in the code but not the package.
That’s it. Twice.
Never had an unbootable system after an update, all not checking news has ever done to me is having a package fail to install (and then I check the news to see how to fix it), I’ve seen plenty of kernel regressions or other software, but that’s a thing with upstream and getting not-as-tested software, not with arch itself
It’s happened twice to me in seven years of using arch (not black screen, just something being broken after an update) and both times would’ve been avoided if I’d just read the fucking blog like you’re meant to, but yolo lmao. Still on the same install, everything still fine after just switching one package for another or whatever.
with enterprise Linux
I think you already know the difference, but we’re talking about relatively bleeding edge systems here.
