I think Arch kind of deserves the hate it gets. I love barebones distros and have been a gentoo user (now on NixOS), and I’ve used arch a fair bit too… I just don’t feel like Arch is a well maintained distribution. There’s all sorts of little things that they can’t seem to get right that other distros do, like that silly issue where they won’t update the arch keyring first, so if you haven’t updated in a while it breaks. In my experience there’s a million little paper cuts like this and I’ve just been kind of unimpressed. If it works for you that’s great! I’ve just been disappointed with it. I get the niche that it fills as the binary “from scratch” rolling release distro, but I think the experience with it is a little rough. I’ve found gentoo more user friendly, which probably sounds bizarre if you haven’t used gentoo, but ignoring compiling stuff, gentoo does an excellent job of not breaking things on updates, and it’s much easier to pin and install specific versions of packages and stuff.
@Chobbes
Looks like you haven’t been using Arch for quite some time now. That used to be the case, nowdays it’s way better experience. I’ve been using Arch for about 11 yrs now and I can see that improvement is noticable. Still not THE BEST, but waaaay better.
This was still an issue maybe a year ago, but I think they fixed the keyring issue finally in the past few months. This is not my only complaint with arch, but it’s frustrating that something this simple went unresolved for so many years. I honestly don’t understand why people love pacman. Downgrading packages is a pain, and there’s no way to install and pin a specific version of a package. I guess they want to keep it really minimal, but I find that this really gets in the way. All in all it was a death by a thousand papercuts for me! I won’t be going back to it. If other people like it that’s fine by me, I can understand the appeal, but I just find it frustrating personally.
Downgrading seemed really easy to me with the mentioned downgrade script. With the IgnorePkg option in pacman.conf it won’t get updated. I did it with nvidia drivers when Steam pushed their new UI and nvidia drivers weren’t ready for that.
What’s dissapointing about the fix? Does its job or not?
@Chobbes
I have an old i3 2nd gen @ my village which I visit very rarely and I’m the only one that uses that PC.
I never had major problems upgrading it (keyring once), downgrading any package or holding some package at desired version.
I think Arch kind of deserves the hate it gets. I love barebones distros and have been a gentoo user (now on NixOS), and I’ve used arch a fair bit too… I just don’t feel like Arch is a well maintained distribution. There’s all sorts of little things that they can’t seem to get right that other distros do, like that silly issue where they won’t update the arch keyring first, so if you haven’t updated in a while it breaks. In my experience there’s a million little paper cuts like this and I’ve just been kind of unimpressed. If it works for you that’s great! I’ve just been disappointed with it. I get the niche that it fills as the binary “from scratch” rolling release distro, but I think the experience with it is a little rough. I’ve found gentoo more user friendly, which probably sounds bizarre if you haven’t used gentoo, but ignoring compiling stuff, gentoo does an excellent job of not breaking things on updates, and it’s much easier to pin and install specific versions of packages and stuff.
@Chobbes
Looks like you haven’t been using Arch for quite some time now. That used to be the case, nowdays it’s way better experience. I’ve been using Arch for about 11 yrs now and I can see that improvement is noticable. Still not THE BEST, but waaaay better.
This was still an issue maybe a year ago, but I think they fixed the keyring issue finally in the past few months. This is not my only complaint with arch, but it’s frustrating that something this simple went unresolved for so many years. I honestly don’t understand why people love pacman. Downgrading packages is a pain, and there’s no way to install and pin a specific version of a package. I guess they want to keep it really minimal, but I find that this really gets in the way. All in all it was a death by a thousand papercuts for me! I won’t be going back to it. If other people like it that’s fine by me, I can understand the appeal, but I just find it frustrating personally.
Edit: https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/archlinux-keyring/-/commit/ad8698e96c423dfc68405b547f310f2e1075a95d this fix is kind of disappointing too to be honest…
Downgrading seemed really easy to me with the mentioned downgrade script. With the IgnorePkg option in pacman.conf it won’t get updated. I did it with nvidia drivers when Steam pushed their new UI and nvidia drivers weren’t ready for that.
What’s dissapointing about the fix? Does its job or not?
deleted by creator
@Chobbes
I have an old i3 2nd gen @ my village which I visit very rarely and I’m the only one that uses that PC.
I never had major problems upgrading it (keyring once), downgrading any package or holding some package at desired version.