I’m using Arch Linux for 2 years. I subscribed to Arch’s mailing lists and I check my mails daily. I use flatpak instead of AUR.

I installed my system with archinstall and I update whenever I want. I didn’t have any issues yet and it’s the only distro that just works for me.

What about your experience? Any “breakage”?

  • SpaceCadet@feddit.nlEnglish
    5·
    1 year ago

    I guess it depends on how you define “breakage”. The system being completely b0rked and unsalvageable? No, that has never happened.

    Bugs, regressions or other gotchas or annoyances that needed to be dealt with? Yeah, several since I started using Arch in 2014.

    • netctl hanging on boot (it was some systemd config issue)
    • Very slow throughput issue with the Intel AX wifi driver (needed to rollback kernel and firmware until upstream fixed it)
    • Intel NIC disconnecting under high load (was eventually fixed in a firmware update)
    • Graphical artifacts in chrome and firefox after certain mesa updates (amdgpu related, eventually fixed)
    • Black screen in google maps after a mesa update (amdgpu related, eventually fixed)
    • Mesa update breaking high refresh rates in vkQuake (mysteriously fixed after several months)
    • Grub introduced an incompatible update last year, so had to boot from USB and re-run grub-install
    • An issue with vim syntax highlighting being broken for bash scripts. Was caused by upstream, and quickly fixed.
    • A new readline version introducing bracketed paste by default. I’m not counting this as regression or bug, but it’s an instability because a default behavior suddenly changed
    • mpv’s pipewire audio output was broken a few weeks ago leading to muted videos. It was an upstream bug that was fixed a couple of days later.
    • mpv’s default subtitle handling behavior was changed around the same time as well, had to add subs-with-matching-audio=yes to the config to revert to previous behavior
    • Currently still struggling with an issue with virtiofsd: my VMs can’t re-mount virtiofsd filesystems when they are rebooted.

    And there were probably several more which I can’t remember.

    Mind you, I’m not blaming Arch for this. It’s just what you can expect from a rolling release distribution, and if you are not able or willing to occasionally diagnose/fix things like this, Arch is not for you.