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?

  • Karna
    11•9 days ago

    taking any action required no matter the os

    This is not really true for fixed release distros. I can’t remember when was the last time I had to read through the release note before Ubuntu version upgrade, or upgrading any package.

    • @[email protected]English
      9•9 days ago

      Ubuntu was by far the worst experience I have had in terms of updates destroying things. The number of times my post update reboot brought me back to a GRUB prompt, I’ll never go back.

    • @[email protected]
      0•9 days ago

      I used to think that, then I learnt the truth. Now-a-days, I say that you may as well use a rolling release because it’s not really any more work that a fixed release and you have up to date software.

      • Karna
        7•9 days ago

        Just to reiterate the same point - in fixed release, a package version is not released until all known issues are resolved.

        At no point, it is end user responsibility to bother checking anything before installing a new version.

        • RaivoKulli
          1•8 days ago

          in fixed release, a package version is not released until all known issues are resolved.

          That’s not really true. It’s more important that the issues are known. Sometimes they actually wait longer to fix issues since it would introduce changes

          • Karna
            2•8 days ago

            My bad, I meant “known major issues”. If minor issues are not fixed, they document it on release note. But, at no point any fixed release distro ever released breaking changes “knowingly”.

          • Karna
            8•9 days ago

            Bugs are of two types - known (found during testing by Distro maintainer) and unknown.

            Fixed release fixes known bugs before pushing packages.

            It is following the standard development life cycle.

            • @[email protected]
              1•9 days ago

              Fixed release fixes known bugs before pushing packages.

              So do rolling releases. What’s your point?

              • Karna
                4•8 days ago

                Are you familiar with the term “Regression testing”?