If you have the time + know how to keep up with Arch, and want the latest packages or need the latest drivers, then go for it.
If you only want an Arch install experience, then fire up a virtual machine and stick with Endeavor or switch to a stable release like Debian on bare metal.
But most importantly, if it brings you value (in productivity or experience) then whatever you decide isn’t a stupid decision.
Arch isn’t inherently unstable. It’s just that most users don’t maintain it properly. Tips:
learn to backup for real: rsync, borg, etc. you broke something? Just back up to that image you made right before you updated ;)
use flatpaks. It’s kind of hard to run into AUR or dependency issues if you’re as close to a base arch install as possible.
read the maintenance page and understand it. You can’t just “yay” every week and be done with it. You need to know how to handle pacnew, read the wiki for manual interventions, look for errors and warnings in the pacman log, etc. it’s not hard at all once you figure it out, but it takes a little learning.
you don’t need to update every day. If it’s working - you can just let it ride. If you don’t update forever, then just update your keyring first and you’ll be good to go.
Despite all the progress in terms of Wayland, I still find my laptop to be unstable with plasma + Wayland on fedora 38. Many visual bugs, when the screensaver is entered and I move my mouse again, the screen just stays black until I close and open the lid.
Some booting and spontaneous shutdown issues too, but I assume that’s something else. (Framework 12 DIY)
Wayland limits me more than I’d like, with no global hotkeys and general low hackability. The only thing keeping me on it is the fact that I can’t figure out how to get fractional scaling on gnome xorg (also on fedora on a framework)
Scaling is one of the major things that suck. Probably on xorg too through. And especially with multiple screens in different ratios and uncommon ratios (like the frameworks 2:3 one)
Yeah, same experience on Wayland + GNOME for me. I want it to work, but stuff just breaks too often for me to accept at this point. How much of that is Wayland and how much of it is other things failing to work properly with it is kind of immaterial. Regardless, I’ll happily jump ship when it’s more baked, but now isn’t that time.
I would count myself among the people who dont have a huge attachment to x11 and am excited by the modern approach provided by wayland.
Ultimately, I just want my stuff to work. I am running pop and I tried booting into wayland, since they provide that as an option, but I was getting hardlocks. Something I haven’t had on a PC in over a decade. According to the log files it appeared to be related to wayland, so I switched back to x11 and haven’t had any issues since.
I am happy to switch to wayland, but I’ll be waiting on the pop devs to make it a focus–presumably after cosmic DE is out.
If you are running things inside of containers you aren’t helping yourself by disabling unprivileged namespaces, you are actually just running more things as root. Inside the containers they generally block namespaces anyway.
TBH I’ve never heard anything positive about most of what hardened does.
Thanks I am looking at these. Do you think maildir format is the best to try to work with? When I was researching I find there are other formats such as mbox, or more program-specific formats. I was not having an easy time discerning which is the most portable, robust format.
I havent looked into these other formats because maildir works for me. I can saxe local backups, remoxe mail from the serveg, and even put it back later. All plain text.
Mutt (and neomutt) has very nice search capabilities, supporting regex search within specific mailboxes. However, it is a relatively slow search - unbearably slow for full text search in large mailboxes.
Here, notmuch is usually used to complement mutt. It’s a very fast (full-text) mail indexer, which can be directly integrated in mutt and allows much faster searching (among other things such as advanced mail tagging, virtual mailboxes and more).
It is generally a royal pain to set up with so many moving parts but once you do it is a very fast, comfortable mail environment if you’re comfy with the terminal.
Not OP, but for me, the main benefit is how uneventful major distro upgrades are. Yesterday I updated to Fedora 39, and it was so anticlimactic to reboot and then be like: is it over? But that was really all there was to it.
I already liked fedora for choosing sane (imo) defaults for the most part. I got to know the atomic builds just a few weeks ago. The advantage the atomic versions have over the traditional builds are that they are reproducible which is huge advantage for maintainers. Hence, it’s not directly an advantage for me but reduced workload for others.
The update process is much easier than with workstation as you just have to restart the system “without having to update”. It’s like android in this case, you just restart and have an updated system. Moreover, I can just switch to another system underneath without breaking the rest of the system. Although it might be better to have an additional layer in between the base OS, the DE and (graphical) applications.
Moreover I really like the idea of having reproducible systems, i.e. I can setup a working system with e.g. distrobox and distribute it to others. I have not yet used this but I like the idea behind it. This is not distro dependent but the atomic versions made me aware of it.
And I appreciate that there’s always a working system. There are other ways that can ensure a working system but it works very well (so far) and is directly integrated into the OS.
Not OP. But for me, atomic updates, reproducibility, (to some degree) declarative system configuration, increased security, built-in rollback functionality and their consequences; rock solid system even with relatively up to date packages, possibility to enable automatic updates in background without fearing breakage, (quasi) factory reset feature, setting up a new system in just a fraction of the time required otherwise are the primary reasons why I absolutely adore atomic^[1]^ distros.
I prefer referring to the so-called ‘immutable’ distros as atomic distros instead. It’s more descriptive, because the distros aren’t actually ‘immutable’ but instead they’re atomic.
I disagree with most of the benefits you list (chief among them “increased security”) - not to mention half of them are already supported by traditional package managers - but I was genuinely curious so thanks for the rationale.
Ubuntu, then Debian on my University computers, broken every weeks with dpkg killed while updating (students don’t care properly shutting down computers).
Since we migrated to Silverblue, it just works. We can downgrade the system at any point in time, even previous release. Apps can be individually downgraded, locked at any point in history. Totally not doable with a traditional package manager.
All of the points of the previous comment are actually valid. Plus, immutable distros are much safer and easier to tinker with than traditional mutable distros. For example, an extremely specialized Arch setup would be much more stable and easier to jumpstart if it was a personalized Universal Blue image, even all your Flatpaks can be declared and installed at setup.
Do you deny that specific protection to some attacks is provided through the chosen model of ‘immutability’ on at least one of the atomic distros?
not to mention half of them are already supported by traditional package managers
Hmm…,:
atomicity; nope
reproducibility =/= reproducible builds for some packages (if that’s what you meant)
declarative system configuration; ansible (and any other solution that I’ve witnessed being mentioned in such discussions) succeed (at best) at convergent system management, while e.g. NixOS does congruent system management by default. Consider taking a look at this page if you’re interested in what these are and how they’re different. (Spoiler alert) congruent is better and therefore more desirable.
increased security; security is not limited to chosen model for ‘immutability’ if at all; as Qubes OS (read: most secure and private desktop OS) doesn’t rely on it for its security. So I can understand where you’re coming from, but I have yet to see any non-security focused distro that provides the elevated protection against particular attacks that some atomic distros offer by default.
built-in rollback functionality; sure, this is not exclusive to atomic distros. Perhaps I should have done a better job at making clear that it isn’t a feature provided necessarily by atomicity. But, the fact that I listed it at the very end, alludes that it isn’t as exclusive and consequential as atomicity is. At this point, however, it has become almost synonymous with atomic distros, while the same can’t be said about traditional distros.
regarding the consequences; I’m unaware of any distro that does those out of the box (barring Pop!_OS with their factory reset). Though, I’d love to be educated on this.
I was genuinely curious so thanks for the rationale.
It has been my pleasure ☺️! I’m also genuinely curious to read your reply to this comment😉.
I really wanted to avoid a debate (doubly so in a thread where some dude just wanted some help), which is why I’m trying not to engage the various answers I got; though just one thing since I apparently can’t help myself: Qubes, which you cite, is indeed an example of such improved security done correctly, through an hypervisor and a solid implementation; not cgroups, some duct-tape and the same kernel, and thinking your security has improved. Thanks again, at any rate.
working from home has loosened ms grip on corporate desktop counts. some brilliant bean counter will save them a ton of money after they write off the downtown office space and offer everyone the cost of a micrsoft seat license. I’d guess it’s around $100/seat but I’ve been out many years. The shitty companies will just pocket the savings.
I’m also looking forward to Bcachefs, but rather for storage of large amounts of data. Just hoping the multi device feature works as well as advertised
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