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Ran gentoo for a decade back in the 2000s, was awesome, then some idiots started breaking everything on a daily basis.
Go back every now and then, builds are SOOO much faster with modern cpus, but there's also no point.
Gentoo is like a fast car on a rail track, you're not actually going anywhere. Arch was OK, but another moron kept breaking expat (pacman needed expat btw). Always hated redhat and ubuntu turned to the dark side.
Some crazy single guys age and stop living so wild, I feel like that's me and distros, a nice cup of debian with a ton of lxcs and vms to bang whenever I'm horny.
Check that, I'm in a thruple with debian and freebsd.
I love Arch and keep it on an old i3 laptop that I use despite having a Core i7 laptop. But for my actual daily desktop computer I use Pop. I don't like being in the middle of some big project and then realizing I need to stop and spend an hour installing some missing package to continue with my project. Pop simplifies all of that, even though it doesn't provide the same sense of accomplishment and old-school computing that I get by using Arch.
I'm tempted to go back, but man, something always breaks, and it's never anything cool, it's always something backwards ass random library for font layout or some shit, and everything just falls on the floor.
But I think I need at least a good arch environment for gaming, debian blows on that regard. I just can't afford to lose my system for half a day because something breaks, if it's a kernel issue I can fix it myself, but not if it's dll layer 8 for the stack used to format yaml files for postscript printing which somehow means all my text editors get linker errors now.
I've never actually had Arch break. I've just encountered shit like when I plugged my printer into the USB port of my computer and hit Ctrl+p and realized I didn't have CUPS or any printer spooling stuff installed. So I'd have to stop what I was doing and figure out how to install and configure that stuff. That's part of what makes Arch so enduring to me, but it's also a PITA when you're just trying to get stuff done.
I have dailied arch for 13 years and have never once ran across something like you are describing. Not saying arch doesn't break in the way you are describing, just genuinely curious how your system breaks like that.
https://www.reddit.com/r/archlinux/comments/67ef10/comment/dh5vjk5/
It was similar to this, but it was longer ago and didn't see this post then.
Never had any issues with Arch and im not the only one. If your system is unstable, it's your fault, point to the line.
Now look, that isn't true. While yes, the maintenance of your system is entirely up to you, you cannot help it when a bug comes from an update. Typically if you stay away from the git versions of software, you should be fine, but library updates break stuff all the time, all it takes is that one piece of software that you use to not be compatible with an update and you're out. Yes you could downgrade that package, but what if something else you uses requires that updated package? Then you're downgrading that. Next thing you know, 30 libraries have to be downgraded because they changed the way their syscalls work and that software cannot make use of the libraries the way they are.
I prefer using arch and I don't have any problem doing any of this stuff (I approach software the suckless way save for a file manager), but I can see why a lot of people look elsewhere for their distro of choice.
bugs is something that can happen when you build your system yourself
I wouldn't really call arch a system you build yourself, as that would imply you are building every package from source including the base packages. Stage 3 Gentoo is IMO the bare minimum.
it's a diy distro, even if you use pre-compiled packages you're technically building your system yourself
Meh, kinda depends. Most issues I've had with Arch are related to bugs with apps rather than system breakage (looking at you early Plasma). Overall Arch is stable and issues are resolved quickly, though sometimes you may need to avoid major software releases for a while.
Lived on gentoo for a decade with less problems than I had on arch.
never said Arch was perfect, boths are diy & great distros, the only bad thing i could mention about gentoo is portage being written in Python
That isn't saying much. I'd say gentoo honestly has better system stability than even Debian if you know how to properly set up your system
Love myself some NixOS. All the customizability with none of the breakage. Pretty stable, very reproducible.