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Realizing Arch isn't for me after updating broke VLC (lemmy.sdf.org)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/linux@lemmy.ml
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I realized my VLC was broke some point in the week after updating Arch. I spend time troubleshooting then find a forum post with replies from an Arch moderator saying they knew it would happen and it's my fault for not wanting to read through pages of changelogs. Another mod post says they won't announce that on the RSS feed either. I thought I was doing good by following the RSS but I guess that's not enough.

I've been happily using Arch for 5 years but after reading those posts I've decided to look for a different distro. Does anyone have recommendations for the closest I can get to Arch but with a different attitude around updating?

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[–] 8 points 1 year ago* (4 children)

Honestly NIXos. Run it impermanent or traditional OS style. If your coming from Arch and want less breakage and more declarative configuration. Immutable or not. Pick almost any DE and all you maintain is your nix config. Nix config is your master file its not huge and the machine runs from it as you tell it. The machine does the rest. No system drift, no cruft. Just works and if you break it. Select your previous generation at boot and your back exactly as you were before.

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  • [–] 9 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Downside: it requires knowing a new coding language, Nix, to maintain your laptop.

    If you don’t understand it, it’s going to be painful to fix anything that doesn’t work.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago*

    The syntax is cake but your point is entirely valid. If your config is commented and plain. There's not much of learning curve. I came from windows to mint, now to NIX. I did a full custom install luks, all my apps and settings pretty much loaded, settings and all, from my mint machine to make the transition easy as I could. Damn near like I never left and even more so now that I have backups, systems in place and working on impermenance and using a golden USB to boot my machine from any device, anywhere. Once I got gen 1 running the rest was simple. The day to day is zero fuss. It's totally mental burden free. That's what I wanted. To finally be stable and out of the way.

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    I don't mind trading upfront effort for stability. I enjoyed setting up Arch and I'm still benefiting from insights gained from choosing my setup packages there.

    Having nearly latest versions of packages is important to me because I can get into a flow after the initial excitement of a new feature being released but if I have to wait long to get my hands on it that won't happen. In this case, a smaller loss of my excitement to watch a video happened in the time it took me to figure out what was up with VLC.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    One thing I appreciate about NixOS is the ability to use overlays and override package sources. For example, overlays can be used to selectively install unstable and stable packages alongside each other:

    While there may be caveats, this approach has been working for me just fine, as I can install VSCode from unstable to get the most recent monthly releases as they roll out, but then pin the rest of my desktop environment to stable to limit anything else shifting underneath me unexpectedly.

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