It's not slower.

proprietary

Only the extension pack, the app itself is GPL.

not even as easy to install

How do you mean? You simply install virtualbox (and virtual-guest-iso if you want). All the relevant packages are available from official repos, at least on Manjaro, including a linux-virtualbox-host-modules-meta package that maintains the required linux*-virtualbox-host-modules as needed automatically.

Also, I prefer virtualbox because it makes a lot of stuff easy to do.

File sharing with the host for example, it's a matter of simply pointing at a dir in settings, as opposed to having to set up Samba on the host (which I don't have and don't want) and deal with wierd networking issues, or deal with virtiofs.

Don't even get me started on selecting locations for the vm files. Whatever you think it should work like, virt-manager's way ain't it.

So, I use it on my workstation because I have to also use windows and virtualbox's cross system integration is far more mature. I really only use it as necessary and it isn't running all the time.

I would prefer to use qemu, but I'm not doing anything serious with it. I'm just sometimes running a windows instance that I need to be able to easily share files with, and copy/paste across. Once virt-viewer gets there, I'll switch.

Though, to be honest, it actually uses kvm as its backend so it really isn't any less performant than qemu for this.

Nice bait there, I nearly started writing an actual answer.

Lemmy always seems downvote heavy. Why don’t you like fedora?

My record with Arch is longer than 6 months without updates, and it completed the updates fine.

My oldest install is 4 years old, and it's true, it became unbootable once. But it was my fault, for generating an initramfs without free space in /tmp, which caused it to fail. It was a quick fix once I figured it out.

All of this isn't to say rolling is as stable as Debian, of course. Rolling is inherently gonna be more unstable, and that's by design.

But if you take some care, you can actually make these rolling distros pretty stable. Hell, my servers run Arch (I'm working on migrating them to Gentoo to get rid of systemd, but I haven't yet commited to it). And I haven't had any serious breakages, even on Arch Linux ARM.

Wouldn't say that. OpenSuse Tumbleweed might got some tech debt with their backend and doesn't come with fancy stuff such as Kernel modifications like Cachy, but their rolling distro is rock solid. And for the few cases where something really breaks the bootable btrfs Snapshots come by default.

It still is for Intermediate users for sure (the installer expects you to know what you want - yet is a GUI). But in terms of stability they really nailed it, I'd absolutely use it for work horses that require newest software. Or Leap if I require binary compatibility to SLED/SLES.

Who needs research when you have backups?

the likelihood of reinstalling is high.

At least with Arch, I don't imagine needing to reinstall, worst case I should be able to reinstall all packages from a live image.

I mean, I've been running exclusively rolling release Linux distros (Gentoo and Arch) as my daily driver for the last 20 years and I don't think I've ever had the thought that reinstalling from scratch would be simpler than just... fixing the issue. I've never backed up my OS files either. Only data files; the sort of files that aren't put there by the install process or package manager. I've never used BTRFS or anything with snapshotting abilities either.

I have booted into a live system, chrooted, and fixed something. (Because my kernel or bootloader or something was borked.) But it's been quite a long time since I've had to do that, and I've never reinstalled from scratch because I couldn't fix something.

(The only times I've used non-rolling releases were pretty limited cases. A server here running Debian here, a Raspberry Pi running Raspian (though even Raspberry Pi's, I've mostly used Arch Linux ARM) there. Also my work machine, though I've even installed rolling release distros on my work machine on a forgiveness-rather-than-permission basis at times. Lol.)

Manual intervention announcements happen far from "often" though, tinkering with your system is a different thing

AUR is not the official distro. Complaining about arch because of the AUR is like complaining about Debian because you npm install some malware

Me three

Mint broke for you? That's the first I've heard of it.

Also if you have a habit of shutting down the PC during updates, check out atomic/immutable distros. They are almost impossible to break. You can pull the power during an update and it'll be fine.

Iptables change actually fucked me because I'd tweaked something stupid 12 years ago and forgot. Took lime 45-60 mins to fix

Active AUR malicious packages incident (the AUR is locked)

🤭 heh

this year

And one post earlier (2025-12-20) that the image likely could be about:

NVIDIA 590 driver drops Pascal and lower support

Install nvidia-580xx-dkms from the AUR

Impact: Updating the NVIDIA packages [without manually changing to AUR packages] on systems with Pascal, Maxwell, or older cards will fail to load the driver, which may result in a broken graphical environment.

I dont get the bad press arch got. I use arch (btw) and can't remember last time it wont boot after an update. It maybe happened to me twice in 20 years and at least once was my fault and the other was because i didn't read the pacman post warning me

If you're running Virtualbox on Arch you deserve everything you get.

Well yeah and cigarettes tell you not to smoke them