Should I give Arch a shot?

s20 , 9 months ago

Based just on this, I’d suggest looking into OpenSuse Tumbleweed. It’s got the reliability you need for your university work, all the software you need, and is about as close to bleeding edge as you can get without cutting yourself.

If, however, you’re also looking to gain a deeper understanding of how your system works, and don’t mind (or enjoy) troubleshooting problems yourself when they crop up, Arch is excellent.

Kangie , 9 months ago

I’m very biased, but try Gentoo. It’s no harder to install than arch and has some very cool package management features, like USE flags.

dino , 9 months ago

In regards to your original quesiton, I would like to know why you stopped using Void linux. Because to me its very similar to Arch in many ways.

unionagainstdhmo OP , 9 months ago

I left it for Fedora Silverblue because I was interested in the immutable distro concept. Otherwise my main problems with it was the use of runit over systems, the small community when something went wrong and the lack of mainstream support. Otherwise it was a pretty good experience

thayer , 9 months ago

You haven’t really identified any of your reasons for leaving the previous distros behind. Did they fall short somewhere? If it was simply to try them all out, then by all means, add a notch on your belt for Arch too. You can always install yet another distro down the road if it doesn’t pan out.

I’m a former Arch dev, and once upon a time I created its logo. I love the project, and it will always be dear to me. That said, I use Fedora Silverblue for most of my host systems now, and Arch containers for my everyday tasks.

As you likely already know, Fedora provides one of the best GNOME experiences available. I like the additional stability, flexibility, background updates, and easy rollbacks that Silverblue provides, but I can also appreciate that the flatpak and containerized workflow isn’t for everyone.

throwawayish , 9 months ago (edited 9 months ago)

Last year I upgraded to an Inspiron 15 7510 with i7-11800H and RTX3050. Since purchasing this laptop I’ve used Manjaro, Debian 11, Pop OS, Void Linux, Fedora Silverblue (37 & 38) and now Debian 12.

A distro-hopper. Noted.

I need to reinstall soon since I’ve stuffed up my NVIDIA drivers trying to install CUDA and didn’t realise that they changed the default swap size to 1GB.

Prefers starting from scratch instead of fixing. Noted.

I use this laptop for everything - development in C/C++, dart/flutter, nodejs and sometimes PHP. I occasionally play games on it through Proton and sometimes need to re-encode videos using Handbrake. I need some amount of reliability since I also use this for University.

General-use and reliable. Noted.

I’ve previously been against trying Arch due to instability issues such as the recent GRUB thing.

Understandable, but not entirely justified.

But I have been reading about BTRFS and snapshots which make me think I can have an up to date system and reliability (by rebooting into a snapshot).

Fair.

What’s everyone’s perspective on this, is there anything major I should keep an eye on?

It is almost common knowledge at this point that this approach has serious merits. That’s why we find it on a myriad of rolling release distros. From Manjaro to Garuda, from SpiralLinux to Siduction. Heck, even Nobara -which is not strictly a rolling release distro- has it. I wouldn’t even use/recommend a rolling release distro if not for (GRUB-)Btrfs+Timeshift/Snapper. But, while by itself it is already very powerful. It still benefits a lot from testing. Which, when utilized by openSUSE in particular, manages to elevate their Tumbleweed to a very high standard. So much so, that it has rightfully earned to be named the stable rolling release distro. But not all distros are as rigorous in their testing… if at all…

Should also note I use GNOME, vscode, Firefox and will need MATLAB to be installed, if there is anything to do with those that is problematic on Arch?

Nah, that’s absolutely fine. Noted.

Should I give Arch a shot?

So there are some glaring issues here:

• You’ve set some parameters and asked us if Arch satisfies. Which it does, but so do a lot of other distros. Which seems to tell me that this will become yet another chapter of your distro-hopper-phase. Which -to be clear- happens to be totally fine. I’d even argue that it’s preferable to do it sooner rather than later. Though the mindset of a distro-hopper might deter you from being satiated…
• As previously alluded, Arch is yet another distro that satisfies your needs. You didn’t mention what attracted you towards it, nor why you’d prefer it specifically over all the other available options.
• Btrfs snapshots, while powerful, are not 100% fail-safe. Sure, nothing actually is as a random SSD crash might loom around the corner. And I’d be one of the first to tell you that using Btrfs snapshots to rollback to is an exponentially better experience than without. But we’re still able to improve upon it (mathematically speaking) infinitely times, to be more precise; some systems allow us to decrease the complexity from uncountably infinite amount of states (which therefore become “unknown states”) to countably infinite or (better yet) finite amount of states (which therefore actually become “known states”). The reduction of complexity that this offers and its implications to system reliability are far more impactful than the simple use of Btrfs snapshots.

---

Consider answering the following questions:

• Are you a distro-hopper? Or did you have very legit reasons to switch distros? If so, would you mind telling us why you changed distros?
  • Would it be fair to assume that it boils down to "I messed up, but instead of repairing I will opt for reinstalling."
    • If so, is this something you want to work on (eventually) or doesn’t it bother you at all?
• Why Arch?
• Would you like to setup Btrfs yourself? Or would you prefer your distro to do it for you? Or don’t you actually mind regardless?

dino , 9 months ago

So many words for so little info. Why are you stealing my time?

throwawayish , 9 months ago (edited 9 months ago)

OP was relatively verbose so I act accordingly. Don’t feel compelled to read larger pieces if you’re sensitive to wasting your time. I don’t recall forcing you to read it, so it’s entirely on you. While information density might have suffered, “little info” is too harsh. Though, as long as there’s even one sentence of ‘original’ information (compared to all the other comments) a piece of writing of that length is worth reading IMO. Though, thinking otherwise is definitely justifiable.

dino , 9 months ago

Though, as long as there’s even one sentence of ‘original’ information […] a piece of writing of that length is worth reading IMO

No. You are just confirming it.

throwawayish , 9 months ago

What exactly am I confirming? Apologies, if I sound obtuse*.

s20 , 9 months ago

It’s like 700 words, dude. It’s shorter than a 6th grade book report.

dino , 9 months ago

But the book report probably has some useful info…

s20 , 9 months ago

Did it? That’s not how I remember book reports.

And this does have useful information.

unionagainstdhmo OP , 9 months ago

I might be a distro hopper. Every distro just niggles me after a while, Silverblue wasn’t flexible enough, didn’t like GNOME 3.38 on Debian 11 after using 4x on Manjaro. Manjaro was buggy and had poor reputation. I didn’t like Pop Shell, however, there was good support for Optimus laptops on Pop OS. Before Debian 12 I gave Ubuntu another go and it kept crashing. Main problem with Debian 12 is Firefox ESR which doesn’t work with some sites I need and that the packages will be significantly out of date within a year.

I thought Arch because it is almost always up to date and seems to be widely recommended.

It’s not like I haven’t tried fixing the issue, I just don’t know what to do outside of uninstalling and reinstalling the drivers or waiting for NVIDIA to provide a repo for Debian 12 for CUDA. As for the swap I would rather have a partition for it than have some combination of swapfiles and swap.

I had a go at installing Arch today in a VM using archinstall and set up BTRFS with Timeshift and grub-btrfs and it all seemed fairly straightforward.

throwawayish , 9 months ago

Thanks for answering! Much appreciated!

I might be a distro hopper. Every distro just niggles me after a while

Perhaps you’ve yet to find the one 😜. Your criticism to the different distros is fair though.

I thought Arch because it is almost always up to date and seems to be widely recommended.

Yup, it’s by far the most popular rolling release distro. Though, I’d argue that openSUSE Tumleweed -while not as popular- is definitely worth checking out as well. They’re, however, quite different from one another. Arch offers a blank canvas, while openSUSE Tumbleweed is relatively opinionated; though it does offer excellent defaults. You would have to make up your own mind whichever ‘style’ of maintaining a distro suits you best.

I had a go at installing Arch today in a VM using archinstall and set up BTRFS with Timeshift and grub-btrfs and it all seemed fairly straightforward.

Well, that sure does sound promising!

unionagainstdhmo OP , 9 months ago

Thanks for taking the time to read my comments, really appreciate it! I’ve had a bit of a look into Tumbleweed and it sounds like it’s similar to Fedora in how it handles packaging of proprietary software which I found pretty annoying, but I could be wrong.

throwawayish , 9 months ago

I’ve had a bit of a look into Tumbleweed and it sounds like it’s similar to Fedora in how it handles packaging of proprietary software which I found pretty annoying, but I could be wrong.

It’s true that Arch is leaner towards proprietary software if that’s what you mean. An example of this is how the Nvidia drivers are just found within repos for Arch (thus enabled by default), while on both Fedora and openSUSE it’s not found in the official repos. Both have made it easier over the years to somehow include options and whatnot within the installer to ease Nvidia users in, but the experience on Arch is definitely smoother.

Furthermore, Fedora is indeed (kinda) hardcore on FOSS, similarly to Debian. While Arch simply doesn’t care in most cases. My relatively short endeavor to find out where openSUSE fits in seems to point towards openSUSE leaning closer to Debian and Fedora.

What’s perhaps important to note is that in all cases there are third party repos that can easily be enabled to acquire proprietary software.

Nibodhika , 9 months ago

You don’t need to reinstall to increase swap size, in fact you can just delete the swap partition entirely, add it to the root partition and create a swapfile there, that way you can quickly change the size if you want to. Get familiar with doing these sort of things, since that is the sort of thing Arch encourages to do.

Also instability does not mean what you think it means, instability on Linux means libraries get updated constantly, so if you are running external programme or developing on it sometimes things break because they haven’t been updated to that latest library version. I’m not aware of any GRUB issues recently, but in any case I use refind and I like it a lot better than GRUB anyways.

backhdlp , 9 months ago

Yes (biased arch opinion)

superkret , 9 months ago (edited 9 months ago)

I don’t understand what you did that means you have to reinstall. Most issues can be solved in system.
One thing that made me switch back from Arch to Debian Sid was third party support.
The Arch wiki is great but for some things, I read through the 30-step process with multiple links to other wiki articles and then see there’s a preconfigured installer for .Deb available…

unionagainstdhmo OP , 9 months ago

The Debian 12 installer creates only 1GB of swap by default which I believe was new behaviour from when I install Debian 11 the first time around. Apparently it’s to make it easier for server users but what a pain. Anyway the easiest way to fix that is to just reinstall, since most of my stuff lives on Nextcloud and Gitea it shouldn’t be too hard

lemmyvore , 9 months ago

I still don’t understand what the problem is, but if you want more swap just get more swap. You can resize the partitions if you want but you can also just add swap as files instead of partitions.

• Create a file of any size you want with dd.
• Format it as swap with mkswap.
• Mount it with swapon.
• Add it to your /etc/fstab so it mounts automatically:

/swapfile swap defaults 0 0

superkret , 9 months ago

So fixing it is literally just what you’d have to do before reinstalling anyway. Reduce your root partition from a live system, increase swap partition, re-initialize swap. Done.

Also, the Debian installer tells you how big a swap partition it creates and asks you if that is what you want twice.

unionagainstdhmo OP , 9 months ago

Are you talking about the Graphical Installer?

I’ve installed it on other machines since and it only confirms stuff for you if you decide to deviate from the defaults

superkret , 9 months ago

Oh yeah, I always use the graphical expert installer. If the normal installer defaults to 1GB of swap without telling you, that’s pretty bad.
1GB swap is pointless IMO. Either make the swap space twice your RAM or don’t bother.

Still don’t know how that could fuck up drivers though. On a normal system, I don’t even use swap anymore.

dino , 9 months ago

Huh? The debian wiki is horrendous compared to Arch. You are better off reading the manuals and trying to get a grip on it yourself.

superkret , 9 months ago (edited 9 months ago)

yes I know. (Besides, Debian’s official documentation isn’t the wiki, but the Debian handbook).
The point is, on Debian you don’t need the wiki. Things that are a long manual process on Arch (best example: Nextcloud) are already preconfigured or there’s a ready made solution available.

dino , 9 months ago

Kind of weird example. When most new software is not even available on debian or heavily outdated due to point release model.

superkret , 9 months ago

I’m talking about third party software, not what’s in the repository.
It’s usually available as .deb or .rpm and nothing else.
On Arch someone may or may not have converted it and put it in the AUR, and it may or may not be maintained.

Besides, I run Sid, which isn’t point release nor outdated.

dino , 9 months ago

Oh then I misunderstood, sorry.

FQQD , 9 months ago

I’ve been using ubuntu based distros but now i use CachyOS and Vanilla Arch Linux, and even though I didn’t want to admit it at first, it’s a better but similar overall experience. the package manager with yay is just so much better than apt

azvasKvklenko , 9 months ago

Arch is what stopped distro-hopping for me. Well, mostly. Sometimes I try some distros on separate install just out of curiosity.

If you use Linux for couple of years, there shouldn’t be too many obstacles. Just read through the Wiki carefully and you’ll be good.

As for reliability, I’d say Arch is fairly reliable for my 10+ years experience with it (apart from my-fault breakages, I remember something unexpected happening maybe 3 times in all that period), but if you want to secure your butt in mission critical situations then 1) don’t yolo upgrade your OS if there’s anything important at the moment. Find the right time for it 2) setup a snapshotting solution to have that quick rollback ability. And it’s not just about Arch, I’d say the same for every distro (maybe apart from immutable ones).

Other than that, remember to have fun!

ElRenosaurusReg , 9 months ago

So, the big thing with instability is that with Linux “Unstable” refers to “Constantly receiving updates” rather than “Breaks all the time”

In my experience, if arch breaks, 99% of the time YOU the user did it.

If you want a kinkless experience with it, keep it simple.

Arch ships with systemd, as such, it also ships with systemd-boot. Use what’s built, don’t add additional bootloaders unless you need the functionality they offer.

Gnome, Matlab, and VScode have wiki pages for installation and configuration, and Firefox is in the repos and is one line in the terminal to install (#pacman -S firefox)

For a first install, I’d recommend following the wiki to install instead of using archinstall to familiarize yourself with how to use and read the wiki.

comrade_pibb , 9 months ago

Two things that arch does really really well:

News feed

Wiki

The best documentation I’ve ever used

notTheCat , 9 months ago

As a fellow developer who recently moved to Arch, it’s great, the installation process was a tiny bit frustrating (I did test it first in a VM) but after that it works as intended, I keep my eyes on the wiki though if any issues happen, nvidia driver works well with PRIME too, although I don’t use it much (I dualboot for the sake of gaming), if you feel like you need to have even MORE control over your PC than your vanilla Debian or Fedora experiences, I guess Arch is the next step, on a side note, minimal Void Linux installation is very similar to what you get with Arch so in case you used that you already have a taste of what you’re getting into, well, plus having access to the AUR :)

Oh also, I’m not sure about MATLAB, but Octave has been shipped as MATLAB compatible (although it haven’t been the case for me with some functionalities…) Maybe you’ll need a Windows VM if Octave wasn’t enough, or maybe it runs using WINE I haven’t bothered trying it

Ashiette , 9 months ago

I tried using the wiki to set up nvidia but to no avail… Is there any insight you might give me ? I’m using Plasma and have a prime card (intel/nvidia)

notTheCat , 9 months ago

wiki.archlinux.org/title/NVIDIA

I followed the steps in the installation section then installed nvidia-prime from Arch repos, prime-run works (I set up a custom menu entry of some apps that I want to run with the NVIDIA card) , the Vulkan demo detects and runs on the NVIDIA driver even without running with prime-run (afaik Vulkan does a good job detecting all the GPUs installed), I have the same setup as you do, Plasma with (Intel iGPU + NVIDIA dGPU)

aebletrae , 9 months ago

For someone seemingly so eager to try out new distros, I’m surprised you haven’t mentioned virtual machines. If the vibes are off, it’s a whole lot less disruptive to find out that way.

Your experience with drivers won’t be quite the same as a bare-metal installation, but checking out software shouldn’t be a problem.

CorrodedCranium , 9 months ago

Definitely. VMs are great for trialing distro and DE. They may not be great for demanding tasks like gaming without a fair amount of tinkering it should get you to the point where you can figure out if something is for you.

That said stability is a bit more complicated and I think a lot of that comes down to personal experience and long term community thoughts. Both are why I don’t use Manjaro anymore and the personal aspect is why I still love Fedora

luthis , 9 months ago

No problems that I’m aware of. I use Gnome, Firefox, and have used vscode totally fine.

Arch is not difficult to get going.

CorrodedCranium , 9 months ago

I can’t think of much. I have been using EndeavorOS as my daily driver for about three years now and haven’t had much in the way of instability.