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?

  • oo1@lemmings.worldEnglish
    3·
    2 days ago

    Would a flatpak would survive this update? I do use arch on some computers but with several flatpaks for some applications that I feel will be safer - but i don’t really know.

    Maybe i just update and see what happens.

    • Ricaz@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      11·
      2 days ago

      The whole point of the update is to avoid the silly Windows-like mentality of flatpack. It splits the package up so you can choose what you want instead of installing a bunch of crap you won’t ever use. If OP had been awake while doing a full upgrade on his bleeding edge system, he would have noticed.

      • oo1@lemmings.worldEnglish
        1·
        17 hours ago

        Surely that can be OPs choice.

        If a user has a large number of programmes they might not want to hand hold updates of all of them each time.

        If they choose only the handful they want from arch repo or aur then they might have a quicker update and find it easier to stay awake.

        I’d think it should be up to them if they want to trade off bloat vs the burden of an update.

        I find, especially for AUR stuff the update can become vexatious.

        • Ricaz@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
          1·
          12 hours ago

          Of course it’s his choice, it’s his system.

          The general advice is that handpicking updates from main repos is a big no-no. There are only a couple of reasons you would ever need that, like updating archlinux-keyring on a very outdated system.

          Even on my 13 year old install with many thousands of packages, it’s not hard to spot if anything is out of the ordinary when doing huge upgrades. You should pay attention.

          That being said, I often just do pacman -Syu --noconfirm && poweroff these days. It’s so rare that anything breaks and I can very easily fix it if it does.