Arch is different…
Every hero has a journey.
Yours has just begun.
I warn you, this is not the easy path.
But I urge you to heed the call.
For though there will be trials and tribulations,
soon, my friend, you will own new socks.
What happened with Arch?
Wait, let me update real quick and reboot, brb
the fact that they wrote “be right back” 5 hours ago and then never came back is telling
This hasn’t been a thing in years at this point
Idk, I’ve had installs of Kinoite, Bazzite, and NixOS bork themselves unrecoverably. Arch, if something goofs, more often than not I can work my way back to a working system without wiping.
How’d you get NixOS borked without a working generation to boot into
Nothing’s perfect. NixOS has worked it self for me more then once. Just like every distro ever has.
It’s difficult to take people shitting on arch in here seriously. I’ll take 1h per year fixing whatever broke over a whole weekend upgrading Debian.
Oh and god forbid you need to compile yourself a package and maybe a few of its dependencies from scratch because that 6 years old bug didn’t make it through the freeze last release.
As someone who gave up on linux years ago, this sounds like one person driving a broken old alfa romeo shitting on someone else driving a broken old fiat. Whilst I watch on from a modern EV.
Hah, here come the downvotes.
Whole weekend upgrading debian? I am confused. That’s not how debian works?
It’s absolutely true. And that my outdated Arch system is likely still more fresh than Debian.
That said yeah I would like something that can update itself whenever without breaking, certainly if it expects me to update frequently. And manual interventions (ideally used for things that actually have a choice/fix, not just what ends up being a pasted command or two) should be a warn-step/update-blocker (depending on situation).
Though what the image is probably about (2025-12-20, nVidia 10-series turned legacy, legacy driver put onto AUR) is a bad situation in its own right particularly later when the AUR issues started happening. And it is really an update-or-don’t (or get an AMD card somehow) issue.
Other distros likely do solve the issue of updating, though from what I can see aren’t as good with packaging (dependency handling, lacking optional dependencies) and package availability. Which can be worked around somewhat too, but still needs more trial/input.
Annoyances are also multiplied for me by having non-fiber internet (also shared).
Debian can take a week to upgrade? Apparently I’m yolo’ing it and just the upgrade. However I have just done one major update, so u might just be lucky
i have often found myself needing to manually update packages on distros like fedora or debian because i need a newer version that hasn’t landed in dnf/apt yet. arch doesn’t have that problem. ymmv, obviously, it’s not going to be an issue for everyone.
Why would anyone want to use a distro that can break at any update unexpectedly or have to read articles first to see if it’s safe is beyond me.
It’s too much of a hassle.
Some crazy people do this for fun.
I mean, I get the appeal. But I’m to old for this shit now. I have a life I need to take care of.
I wish arch didn’t have that reputation because I seldom have issues with it
Its like that subway meme where it goes “my brother in Christ you made the sandwich”
If arch breaks it’s 99% of the time user error, and that’s ok. But to say it’s the distros fault is incorrect imo.
That’s literally every distro ever. Fuck even debian can break on an update. Things happen.
Flashbacks to when I bought a Winblows Surface Pro 3 tablet that broke on every single update they released for the first year i owned the damned thing
Yeah, idk bro, it’s weird to me too.
yeah windows do be like that
I’ve yet to have one of my windows systems brick itself. Several of my Linux systems have.
Same, at-least everything past Windows Vista era of operating systems. I guess Microsoft has the resources to test and deploy to most types of hardware configurations so the chances of getting a borked update is rarer compared to other OS’s like Arch and Mint which have a smaller user base but more diverse hardware configurations.
It’s a problem regardless of what OS it happens to. I’ve personally/professionally found it much more frequent that an update breaks something on linux vs. windows, but it’s also much easier to fix those issues & they’re rarely the kind of critical failure you get with a M$ OS.
(and if you truly crave stability, Debian is always happy to welcome you back into it’s big soft embrace)
Any distro can break at any update. If you’ve ever done a major upgrade on any fixed-release distro, you have very likely experienced some sort of issue.
And the solution is very simple (and the same for all distros): Enable Snapshots, roll back if important stuff breaks.
Any distro can break at any update.
Not atomic distros, at least not nearly the same risk. Every update is like a fresh install.
And that fresh install can also just fuck up. Have you never had a clean install go screwy? I know I sure the fuck have a few times over the years.
I’ve had bazzite kill it self twice so far on an update.
Except the last arch news post is a month ago about virtualbox. I’ve blindly run pacman -Syu for years without issue
Just did it on two machines this morning actually…
Damn. Truth.
Why, what news? What I need to be careful this time?
Nothing. OP is imagining an idiot for imaginary internet points.
i use arch btw
this happened to me once in 6 years. it was my own fault.
Really? It happens this often?
In 26 years, I’ve seen this happen in two occasions with enterprise Linux. One of them was my own damned fault for using a marginal config. The other was an update that added a new dependency in the code but not the package.
That’s it. Twice.
Never had an unbootable system after an update, all not checking news has ever done to me is having a package fail to install (and then I check the news to see how to fix it), I’ve seen plenty of kernel regressions or other software, but that’s a thing with upstream and getting not-as-tested software, not with arch itself
It’s happened twice to me in seven years of using arch (not black screen, just something being broken after an update) and both times would’ve been avoided if I’d just read the fucking blog like you’re meant to, but yolo lmao. Still on the same install, everything still fine after just switching one package for another or whatever.
with enterprise Linux
I think you already know the difference, but we’re talking about relatively bleeding edge systems here.
“No way to prevent this” says only distro where this regularly happens
Arch explicitly says “never do this”
Well yeah and cigarettes tell you not to smoke them
Lol. Care to explain how your analogy stands?
Lol. Care to explain how your analogy stands?
It stands as written.
Arch will give you cancer
I have been using arch linux. And I havent gotten cancer yet. How do i have to be using arch linux to get it?
I smoke since 20 years and I haven’t gotten cancer yet too. How do I smoke to get cancer? /s
Cigarettes work for me perfectly well, other users must be doing something wrong.
You need to be wearing striped thigh-highs I think
No no no, that’s how you prevent it. Striped thigh-highs and fursuits isolate against the cancerous effects.
Hasn’t yet. Ubuntu, on the other hand, managed to piss me off completely
Arch can be traded for sex and murders in prison.
Exactly
Hasn’t yet. Ubuntu, on the other hand, managed to piss me off completely
Edit: sorry, wrong thread
Damn I thought you were about to say Ubuntu gave you cancer
Reminds me of my try of Nobara. I do clean install, it installs and starts updating itself for a long while. Afterwards it tells me to reboot, and that the update has failed. I am??? Since I am a noob, so I reboot. And the whole system fully breaks, and no trouble-shooting helps, so I have to re-install. No biggie, just mildly annoying, it was a clean install after all. Then I do some searching to figure out, what went wrong, and find out, that updates failing and the system fully breaking, and having to re-install it if you reboot, is apparently normal behavior for Nobara.
I’ve had Nobara on my PC for several years and not had a problem, though I know others have
Having said that, if I could be bothered I would probably just return to regular Fedora again so that I could have a decent package manager and updater…
News from this year:
- virtualbox-ext-vnc >= 7.2.12-2 requires manual intervention (package won’t install)
- Active AUR malicious packages incident (the AUR is locked)
- Arch Linux 2026 Leader Election Results
- Breaking changes for all users of
varnish, which is renamed tovinyl-cache(it’s a proxy, only affects servers) - kea >= 1:3.0.3-6 update requires manual intervention (dhcp server, affects routers)
- iptables now defaults to the nft backend (affects pretty much nothing)
Repost.
Also, my Mint install broke, uh, shit I don’t remember, 5 times? Arch broke zero times. Zero times not my own fault for forgetting I was installing something and shutting off the computer, of course. Except for the times I tried the fucking installer python script, but since I never even booted the install it doesn’t count.
If you’re running Virtualbox on Arch you deserve everything you get.
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.
Yes, that was a while ago, so it’s a repost. Also, NoVideo deprecations affect all distributions.
Iptables change actually fucked me because I’d tweaked something stupid 12 years ago and forgot. Took lime 45-60 mins to fix
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
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.
Active AUR malicious packages incident (the AUR is locked)
🤭 heh
Foot-guns are my PROTECTED SECOND AMENDMENT RIGHT.
I just had my first one. Update shows a change in the template for official mirrors. Updated asks me if i want to view, merge or cancel. I view, looks okay? Merge. No more updates, corrupted. Heeeeetyyyyhh?
When I type “yes” for view pkgbuild, it always shows failed to retrieve message. Then without asking for a retry, it asks to continue with installation!
I love me my arch, but yes. This is a reality.
It’s super rare in my experience over the last 10+ years.
Used to get it like every other update on arch. For it once or twice on Manjaro and once on catchyos.
But in also on an nvidia card. Can’t afford to switch these days lol
Weird. I wonder what makes the difference because I’ve got an RTX 4060 in my main machine and a laptop with an AMD card and haven’t had an issue. Idk I’ve also got the mesa driver’s installed as a fallback though and headers.
I guess I also don’t use a typical DE so that could have something to do with it. Dwm seems to basically always just work as long as the system posts.
