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?
OpenSUSE TUMBLEWEED, always updating, but they have an OpenQA tool that checks the builds for success, and if for some reason something did go bad you just reboot and pick the previous (automatic) snapshot. Lots of GUI tools to manage the system and packages via the various Yast2-GUI apps.
+1 for Tumbleweed. It’s a rolling release distro without (most of) the hassle and YaST is a fantastic utility which you can use to do many things. Nice graphical stuff to help you configure things like backup. Never had any breakages so far with Tumbleweed :)
Another +1 for Tumbleweed. It’s an simple setup, easy to roll back if needed, and has solid tools like Yast that help manage most aspects of your os.
Also, obs and opi are such useful services, I don’t think it’s possible to not use them once you’ve tried them. OpenSUSE Tumbleweed just gets so many things right that I’d recommend it to any person who’s moderately familiar with Linux with how easy it’s to use.
Thanks! This wasn’t a distro I knew much about but it’s looking like one I will try out. The way they test packages is exactly the kind of choices around updates I’m looking for.
I like how many options Yast exposes. I enjoyed learning how to do most of what I need in the terminal with Arch but being able to do everything I need through GUI helps when I’m not able to recall a lot in the moment but still need to do a thing.
The repos have a lot of stuff, but if you ever get stuck for q package you can install debs with alien command, or find community repoes here https://software.opensuse.org/ They typically offer 1 click installs, or direct rpm downloads
This is probably the best answer.
Plus, their equivalent of the AUR, the open build system, can actually be used to build packages for any system.