Arch Linux Updates Keep Breaking Packages (I've Given Up On Pacman!)

It has happened. I have become so frustrated with my rolling release distribution constantly breaking with updates. It seems like with every update, I have a program that I depend on break. There has to be a better way!!!
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Your support is very much appreciated. Thanks, guys!

[@jimmyrichards5595]

DistroTube: “Rolling release distro’ s are the way to go, they help keep you on your toes.” Also DistroTube: “I’m a broken man.” 😅

[@fabricio4794]

Bee Gees - how can you mend a broken heart

[@sirzorg5728]

"...on a Halifax pier, the last of Barrett's Privateers."

[@charleshowse3942]

thought you were going with AppImages only...?

[@Milky____]

Even tho I'm part of that flag, I'm not even mad. There are so bat sht crazy people out there pushing their shit onto others and trying to cancel everyone... Hope you're having a good day. 💜

[@em_the_bee]

Thank you for those years of unpaid beta testing, friend!

[@Perry....]

Arch is a meme for a reason 😹

[@heroe1486]

@@Perry.... Arch works fine and rarely breaks, people like you speaking about stuff they don't know are the actual memes. And for a fact "I use Arch btw" isn't even spread by arch users but trolls like you.

[@Perry....]

@@heroe1486Cry more incel 😹

[@heroe1486]

@@Perry.... Learn from your superiors, kid 👶

[@leonardonovara9348]

@@Perry.... It's a channel about Linux and tech, why do you have to talk about sex, bro?

[@cherubin7th]

I rarely had issues with Arch Linux and they were only minor. But Ubuntu breaks deep inside sometimes from updates. I don't know why people have such different experiences with this things.

[@shashwatyashaswi]

Same experience for me. Never had any major issues that I didn’t already plan for (like when changing the boot partition because the current one was too small and didn’t have enough space sequentially to resize and honestly creating a new one was easier). However have seen a lot of major breakdowns in friends’ Ubuntu. I’ve been using arch exclusively since like 2017 now.

[@santiagoglezsrez]

I have been running Arch for 2 years now and I haven’t had issues like this. I don’t know about other Arch based distros and how they get along with the AUR but on arch all I had was a minor issue with a package not installing because I missed something on my PATH and that was me not reading the docs. I have Kdenlive and OBS and no issues at all. I understand Arch is not for everyone tho. I would just not recommend updating if you have work to do and save the updates for when you can dedicate time for issues that may arise

[@shashwatyashaswi]

@@santiagoglezsrez exactly. And again exactly. Updates should always be planned. Doesn't matter what distro or even OS you're using. I know as a matter of fact that mac os updates have caused issues with dependencies on certain code bases and developers had to revert back (which again is much more tricky than on arch) just so they can continue working on their code.

[@dersg1freak]

Ive come to accept the occasional minor hiccups on arch, because i know i can handle within half an hour, on debian and linux mint ive had to give too many times. Make no sense idc, arch ftw jk XD

[@dersg1freak]

@@shashwatyashaswi true, thats why i would donate 10 bucks again to Debian :D

[@harshalp24]

You can also prevent snaps from updating by issuing - snap refresh --hold. Then you can only update snaps manually.

[@smugtomato5972]

I've recently switched to fedora after I got sick of Arch randomly breaking for the nth time and so far I'm really liking it, upgrading to the next release is also very easy

[@watynecc3309]

Using Opensuse Tumbleweed I got good experience with !

[@iusegentoobtw]

based and fedora pilled

[@AgentFortySeven47]

fedora is perfect. it's basically a rolling release without any breakage

[@driden1987]

I'm thinking of going the same route ! How are the 3rd party repos? any package you couldn't find ?

[@iusegentoobtw]

@@AgentFortySeven47 This. Way fresher packages and rarely breaks. 3rd party and proprietary packages are slightly annoying if you're coming from debian or arch, but very intuitive after you use it for a few days. Also kinoite/silverblue are fantastic but significantly weirder to manage.

[@mtothem1337]

After hearing this rant. I think you should revisit nix. It allows you to have per-package depdencies, and even multiple versions of the same package. This negates any version conflicts from even happening to begin with. It also does clean installs and removals since it's isolated within it's own path by the underlying store system. So you can freely experiment without tainting the system.

[@dominiklukacs7677]

This seems really interesting. No idea how I have not heard about this yet

[@Saeppel]

And you can easily rollback to a previous version if an update breaks something. The only real downside of nix that I have experienced is, that it can be painful to use a program if it isn't available in nixpkgs. This is becoming more and more rare because the software available in nix is massive and growing.

[@eriksaari4430]

guix is moar gnu

[@Aturnadagar]

Time to revisit Nix, Indeed. I did a time ago and end all my problem, once you go Nix you never look back.

[@FlafyDev]

And you can choose which packages you want from the unstable or stable branches

[@johncrunk8038]

You have documented one aspect of packages that really just touches the surface. I use Python a lot for "scripting"; i have used Python for many years. Unfortunately, it is suffering from the very popular "update every week" mentality that breaks so many applications. After installing Ubuntu 22.04 in a VM, I tried to build a fairly simple Python app and discovered that someone decided that Python 3.10 was ready for prime time. Python itself may be ready, but there are so many libraries that are not up to the task and I couldn't get pip, venv, or pipenv to work properly. So it's back to Debian 11 for now. Keep up the good work!

[@ach3456]

I've had that issue a lot with Pythorch and Tensorflow: cuda and cudnn would update and then I'd be unable to do research. The maintainers of the Arch repo do say you shouldn't use pip or pipenv though, which is a very weird design choice. Python on Arch is just odd, with the way you have to install Arch packages to get the various libraries to work and how often pip is either useless or actively breaks things. Not even using the anaconda distribution fixes things, since that is also discouraged by the repo maintainers so I imagine it's also just as buggy and troublesome as the other stuff they ask people not to use. It's one of the reasons I switched to Julia; since it can run gpu arrays natively and Flux is array-agnostic, updating my system has never broken anything since. I also do a lot of work in rust, which is also greatly maintained.

[@MrLoggfreak]

Distrobox is the solution for this Running Opensuse MicroOS as a base, rock solid system with modern software, Ubuntu20.04 in distrobox with stable well supported python3.8

[@marloelefant7500]

I don't experience this issue on Ubuntu. Python is quite stable on my work and private systems for years now.

[@borisyeltsin6606]

Kindly ignore previous suggestions in the comments, using a dedicated OS for a stable python version to script with is silly. The industry standard approach is to use pyenv with a virtual environment for every project. Everyone who uses Python to develop or write scripts is supposed to follow this advice, regardless of distro, as well as mac and windows users. This is not something that's really talked about for end-users because python project owners have their own set of processes and tooling when it comes to releases so that their packages work across a known list of major and minor versions of python.

[@marloelefant7500]

@@borisyeltsin6606 A virtual environment isn't completely independent of your system. On Linux, the interpreter within the virtual environment just points to the system interpreter and when you remove this interpreter, the virtual environment will become unusable. This happened to me when upgrading Ubuntu from 20.04 to 22.04. Python 3.8 was removed from the system in favour of Python 3.10 and subsequently, all my existing virtual environments broke. This is half as bad if you properly keep track of the required dependencies of your projects, so a pip install -r requirements.txt is enough to get a new virtual environment working again - but not necessarily. If your project or any dependency depends on an older Python project, you have to add the deadsnakes PPA and then install an older version again. Long story short, keeping everything around in virtual environments doesn't protect you. Furthermore, having one environment for every project can require a lot disk space if many of your projects have large dependencies (such as tensorflow or pytorch). I personally only use a few virtual environments for all projects and test an application after development in an isolated environment before shipping to make sure it builds and runs properly as specified.

[@tmendoza6]

I have been able to program and use mathematical software on Debian for 7 years with zero problems. Every time I have moved to an arch based distro on my testing computer I have always had to troubleshoot issues that were not worth the time to fix

[@rishirajsaikia1323]

I mean, Arch is supposed to be bleeding edge i.e. it's supposed to provide untested latest software even if it breaks the system. That's why if you want stability, you should use some other linux distributions. Moreover, rolling release doesn't mean it's unstable and untested. Fedora, Opensuse tumbleweed, Debian testing, Void, Solus and Gentoo are all stable rolling release distros and goes through testing before the packages are released in the repository. Only Arch gives the bad name for instability to the other rolling release distributions.

[@MichaelWilliams-lr4mb]

Agreed. I do like Arch, but yes, things easily go wrong there. Manjaro is a bit better with their main repositories, IMO, but things get crazy when you use the AUR. I just recently started using OpenSuSE MicroOS. It's a rolling release, yet immutable, system. OpenSuSE does a great job of having a rolling release that works well, IMO. And the BTRFS snapshot system with OpenSuSE with the read only root file system makes it easy to roll back in case an update does break the system.

[@keilmillerjr9701]

@@MichaelWilliams-lr4mb Manjaro had many packages broken, and eventually left me with a botched gnome 40. I switched to plain Arch and it's been great. Would never recommend Manjaro.

[@questionmarc8]

Actually you do get testing on some packages. All packages in core are tested.

[@MarkusHobelsberger]

That's why I prefer Debian and Debian based systems on productive and semi-productive systems. They just work and work and work. For testing or tinkering machines Arch is fine and it's great to have the possibility to have a bleeding edge system, also for developing. Fedora seems to be developing the image of the best of both worlds at the moment, though.

[@Booruvcheek]

Well, this is weird, but in my 1.5 years of using Arch on several machines (2 laptops and 2 VMs) I have never encountered anything like DT describes. Arch just keeps working for me! Signed, Ubuntu derivatives user of 7 years, switched to Arch.

[@nathanoneiric]

@@Booruvcheek If u depend on AUR you are doomed to have updates break ur system...

[@Booruvcheek]

@@nathanoneiric The only thing that broke one of my VMs a couple of months ago was me deciding to actually upgrade Grub (as opposed to simply upgrading the Grub package). AUR packages? I've had 0 issues with those.

[@nathanoneiric]

@@Booruvcheek every couple of months something in my system stops working...like right now suspend closes all apps and doesn't work.

[@yothebob8162]

I use Garuda on all my computers and they have an update function that helps avoid broken packages. They have a lot of features that make for a nice desktop distro

[@APNetworX]

I've been there myself! :) I am currently on Fedora 37, I found it to suit my needs really well, I was previously on EndeavourOS.

[@Little-bird-told-me]

why did you switch ? I ask because I am in Endeavour too

[@APNetworX]

@@Little-bird-told-me I found Fedora 37 to be more stable than EndeavourOS. I also prefer DNF/YUM over pacman

[@alx8439]

This is why you need to learn your package manager, especially for rolling distros - for the purposes of not just being able to install and remove software, but also to undo the upgrade, or hold particular versions of the software

[@Ethorbit]

Or just backup system regularly and revert to an older version when an upgrade is destructive

[@ArniesTech]

The average user is NOT expected to do any of that. The average User has the right to have a working system. And thats where Ubuntu wins. You as a care driver are not supposed to know when to open and to close valves in your engine. That's the manufacturer's Job to finetune everything so that you only turn the key and press one of two or three pedals.

[@alx8439]

@@ArniesTech that's true. But average user is not supposed to run Arch or any rolling distros - for that specific reason. It's like one is buying a racing car and then gets frustrated by the fact the engine requires a maintenance every 100 miles

[@alx8439]

@@Ethorbit yes, backups is definitely an option, but that requires a self discipline. The similar option would be to chose btrfs or zfs with their out-of-box snapshot features but to pay a price of SSD drive to wear faster, than with ext4 + filesystem performance will be slightly worse for specific tasks.

[@alx8439]

@@marco31 no, not at all. He's very skilled linux user, but you know - there's always a place to grow :) I never seen him covering any of the cool topics like memory management, kernel modules, advanced usage of package managers (not the bells-and-whisstles one like nix or nala, but regular ones - there A LOT OF STUFF in there, when it comes to various techniques and approaches which could save your ass, if you prefer rolling distros). I know why he is not covering all these topics - there's just no such a demand from his audience, and it's fine. He's doing his job and I really love his videos and DT himself. But again, to me these videos they're more like linux advertising or entertainment, rather than the serious stuff everyone is ready to listen

[@greatestcait]

Honestly I’ve never really had much of an issue with Arch updates breaking things, but yeah, I see where you’re coming from here. I’m glad that these options exist.

[@heroe1486]

Same one small break in 3 years due to python 3.10, was the login manager. But I don't use artistic stuff. Other "breaks" were my fault like postgres major updates which I should have pinned or be aware of the fact that it was intended to do some work after updating

[@zpgJiggleBilly]

I've been using arch for years, a little over 5000 packages installed, and I have never had anything break. I update 3 times a week. How do people keep running into these issues? I guess I am lucky. At least I know if something does break I can roll back in about ten minutes.

[@fabricio4794]

I Hate Linus Soysebastian but i Agree With Him about Manjaro.....Manjaro...is not Good...

[@ardishco]

whenever smth breaks its usually my fault

[@terrydaktyllus1320]

I used Arch for a short period alongside Gentoo but, unfortunately, Arch dropped the 32-bit version which, for me, was a good alternative option if I didn't want to sit and wait for Gentoo to compile on the same (usually slower) platforms. Arch is a great distribution as long as you're not one of these people that constantly goes "bleeding edge" with constantly updating to the lastest software versions - to be fair, I think that's an issue for any binary distro. The moment users start to introduce beta and test versions of software into a distro, they create a much larger combination of binaries and libraries, most of which have never been tested to work together anyway. As Arch tends to attract more advanced Linux users, more of them are likely to be trying out "bleeding edge" and therefore introducing more instabilities into their Arch builds.

[@srikantas2460]

Have you tried Nix as your package manager, it works well for me and its mostly bleeding edge. You can use home manager with it to keep track of all the packages you want and version control it.

[@carlos_790]

Enjoy your experiences, it helps understand the Information world better! Keep it up!

[@derekgoodwine7509]

In the last few months I had serious issues with Manjaro and ArcoLinux related to updates. Too many things broken. I got so frustrated that I reinstalled Ubuntu on all my machines. I had enough. I wasn't a big fun of Snap and I was wrong. I totally forgot how easy snap makes everything and guess what everything works now. I love Ubuntu server (it's my os on my server) but I never thought I could be so happy to have Ubuntu little brother (desktop version) running on my computers. Believe me I know what you are saying brother!

[@derekgoodwine7509]

@Hoxton lol I like fooling around a lot so I change distro often but on some machines (my home lab consits of 6 computers) I was running Arco but something is getting worse and worse with this distro so here go jumping back to the past and getting Ubuntu on there. No bad at all and snap gets you right where you need. I forgot the convenience of universal packages

[@umop3plsdn]

arco from what i've seen is heavily modified which introduces all kinds of chances for broken changes especially with new or changed features of applications.

[@heroe1486]

Just install arch and you shouldn't have any problem tbh, had one minor break in 3 years

[@fabricio4794]

Arch Linux is just that wannabe cool hipsters from United States distro, i dont like that.....

[@PaullyRobots]

I feel like a lot of this is kinda stuff we accept playing with rolling release. A production machine running in an unstable ecosystem seems like the true issue. Especially with things like snaps and flatpaks working as well as they do. I've been running Endeavor for a bit now and I've found that the less I tinker, the better things go. I have a small ssd i save for tinkering when I get the itch. On a more productive note, I did take fedora for a spin recently and was really impressed with package availability and generally enjoyed it.

[@jackkeifer]

I've been having the same issues, including the Kdenlive parallel processing thing - ugggh! Your video is the confirmation I needed. Gonna try a snap - Thanks for this!

[@tubby4742]

man uses arco, it breaks, gets mad and blames arch

[@ecubed6571]

This is the exact same problem Microsoft had back in the late 90s. It was very nasty. I would think the Open Source system designers would have learned from MS' mistake. They need to find a architecture/infrastructure to address libraries updating to side break applications. Planning to swap the last machine at my house to Linux within two months. Hoping Flatpaks will address this for the critical applications I'll use.

[@DrZingo_]

I never blame Arch. On Arch, you fix the very few things that "breaks". Almost nothing "breaks" on Arch the last 10 years. It was more prone to break 15 years ago, but I stayed and learned what _I_ could do to fix it. Lamer! ;)

[@satnififu]

Literally gave up on Arch (Endeavour) a few days ago and have been distro hopping since trying to find a replacement. As much as I love the AUR as a concept, the U part of the thing is what ultimately makes it incredibly unreliable. I must be one of the 1000 people in the world that still uses an iPod, and one of the 10 people that uses that iPod with Linux; therefore gtkpod (even if it's deprecated and hasn't been maintained for years) is a crucial piece of software for me to be able to sync my music to it. The gtkpod AUR package hasn't built correctly for months, with solutions to the problem almost always being some sort variation of "Take some time out of your day and debug the source code yourself", which led me to having to always install the package in another distro through distrobox (Which doesn't always work the way it should btw), a few days ago a package as essential as the Spotify client also suddenly stopped working after some bad push from the package maintainer, I think it's getting close to a week without it being buildable and someone in the comments had to provide a fixed PKGBUILD for it. Arch has a ton of great things, but the over-reliance on the AUR as a clutch for not packaging software that really should be on the core repos (e.g. Spotify or the AppimageLauncher) and leaving that work up to users is a practice that has to end. I'm currently on Linux Mint while I find a distro that satisfies my needs better than Arch does.

[@mytruepower2]

I've had issues with snaps for one of the programs I use to run old games, but it's worked just fine as a flatpak, and once I learned how to write shortcuts for flatpak run commands into the bashrc file (or even created my own apps using the same commands,) it became just as efficient as any other method of launching the games I wanted to run. So I guess I love flatpaks.

[@gildedlink]

I'm having the inverse experience to you with pacman, weirdly enough. When I had a laptop on Manjaro pacman used to completely break everything, and it caused me to rely on debian based stuff and appimages for quite a while. Recently I upgraded my desktop and switched to daily driving linux on that for the first time, and due to a first look vid you did for Garuda long ago, I decided to try Garuda out, which uses pacman with chaotic AUR. I've been really happy with that choice, it's been the most consistent experience I've had with a linux distro so far, which was the opposite of what I expected based on prior arch-based distro experiences. It's even been smoother than Solus, which was what my laptop had settled on. The update command is garuda-update, just wrapping pacman with extra hooks, and I've had almost no breaks- most of the few serious issues have been solved by a reboot, and by lucky timing I avoided the one big showstopper a while ago when grub updated and removed some arch users bootloaders. The one program that's a hassle to run is Discord, and that's discord's fault. Appimage integration when updating doesn't behave perfect either. All that said, I'm not doing anything fancy with package management and that's probably a big factor. I don't want to consciously downgrade apps, track versions, pin static dependencies, since I don't yet have a need to do so. None of that stuff is part of my workflow for any reason, so I want it all to remain fully up to date. The distro itself is smart enough to warn about breakage if using the pacman command in isolation. That might really be the fundamental difference here.

[@captgeoff0713]

My Arch experience has been going great as well. Any problems I've had in the last six months have all fixed themselves.

[@fabricio4794]

Pacman For me is just an Old Game

[@densidad13]

Similar experience with Garuda here. It's been my daily driver for 15 months. I supposed garuda-update and hot fixes have kept me stable all this time. I have my doubts on some of the (interesting) performance tweaks though.

[@kpcraftster6580]

Hyperbola is both Arch-based and LTS, in addition is it fully libre. Might be up your alley, especially with the addition of agnostic (non-libre) packages? Regardless, from pacman to snap is a step in the right direction. After that, it's only a small step backward from snaps to flatpaks. Then a major step up to appimages. And before you know it, you're using nix and guix exclusively, the way God intended 😁 I think the main reason people dislike snaps is because of canonical's stranglehold on them, just like with systemd: it's not that it works poorly, it's that people hate the idea of being made dependent on it.

[@RAN-os5gz]

This is why I switched to Tumbleweed, none of this shit happens anymore. I let zypper and snapper do whatever they want and nothing ever breaks. edit: krunner picks up flatpak apps by name, thanks KDE!

[@Wren1]

This is why I only update things if the changelog specifies fixes for bugs I've actually experienced or additions for features that I want. I also never update to non-stable versions. As the old saying goes, ‘If it ain't broke, don't fix it.’ One of the reasons I despise Windows so much is because it tries to force and/or sneak in ‘updates’ without my consent.

[@Wren1]

@@4tado Huh? Non-sequitur much?

[@xkkx377]

I’ve been using NixOS. It’s a bit of a learning curve but it’s well worth it. Never had any problems with the nix package manager and they have almost as many packages as the AUR

[@emmanuelezeagwula7436]

Can you tell me more about NixOS it’s look like something new

[@MaxHeroGamer]

Me too, I've used to use arch, but after nixos I don't get frustrated with those things

[@emmanuelezeagwula7436]

@@MaxHeroGamer can you tell more about it ?

[@kasperkondzielski3028]

correction: nix has more packages than AUR

[@xkkx377]

@@emmanuelezeagwula7436 It's more stable than debian with MORE packages than arch... the best part is there's no chance of dependency errors!

[@Chrisg457]

I gave up on Rolling Releases. First with OpenSuse Tumbleweed where update often lead to problems I always had to fix. Moved to Arch and it got so bad I was afraid to update it anymore because I never knew what it would break next. Then I moved to Void which was great and seemed super stable. Never had the issue of system or package breaks, however I did have much more limited repos. I really like XBPS otherwise. Now I run Debian stable and happy I do. It just keeps ticking no matter what.

[@unfa00]

I don't think you can blame Arch for Kdenlive not being stable ;)

[@bobbybologna3029]

👋

[@heroe1486]

@@porterhouse937 Kdenlive is just "bad" software, when you know that you pin a version that works or use an appimage/flatpak as he said, there are usually no problem with Arch, had one minor break in 3 years

[@ordinarryalien]

I thought I could never leave Arch and AUR. Now I love my Linux Mint.

[@folksurvival]

Mint is a great distro.

[@SearchFinger]

I just don't get the need to complicate things. When I see videos about a new distro, my finger is quick to scroll past them. Linux Mint just works for everything I do. It just works period. ;-)

[@wavelengthaudio]

This is the best ad anyone could've made against using rolling releases in production environments. Thanks!!!!

[@terrydaktyllus1320]

Why would anyone with a brain do that anyway? You're describing a fix to a problem that doesn't exist in the first place.

[@d3stinYwOw]

Unless it's Slackware-current ;)

[@d3stinYwOw]

@@4tado As seen on DT video, bleeding edge does what it has in name - makes you bleed :)

[@PenguinRevolution]

@@4tado Point releases are stable and are designed to be upgraded. Rolling releases are the ticking time bombs, not point release or LTS distros.

[@fabricio4794]

@@PenguinRevolution Rolling Releasers should be label as "Nightly"or"Still in Development"version,using Arch to play the"cool pc hipster"is preety naive if you are not an Community s developer.

[@tylerdoestech]

This reminds me of how Ubuntu's changes to the kernel broke OBS for me on an LTS release after an update. This has always been my fear with Arch anything, and I had not heard too much about it until Grub was broken I think last year for a short period and now this video. Kdenlive and GIMP are two of my most frequently used packages as photographer and videographer, so I cannot have those breaking on me in the middle of a workflow simply for trying to keep my security patches and packages up to date!

[@walking_on_earth]

I didn't see this video coming but you make a very clear and convincing argument. Ideally one can do a little mixing and matching with packaging formats to reap the benefits of all.

[@jonathandawson3091]

I am not sure about the argument being convincing, because I can't still believe the premise. Haven't had a single crash in over a year, so it is really weird to hear systematic and monthly crashes.

[@MichaelMantion]

My solution is to just timeshift or snapper back. Wait a bit before I do an update again. Someone eventually finds the solution. The flaw in DT idea is that if we all switch to snap/flat/app than bugs won't be discovered and resolved as fast.

[@terrydaktyllus1320]

I'd argue that mixing packaging formats is one of the worst things that you can do.

[@exnihilonihilfit6316]

Jonathan, you're not doing much with the thing, that's why...

[@jonathandawson3091]

It's my daily driver, but it's true - I do use gimp, krita, libre office and blender occasionally. Never used kdenlive (as I don't produce videos). Actually what startles me is that I haven't also heard this anywhere else yet that pacman keeps breaking (except for AUR in Manjaro but that's different).

[@airbossone]

I was a Arch fan guy a long time ago but honestly I fed up to eventually spend my time to fix my driver regardless of whether there is timeshift, timeshift-snap. I switched to SUSE tw and Fedora and no pain in a…

[@raphael2407]

that's what you get when you use bleeding edge. When a rolling distro rolls in bleeding edge all the time, there can never be any kind of protection for the API and (worse) ABI. For my old head that's a nightmare. You can't just roll in untested things that might not work, might break other things, and potentialy cause crashes on the hardware level, and expect *your every day working environment* stay stable under these conditions. That's why no matter how long and far I dabble into other things, I always come home to my good old Debian. "Stable" actualy has meaning. I hear though Fedora is good for a stable work environment and from my recent travels around the Linux space looking for things to tinker with, I can say (for me) Void is a thing to play with for a while. (actualy I am really impressed) But Debian is home and it will always be, since forever, and for good reason Just do a minimal install and build from there. You be happy... bored out of your mind , but happy 🙂

[@OM-bs7of]

Tip: just alias the "flatpack run ..." command in the bashrc file as the program name. This only has to be done once. It's very easy to do, no need to change an entire package manager...

[@jorgeb_96]

It's what I thought but I don't know if dmenu can find the executables.

[@sweep-]

Hey DT. Why not use nix instead? Doesn’t it work on most distributions? It seems like it’s a better version of “snaps”. I haven’t really looked into using it yet though.

[@borise4104]

better to use NixOS itself with nix

[@9s-l-s9]

Or Guix. Way easier to understand

[@lennihein]

@@9s-l-s9 GUIX has like a handful of packages. Coming from the AUR or even NIX, GUIX just isn't enough.

[@dermond]

I like using Appimages with AppimagesHub, it's like you install that Appimage on your system, and you can update from there, it doesn't delete the older version. I also think that snaps on GNOME are slow, but on other desktop like Plasma are ok

[@umop3plsdn]

to be fair most the time the breaking changes aren't from the package manager itself it's the changes from the projects themselves or the dependencies they rely on

[@SF-bh7rd]

Arch still bears some responsibility making sure a -Syyu will never break any package from their repos.

[@SkyyySi]

@@SF-bh7rd By the way, please never use -yy; it's pointless, it just wastes bandwidth of the mirrors.

[@umop3plsdn]

@@SF-bh7rd the issue is some may think that's the cause of the breakage when it isn't. Take DTs argument about gimp crashing every time since he updated also, libre office. both are absolutely fine on my install continually updated. Am I saying it never happens... no. but almost always it's either a conflict with maybe a config file or maybe even another package or library. The major snafu I can think of was the openssl breakage that happened not long ago but that in itself wasn't really the package manager fault either.

[@Lewdovico]

@@SkyyySi what's the -yy does?

[@nameless9726]

@@Lewdovico +1

[@nesper8]

Happy Thanksgiving man Enjoying your content since 2021

[@N0stalgicLeaf]

In other words, imperfect software made by imperfect humans doesn't work as intended sometimes.

[@boogelymoogely8851]

I love Arch, but I've recently switched to Fedora, as it gets that new software that I love about Arch, except the reliability of something like Debian. If you still want a rolling release distro, something like OpenSUSE Tumbleweed might be a good idea.

[@safi164]

Honestly speaking Ubuntu and Ubuntu based distros are good enough but somehow people hate them for no reason just for being too normie distros and too boring. Ubuntu LTS is a good base for a distro... Arch based distros are just too unstable.

[@heroe1486]

Arch based aren't unstable, unstable in term of "it's moving" yes but not software stability, maybe his artistic programs but otherwise no, one minor break for me in 3 years with near 2k packages. Ubuntu isn't good enough, I don't want to spend time installing packages or getting newer versions with all the PPA hassle, the AUR is just too good.

[@Danielddiniz]

This remembers me of The Big Bang Theory’s “anything can happen Thursdays”, who’d imagine a future where we have DT sidelining with Snap Packages! Linux world is so crazy!

[@demanuDJ]

That is why I've switched from Arch to Nobara, not so bleeding edge, very stable, based on Fedora and has a lot of improvements for gaming, content creation etc. Nobara since I have it never failed me. Give it a try. For me it was switch from "I hope it will not broke everything" to "I'm not affraid of updates"

[@ruirodrigues705]

That's why i use a Debian based distro!

[@heroe1486]

Thanks for doing this video, you'll perpetuate the myth that arch is unstable when it's not and make happy all the people insecure about arch (although they shouldn't) that have never tried it and thus can't relate, great service.

[@terrydaktyllus1320]

Arch is unstable because it attracts advanced Linux users who are more than likely to introduce "bleeding edge" software versions in what would otherwise be a very stable distro release. No OS will retain stability if you introduce untested software versions unless, like in Gentoo, you compile from source each time you make an update.

[@heroe1486]

@@terrydaktyllus1320 Arch is unstable in terms of "packages are always updated" not in term of software stability, every package worth being available in the official repo certainly has a great coverage in term of automated tests and you don't get alpha versions either, those are in the AUR for you to try, experiment and give feedback. From my experience things rarely break, if you install random packages from the AUR that's an other story although I haven't even experienced much problem either.

[@terrydaktyllus1320]

@@heroe1486 What you are describing, whilst factually correct, is not mutually exclusive to what I described. Any user running testing or "bleeding edge" packages in any distro is likely to suffer more problems and instabilities that someone only running stable packages in the same distro.

[@chaslinux]

One issue we've run into including snaps as part of our install is that the snap store sometimes slows downloads to a crawl. It hasn't happened too often, but a couple of times prevented us from helping people as quick as we'd like to.

[@MartinJungblut]

Thing is, system-wide package managers should track shared libraries. And other files, if possible. RPM does this quite well, hence why both DNF and zypper are very solid, thanks to the combination of RPM + libsolv (which uses a satisfiability solver algorithm, plus RPM's shared library tracking). Deb also does this via deb-shlibs, although that requires an explicit declaration. RPM does this automatically (calls 'ldd' for every file that belongs to the package, declares those dependencies automatically). As far as I know, pacman doesn't do this. Packages' shared library requirements are satisfied implicitly: they're compiled and recompiled to fit together, so that Arch's latest snapshot is always a concise whole (of course, mistakes could happen here, there aren't super strong validations AFAIK). This also means AUR packages need to be recompiled once shared libraries are no longer ABI-compatible. Not sure if there are tools to detect this breakage, there probably are. Still, the remote build infrastructure provided by COPR, OBS and LaunchPad, plus shared library tracking... yeah. It's good stuff.

[@Kylian381]

give opensuse TW a try! It is rolling release. but the automatic testing they do works really well.

[@fabricio4794]

OpenSUSE,TW or Leap are the Best Choice for this people....

[@raphaeldrouin2934]

Like you said in an other video, I use NixOS BTW, I switched this summer and love it, it just take me time to adapt because it is different

[@speedyfox9080]

Hey DT! I would recommend you to move your workflow to NixOS. It seems like your distro. You don't have to deal with dependency hell nor with appimages (Which are basically the windows way of installing software). Arch sucks for stability, I still get nightmares when I got ICU broke, so I moved to NixOS.

[@emmanuelezeagwula7436]

Can you tell me more about NixOS I’ve never heard about it

[@borise4104]

@@emmanuelezeagwula7436 There are some reviews, you can search for them on YT, also read documentation on their site. Basically NixOS is distro built around their Nix package manager, focused on solving dependency hell and stable rollbacks. Also you can try using Nix package manager on other distributions or OS like MacOS.

[@speedyfox9080]

@@emmanuelezeagwula7436 NixOS is very unique distribution: You configure your whole system (packages, services, etc.) in one config file, making it the same on any computer you use it on. When you install a program, instead of just installing the program and it's dependencies as a normal distro, it symlinks the dependencies and program version: this approach makes having programs that depend on different versions of the same library work seamlessly on your system. And because you use symlinks, it is super easy to go back to your previous build of the system (although I say build, I don't mean compilation wise, I mean previous version of the configuration file). This is why I have started using NixOS. There is also the standalone nix package manager, which offers a big part of what I have just said, but without the configuration file. If you want to know more about NixOS, you can read their official documentation (nixos.org/manual/nixos/stable/), but the first thing you have to do is install NixOS (which is super simple, being even simpler than something like arch or debian, having the graphic calamares installer).

[@StabbedPerson]

As a Arch newbie who just went through a 2-day long system recovery session because I made the audacious, daring decision to attempt to download steam via pacman, yeah I feel you.

[@theplaymakerno1]

Steam broke your system! My God! That must have been terrible! This is the first time I have heard Steam breaking an Arch Install.

[@milohoffman274]

The Flatpak solution for us TWM users is simply to use ROFI, instead of dmenu, rofi will provide a menu of .desktop apps just turn fine.

[@terrydaktyllus1320]

I do wish you people would say "Tiling Window Manager" because in my world, "twm" is the default window manager that comes with Xorg that nobody ever ends up using anyway.

[@San0ix]

I would love to see you try out the Nix package manager, or even NixOS! I was having your exact issues and found Nix to be a great solution with dependency hell and applications constantly breaking. Plus, you get really good roll-back capabilities out of the box.

[@mikkel3135]

While I've had minimal friction with Manjaro so far, I've started messing with NixOS in a VM as well. Love the concept, and will hopefully make the switch when I'm certain the experience wont be a downgrade (needed flake to get newest LeftWM version for example).

[@Winnetou17]

He did try NixOS! That's how I heard about it, seen a video from DT.

[@jenstiensuu4890]

Plus, daily driving NixOS would make for great content on the channel!

[@cesarhinojohinojo4184]

Kind of the same happened to me several times last year. I had Arch on my 3 computers I use for everything, and have had that setting for about 5 years without issues. This year I got several dependency errors in packages, starting with pandoc stuff, which I use a lot, and then GDAL just didnt run, and all my work depends on GDAL. It stayed broken for months, and then I decided to totally switch to Slackware 15. I havent had any issue at all with Slackware, but I hope if something comes up I would be able to figure out and solve it, as is pretty much compiling your own stuff besides the base software. Totally liked coming to a stable distro after being so much time in a rolling release.

[@ausare32]

Thank you, I was having issues with Kdenlive on Manjaro and the Flatpack fixed those.

[@StrelokRadist]

xbps, nix-env or NixOS itself will deliver also fresh packages, but better stability.

[@luisortega8085]

i wish nixos was more popular. literally it's great but too niche

[@terryforsythe8083]

I feel your pain. I have the same experiences with Arch. Won’t be long, though, before some fanboy jumps in and falsely claims they have been using Arch for years and have never had anything break from an update.

[@terryforsythe8083]

@ok a short time, perhaps, but not years. Arch updates over the years have broken Network Manager, Grub, etc., which are packages most users need.

[@TVPInterpolation]

for anyone hitting the same issue as DT with flatpaks not shown in dmenu, there seems to be a relatively nice workaround called j4-dmenu-desktop, which allows dmenu to also pick up .desktop files.

[@styrofoamsoldier]

I had a wonderful time with Arch myself, never had any issues with packages breaking until one update to glibc broke the only game I play. The issue was with my nvidia (as usual...) and its drivers having some deprecated hook to glibc and there seemed to be no fix in sight. I tried rolling back the package but that just broke other things, being a c library. I'm happy and content on Void now, been using it for almost a year now. I probably won't be going back any time soon, void has all the good sides of arch but is just a bit more conservative on some fronts when it comes to updates.

[@styrofoamsoldier]

@@rishirajsaikia1323 No, why would it? I can't say I've looked at it too closely. I don't quite understand the question.

[@drishalballaney6590]

Imho this is a great time to probably switch to NixOS ;)

[@esmailelbob]

I feel your pain, I use gentoo and 3 apps are not working with me (because deps) and I use flatpaks so sometimes I will compromise on flathub, but I WILL NEVER use snaps

[@terrydaktyllus1320]

Which apps aren't working?

[@milosCivejovidar]

I use Manjaro KDE and it is pretty stable for me. Never experienced things breaking, only bugs getting fixed. I guess it has a small testing buffer to check Arch updates. KDE on Wayland is still kinda experimental but I use it every day with occasional bugs.

[@exnihilonihilfit6316]

Manjaro - stable! 😂😂😂👍😂😂😶

[@flyinghippo5767]

I may check out some snaps after seeing this video. As a Manjaro user, I never have to worry about packages breaking with updates, but with it being a stable release, I have to use Flatpaks for some packages when I want to be on the latest version, and configuring permissions for them (like I had to do with Steam since a few games would crash when opening some cutscene videos and minigames) gets to be a bit of a headache. Cheers.

[@browser1685]

I really enjoy your content. @ChrisTitusTech stated in a recent video that Arch is for hobbyists; the business world requires stability. That resonated and got me questioning why content creators are using a roller-coaster like Arch in production environments. I decided to "distro-hop" to devuan ...sysvinit btw. Thank you DT. I wouldn't of found this distro without your effort.

[@MichaelJHathaway]

This is correct

[@stephenwilson0386]

This realization is what got me away from Arch and Arch-based, and I've been very satisfied with openSUSE Tumbleweed on my PC and Fedora on my laptop for the past year-ish. Some people have the mentality that "corporations are bad" but the stability has really been night and day. Many more eyes on things, stable funding, and the fact that they're both tied to enterprise operating systems seems to make a huge difference.

[@fabricio4794]

@@stephenwilson0386 Germans are good Technology Specialists,OpenSUSE Leap,and TW is a proof of this,Red Hat,is for me the Number 1 United States Company that can Beat Microsocks in their domain - Desktops(Just need a Heavy Marketing Campain promoting Fedora Games and Fedora Jam)im the Fedora and OpenSUSE Team,LInux MInt is Awesome too,but im going to Rpm side of the force.

[@Little-bird-told-me]

CTT is a noob when it comes to **desktop** Linux. See what i did there

[@jaime57473]

For exactly what you are saying I switched to Void and my dependency hell went away...

[@kaveiros1]

I use Ubuntu for a few years now on two if my 4 machines and snaps are great for me , never had an issue. On Ubuntu 22.10 snaps are launching faster than flatpaks and debs. On one of my other machines I use Garuda gnome for 1 year now and never had an issue, great stability but I only use chaotic aur and flatpaks on Garuda. I run a business with these machines and snaps was the only packaging system that never betrayed me even until last year that were slow on Ubuntu too.

[@keyboardwarrior6296]

The universal package managers are a pragmatic solution, but not an ideal one, imo. I've never understood why the distro-specific package managers don't have the ability to containerize software or to maintain parallel sets of shared libraries. Something like that would be more in line with the heterodox nature of linux. A universal solution shouldn't be necessary. "One size fits all," is simply not the linux way. While the universal package managers offer a solution for now, I think that the various distro maintainers should be looking to render them obsolete, considering they offer a feature that should realistically already exist. Multiple package managers can very quickly snowball into a difficult mess by the time you have your distro's PM, multiple universal PM's solving respective niche use-cases, npm, pip, etc. It over complicates the idea of package management to a degree comparable to having to go to the website as if you're running windows, and this is counter-intuitive for users of all skill levels, but particularly for new users trying to learn the basics.

[@anon_y_mousse]

Agreed. I feel like a universal package format would really just be a standard format for every distro. That way it wouldn't have 1gb downloads for a single program, but rather it would connect with already available dependencies and if it's incompatible with the available dependencies it would have segregated dependencies for anything that requires that specific version. Then you could have distros sharing repos and have less fragmentation of the infrastructure. Something like a base install necessary to get a system up and running and every distro would build from there. Like if LFS had a package manager. That would be true universality, unlike what we have with FlatPak, Snaps and AppImages, and I say this as someone who actually likes AppImages.

[@TheExileFox]

so basically Nix / NixOS is what you want?

[@keyboardwarrior6296]

@@TheExileFox I've never looked into Nix

[@archerboy2714]

*uses bleeding edge rolling release distro* - "why is stuff breaking".

[@waddon1]

I've been fine using Arch for years and then the past few months I've had a few things just completely explode

[@leopard3131]

So sorry I feel your pain. This is why I switched from awesomewm on arch to Gnome on Fedora these sort of issues got old. Fedora is bleeding edge without the hassle. Hope you get it sorted soon

[@terrydaktyllus1320]

Bleeding edge is always hassle. That's the core problem here - people coming from the Windows "constant upgrade cycle" and believing that as soon as an update is available, they need to install it. I have no issue with people using bleeding edge intelligently - I have a couple of machines that I run testing branch Gentoo on, but if they break I am not going to be whining about losing all my files or not being able to get on the Internet to fix it. Idiots that run bleeding edge on their daily driver PCs are the problem.

[@leopard3131]

@Terry Daktyllus Well IMO running a system without expecting it to be functional is past bleeding edge and into the void. God gave us virtual machines for what you are suggesting. Also in my experience it is the linux users who update frequently especially Arch and new users. Windows users update much less frequently and many stay a version or 2 behind the most recent windows release more so in a production environment. I do agree for what you are suggesting Gentoo is absolutely the way to go. Packages are marked regarding if they are working, multiple versions of a package, and easy to roll back changes. All that is great fun if that is your interest but again these days I have other interests and thus I find Fedora to be bleeding edge enough. I would use Arch if they supported selinux to the degree fedora does I am not about to debug selinix on arch or maintain the policy on a desktop.

[@terrydaktyllus1320]

@@leopard3131 I can't disagree with anything you've said - it works for you, who am I to argue with that? I do think there's an "over reliance" on VMs in the general Linux community because very often what happens on "bare metal" is different to what happens in a VM with entirely the same distro installation. That's why I tend to use the "any old cr*p" methodology and throw my builds onto an old but real PC as much as possible - whilst still using VMs for other things I need to do.

[@grimslade0]

The only time my Arch system has broken after using it for the past couple of years, was that damn grub update a few months back. How dare they? My system was innocent man... It really kept me on my toes though 👀 I thought it was my fault. And I learnt some new things about boot-loaders. Clearly, it was just the nice fellows maintaining the repo making sure users weren't getting rusty. -- not rust as in: the programming language. But rust as referring to: corrosion on metal... Bare metal. 👁️👄👁️

[@spicynoodle7419]

Same, I don't get how everyone accuses Arch for being broken constantly. I've had 2 breakage and both were caused by GRUB. I've been running systemd-boot since the last breakage and haven't had a single issue.

[@heroe1486]

Same, but just a login manager problem when we switched to python 3.10, just had to go to the tty, install another one and systemctl enable, and I have a ton of packages installed, even from the AUR

[@pivad1388]

@@spicynoodle7419 i just wonder what they are installing or are trying to do with their computers. ive rarely had problems (the grub bullshit), and if i do, i know its because im testing new packages that arent ready for release yet (Wayland compositors). i swear these guys are installing crap shit and are making a mess of their OS.

[@someonestolemyname]

rofi does read desktop entries. And you can add executables that alias to flatpaks even though it will take some work. The lack of scriptability is definitely one of flatpak's greatest weakness though, it is not made for command line.

[@mehdi7586]

for launching flatpaks I recommend j4-dmenu-desktop it's a wrapper of dmenu that uses .desktop files instead of just scanning your bin directory

[@grtcdr]

FYI j4-dmenu-desktop is a standalone utility and a wrapper for dmenu, not a version of dmenu.

[@mehdi7586]

@@grtcdr yeah, I just didn't know how to say that

[@avdibeg]

I use Debian for exactly the same reason - it is stable. No problems whatsoever. Everything just works, even Steam, games, and whatnot. On my laptop I keep Devuan. They are so boring, that everything works, even though I am not known for not breaking stuff. And I like it that way. Too old now for this sh... distrohopping.

[@zsh7862]

Have you considered Nix as an option, I know you did a video about a year ago on the topic.

[@haydencct]

I get making the move towards dependency-neutral formats, but don't snaps specifically have proprietary elements that make them undesirable? Seems like AppImages were working fine for you at least from what I picked up from the video

[@jamesmackinnon6108]

it is time to enter the void: rolling release but with a focus on stability, i have never had a package break in void linux

[@13thravenpurple94]

Great work Thank you

[@pord]

I got fed up of arch breaking. On opensuse tumbleweed. Been stable and rolling for sometime now

[@Fidelity_Investments]

I'm also on Arch and I've had none of these problems except for pipewire.

[@phonewithoutquestion80]

Flatpaks are generally better than snaps imo, so much so that distributions like Fedora Silverblue kind of build their whole system more along the lines of how Flatpaks separate from the rest of the base operating system.

[@hammerheadcorvette4]

I solved my Video editing issues by going with Shotcut. KDEnLive has a ton of development issues, the team needs a lot of help. There are many bugs and simply not enough people contributing. I unfortunately could not help at the time, and switching was my last resort. Shotcut is brilliant for my needs and the support around it is positive.

[@Tyler-Kearney]

I recently noticed that the aur version of caffeine was basically broken. The gnome extensions version works, but I'd prefer to use either cinnamon or kde over Gnome

[@bret44]

this why I switched to fedora, it is cutting edge enough for me and everything just works with no wasted time.

[@tessiof]

"Arch Linux is The Ideal Beginner's Distro"

[@samyt681]

shilling garbage distros leading to being a broken man even windows would be a godsend for production this person is crazy

[@goldhalowings]

*Snap installed programs always take few extra seconds to launch* when you power up the system and it's noticeable. *Some snap installed programs may have odd behaviors* like smplayer for example it can't play any media content from a (hidden) .folder. *Snap is useful* indeed in some cases especially if you want a recent version of a program without adding a specific repo.

[@dominikheinz2297]

Thats why I use void. Rolling release, but not bleeding edge. Fast and rockstable.

[@Sjoerdschouten]

Life's good on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. Snap and Flatpak enables me to run a very stable system (I depend on it for work daily and I really can't deal with stuff breaking all the time) and still have access to the latest applications and binaries.

[@hotrodjones74]

Pretty much the same on Pop!_OS minus the snaps. Just flatpak, apt and .Deb for me

[@toranshaw4029]

I think DT has *snaped* 😏

[@arfeloreed]

Currently using endeavor os, based on arch, xfce DE. Haven't experience any breaking you guys are talking about. I also distro hop after a few mos, so I already tried some debian based distros and red hat ones. So far I really liked fedora, been thinking on going back to it to experience the 37 version. But currently, I am also growing fond of endeavor os. It's working perfectly, no issues on my end. But hey, it's the beauty of Linux, if one is not working for you there are more options available.

[@shaddow1dog]

Strange that you say this I have been using Arch for the past 5 years with no issues with broken packages but then I do not use Manajaro or what ever it's called nor the likes but my own.

[@toquita3d]

I used Arch for 8 years and it *was* really stable. Now it's far from it. I then went for Kbuntu, but I hate the Snap package BS from Mozilla. OK then, let's go Debian Testing. Seems OK at first, but then some programs just started breaking, like GIMP (color choser doesn't work), KDEnlive not rendering..... openSUSE's Kernel doesn't recognize my tablet, and Tumbleweed updates/breaks a lot. I had to go back to Windows to be able to work. "Well have you tried this or that distro" - don't even start me on distro hopping. I need good distros that work well with my graphics tablet (Huion H320M) and the only DE that works well is KDE, so Mint is out of the question, Ubuntu and most of it's derivatives, Zorin, PopOS, etc, none work well because their DE's are horrible.

[@tobiasheath529]

You had to switch back to windows for your graphics, I had to switch back because of software not working properly with my speech. It should be said that I could've probably learned to live in the command line, and maybe I'll even give that a try. But even command line apps have their issuees. Did you ever look at Fedora? I believe that's designed to be as stable and workable as possible, as it's based on red hat enterprise LINUX.

[@themroc8231]

As far as i am concerned Open Suse Tumbleweed is the new Arch.

[@MichaelWilliams-lr4mb]

I'm on OpenSuSE MicroOS here.

[@RifterDask]

I recently said screw it and went back to Ubuntu. Aside from some theming and hybrid graphics hiccups, the experience has been just delightful, even compared to Fedora.

[@ellesper]

I’ve never had issues with Pacman. An update broke my system once a few weeks ago but it was my own fault for messing up a config lol

[@jeffreydurham2566]

This is one of the reasons why I like ZorinOS, it has support for all these different packages out of the box.

[@PenguinRevolution]

Zorin is just a fork of Ubuntu LTS, you get the same support in Ubuntu

[@jeffreydurham2566]

@@PenguinRevolution Yes Ubuntu supports Flatpak, but you still have to install it yourself. In ZorinOS it is already installed and ready to go.

[@PenguinRevolution]

@@jeffreydurham2566 One of the many reasons not to use Zorin, it so unbelievably bloated.