pyromaniac_donkeyshhhh dont tell them :)
SpaceCadetThe irony is that “it just works” is often more true for Arch than for other distros because it has up-to-date drivers for everything.
Try to get a Radeon 7900XT working on Ubuntu 22.04 for example. It’s possible, but you’ll be jumping through much more hoops than on Arch.
bob_wileyThat’s a double edge sword though. Bleeding edge updates also mean more bugs that need to get worked out, so how seamless the experience is may be up to luck or the amount of effort being put in to keeping up on release notes.
But the good thing is that it’s usually super easy to fix if something does break. The amount of headaches I had with PPAs and snap are worse than having an arch update break something. You can usually roll back the packages with issues (namely anything from nvidia).
It really depends on how much time a user wants to spend playing sys admin in their free time. If you run an update and it installs 250 package updates, and some random thing stops working, maybe you don’t even notice it for a couple updates… have fun tracking it down, especially if it’s some random library that’s several dependencies deep on the thing that actually broke.
Then you roll it back, which may be rolling back other things, or letting that stuff break. And then what happens for updates, do you then have to watch the PRs and release notes on those projects to see if/when the issue is resolved, or write the fix yourself and submit the PR.
That might be fun for some people, but not for the masses. It also doesn’t seem like something a person would want on their primary system if it needs to be used for anything even remotely important or time sensitive.
Those are valid points, but windows has the exact same issues. Updates break stuff so often that many people have just adopted a habit to never update if they need to rely on their machines. The same is true for me, I spent many hours trying to find a version of the nvidia driver that has no issues.
True. The company I work for is starting to get a little more proactive with OS updates and I can’t tell if it’s good or bad. On the one hand, we get some new features. On the other hand, things are always broken… but things have always been broken because they load them up with so much security software that they fail to function. So I’m not sure if they’re more or less broken than usual, lol.
My company recently enabled windows defender’s ASR and it caused a shitload of issues, so they had to disable it again for half the company.
Windows also does shit like turning up my volume all the time and some update broke lightshot in a weird way where some people who had it installed before the update can use it, but when you install it after the update, it just won’t launch. This crap is impossible to troubleshoot.
Meanwhile on Linux, I can fix pretty much everything with a bit of googling and if I can’t figure it out, I can post on the arch forums and get help for free, usually very quickly and by people who really know their shit.