this post was submitted on 25 Sep 2024
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so a common claim I see made is that arch is up to date than Debian but harder to maintain and easier to break. Is there a good sort of middle ground distro between the reliability of Debian and the up-to-date packages of arch?

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago (1 children)

There is no other Arch-based distro that strives to achieve a "rolling-stable" release.

Alternatives like Fedora have already been mentioned by other comments.

Debian testing is not a rolling release. Its package update strategy is focused on becoming the next stable so the frequency ebbs and flows around stable's release cycle.

manjaro since it manages to be less stable than Arch specifically because of their update policy

This is false. Their delayed updates mitigate issues in latest packages. Plasma 6 was released late but it was a lot more usable, for example.

I mean why even be on Arch if you can't use the AUR and have the latest packages?

Anybody who wants Arch should use Arch. Manjaro is not Arch.

Some of us don't want the latest packages the instant they release, we're fine with having them a week or a month late if it means extra stability.

There's nothing magical about what Manjaro is doing, it stands to reason that if you delay packages even a little some bugs will be fixed.

Also you can use AUR on Manjaro perfectly fine, I myself have over 100 AUR packages installed. But AUR is not supported even by Arch so it's impossible to offer any guarantees for it.

There's also Flatpak and some people may prefer that since it's more reliable.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

that's because you can't have both. It' arch or it's very stable. Granted Arch by itself is not that unstable if you manage it well and know what you're doing but we're talking hardly ever having to troubleshoot something.

Manjaro doesn't acieve any more stability than Arch, and in fact is actually worse than arch.

Debian testing is a rolling.

Manjaro is an arch derivative and has the bad parts of arch still. Again, why recommend manjaro when you have better alternatives that actually achieve what manjaro sets itself out to be? Fedora had KDE plasma 6 sooner than Manjaro afaik and it managed to be stable, it is a semi-rolling with up to date yet stable packages etc, same for OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. Manjaro has no purpose, it's half-assed at being arch and it's half-assed at being stable.

AUR isn't a problem in Manjaro because of lack of support, it's a problem because packages there are made with Arch and 99.999% of its derivatives in mind, aka latest packages not one week old still-broken packages. Also Manjaro literally accidentally DDoSes the AUR every now and then because again they're incompetent.

And if you're going to be using Flatpaks then all the more reason to not bother using Manjaro or any arch derivative and just use an actually stable distro with flatpaks.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Manjaro has no purpose, it's half-assed at being arch and it's half-assed at being stable.

My experience with Manjaro and Fedora, OpenSUSE etc. contradicts yours. Manjaro has the best balance between stability and rolling out of the box I've seen.

"Out of the box" is key here. You can tweak any distro into doing anything you want, given enough time and effort. Manjaro achieves a good balance without the user having to do anything. I remind you that I've tested this with non-experienced users and they have no problem using it without any admin skills (or any admin access).

Debian testing is a rolling.

It is not.

AUR isn't a problem in Manjaro because of lack of support, it's a problem because packages there are made with Arch and 99.999% of its derivatives in mind, aka latest packages not one week old still-broken packages.

And yet I've managed to install dozens of AUR packages just fine. How do you explain that?

Matter of fact, I've never run into an AUR package I couldn't install on Manjaro. What package is giving you trouble?

Manjaro literally accidentally DDoSes the AUR every now and then because again they're incompetent.

You're being confused.

AUR had very little bandwidth to begin with and could not cope with the rise in popularity of Arch-based distros. That's a problem that needs to be solved by the AUR repo first and foremost. Manjaro did what they could when the problem became apparent and has added caching wherever it could. Both Manjaro and Arch devs have worked together to improve this.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

How do you explain that?

Easy: You were merely lucky that they didn't break.

And no it wasn't just a rise in popularity of Arch it was Manjaro's PAMAC sending too many requests DDoSing the AUR.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago

You were merely lucky that they didn't break.

Lucky... over 5 years and with a hundred AUR packages installed at any given time? I should play the lottery.

I've noticed you haven't given me any example of AUR packages that can't be installed on Manjaro right now, btw.

it wasn't just a rise in popularity of Arch it was Manjaro's PAMAC sending too many requests DDoSing the AUR.

You do realize that was never conlusively established, right? (1) Manjaro was already using search caching when that occured so they had no way to spam AUR, (2) there's more than one distro using pamac, and (3) anybody can use "pamac" as a user agent and there's no way to tell if it's coming from an actual Manjaro install.

My money is on someone actually DDoS'ing AUR and using pamac as a convenient scapegoat.

Last but not least you're trying to use this to divert from the fact AUR packages work fine on Manjaro.