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?
Off-topic: A meta-analysis if you will, but I’m just astonished by the engagement this post has received. I wonder what this tells us about the Linux community on Lemmy.
On-topic: OP, honestly, others have chimed in and left very good answers already. So perhaps you won’t find anything within my comment that hasn’t been said. But, as I’m a latecomer to this thread, I might have an advantage that some didn’t (try to capitalize on). To be blunt, the original post didn’t reveal much about what you liked and didn’t like about Arch. As such, my initial impression would have been to suggest Gentoo. But, you’ve since provided the engaging community crucial insights that help us in grasping the full picture. Below you may find my own notes on your distro preferences based on what you said:
Furthermore, I’ll take the liberty to assume that (native) package availability is expected to be vast. And that you wish for the process of updating to be snappy.
Based on the above, I recommend NixOS.
If jumping ship to NixOS seems too daunting, then consider installing Nix[1] on Arch. Consider to slowly but surely expand its usage within your system. And, then, when you’re comfortable, embrace NixOS as a worthy successor to your Arch installation.
To be clear, I meant the package manager. Determinate System’s installer is probably your best option. ↩︎