Arch Linux Updates Keep Breaking Packages (I've Given Up On Pacman!)
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- čas přidán 23. 11. 2022
- It has happened. I have become so frustrated with my rolling release distribution constantly breaking with updates. It seems like with every update, I have a program that I depend on break. There has to be a better way!!!
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DistroTube: “Rolling release distro’ s are the way to go, they help keep you on your toes.”
Also DistroTube: “I’m a broken man.”
😅
Bee Gees - how can you mend a broken heart
"...on a Halifax pier, the last of Barrett's Privateers."
thought you were going with AppImages only...?
Even tho I'm part of that flag, I'm not even mad. There are so bat sht crazy people out there pushing their shit onto others and trying to cancel everyone...
Hope you're having a good day. 💜
Thank you for those years of unpaid beta testing, friend!
Arch is a meme for a reason 😹
@@Perry.... Arch works fine and rarely breaks, people like you speaking about stuff they don't know are the actual memes. And for a fact "I use Arch btw" isn't even spread by arch users but trolls like you.
@@heroe1486Cry more incel 😹
@@Perry.... Learn from your superiors, kid 👶
@@Perry.... It's a channel about Linux and tech, why do you have to talk about sex, bro?
I rarely had issues with Arch Linux and they were only minor. But Ubuntu breaks deep inside sometimes from updates. I don't know why people have such different experiences with this things.
Same experience for me. Never had any major issues that I didn’t already plan for (like when changing the boot partition because the current one was too small and didn’t have enough space sequentially to resize and honestly creating a new one was easier). However have seen a lot of major breakdowns in friends’ Ubuntu. I’ve been using arch exclusively since like 2017 now.
I have been running Arch for 2 years now and I haven’t had issues like this. I don’t know about other Arch based distros and how they get along with the AUR but on arch all I had was a minor issue with a package not installing because I missed something on my PATH and that was me not reading the docs. I have Kdenlive and OBS and no issues at all. I understand Arch is not for everyone tho. I would just not recommend updating if you have work to do and save the updates for when you can dedicate time for issues that may arise
@@santiagoglezsrez exactly. And again exactly. Updates should always be planned. Doesn't matter what distro or even OS you're using. I know as a matter of fact that mac os updates have caused issues with dependencies on certain code bases and developers had to revert back (which again is much more tricky than on arch) just so they can continue working on their code.
Ive come to accept the occasional minor hiccups on arch, because i know i can handle within half an hour, on debian and linux mint ive had to give too many times. Make no sense idc, arch ftw jk XD
@@shashwatyashaswi true, thats why i would donate 10 bucks again to Debian :D
You can also prevent snaps from updating by issuing - snap refresh --hold. Then you can only update snaps manually.
I've recently switched to fedora after I got sick of Arch randomly breaking for the nth time and so far I'm really liking it, upgrading to the next release is also very easy
Using Opensuse Tumbleweed I got good experience with !
based and fedora pilled
fedora is perfect. it's basically a rolling release without any breakage
I'm thinking of going the same route ! How are the 3rd party repos? any package you couldn't find ?
@@AgentFortySeven47 This. Way fresher packages and rarely breaks. 3rd party and proprietary packages are slightly annoying if you're coming from debian or arch, but very intuitive after you use it for a few days. Also kinoite/silverblue are fantastic but significantly weirder to manage.
After hearing this rant. I think you should revisit nix. It allows you to have per-package depdencies, and even multiple versions of the same package. This negates any version conflicts from even happening to begin with. It also does clean installs and removals since it's isolated within it's own path by the underlying store system. So you can freely experiment without tainting the system.
This seems really interesting. No idea how I have not heard about this yet
And you can easily rollback to a previous version if an update breaks something.
The only real downside of nix that I have experienced is, that it can be painful to use a program if it isn't available in nixpkgs. This is becoming more and more rare because the software available in nix is massive and growing.
guix is moar gnu
Time to revisit Nix, Indeed. I did a time ago and end all my problem, once you go Nix you never look back.
And you can choose which packages you want from the unstable or stable branches
I have been able to program and use mathematical software on Debian for 7 years with zero problems.
Every time I have moved to an arch based distro on my testing computer I have always had to troubleshoot issues that were not worth the time to fix
You have documented one aspect of packages that really just touches the surface. I use Python a lot for "scripting"; i have used Python for many years. Unfortunately, it is suffering from the very popular "update every week" mentality that breaks so many applications. After installing Ubuntu 22.04 in a VM, I tried to build a fairly simple Python app and discovered that someone decided that Python 3.10 was ready for prime time. Python itself may be ready, but there are so many libraries that are not up to the task and I couldn't get pip, venv, or pipenv to work properly. So it's back to Debian 11 for now. Keep up the good work!
I've had that issue a lot with Pythorch and Tensorflow: cuda and cudnn would update and then I'd be unable to do research. The maintainers of the Arch repo do say you shouldn't use pip or pipenv though, which is a very weird design choice. Python on Arch is just odd, with the way you have to install Arch packages to get the various libraries to work and how often pip is either useless or actively breaks things. Not even using the anaconda distribution fixes things, since that is also discouraged by the repo maintainers so I imagine it's also just as buggy and troublesome as the other stuff they ask people not to use.
It's one of the reasons I switched to Julia; since it can run gpu arrays natively and Flux is array-agnostic, updating my system has never broken anything since. I also do a lot of work in rust, which is also greatly maintained.
Distrobox is the solution for this
Running Opensuse MicroOS as a base, rock solid system with modern software, Ubuntu20.04 in distrobox with stable well supported python3.8
I don't experience this issue on Ubuntu. Python is quite stable on my work and private systems for years now.
Kindly ignore previous suggestions in the comments, using a dedicated OS for a stable python version to script with is silly.
The industry standard approach is to use pyenv with a virtual environment for every project. Everyone who uses Python to develop or write scripts is supposed to follow this advice, regardless of distro, as well as mac and windows users. This is not something that's really talked about for end-users because python project owners have their own set of processes and tooling when it comes to releases so that their packages work across a known list of major and minor versions of python.
@@borisyeltsin6606 A virtual environment isn't completely independent of your system. On Linux, the interpreter within the virtual environment just points to the system interpreter and when you remove this interpreter, the virtual environment will become unusable. This happened to me when upgrading Ubuntu from 20.04 to 22.04. Python 3.8 was removed from the system in favour of Python 3.10 and subsequently, all my existing virtual environments broke. This is half as bad if you properly keep track of the required dependencies of your projects, so a pip install -r requirements.txt is enough to get a new virtual environment working again - but not necessarily. If your project or any dependency depends on an older Python project, you have to add the deadsnakes PPA and then install an older version again. Long story short, keeping everything around in virtual environments doesn't protect you.
Furthermore, having one environment for every project can require a lot disk space if many of your projects have large dependencies (such as tensorflow or pytorch). I personally only use a few virtual environments for all projects and test an application after development in an isolated environment before shipping to make sure it builds and runs properly as specified.
I mean, Arch is supposed to be bleeding edge i.e. it's supposed to provide untested latest software even if it breaks the system. That's why if you want stability, you should use some other linux distributions. Moreover, rolling release doesn't mean it's unstable and untested. Fedora, Opensuse tumbleweed, Debian testing, Void, Solus and Gentoo are all stable rolling release distros and goes through testing before the packages are released in the repository. Only Arch gives the bad name for instability to the other rolling release distributions.
Agreed. I do like Arch, but yes, things easily go wrong there. Manjaro is a bit better with their main repositories, IMO, but things get crazy when you use the AUR.
I just recently started using OpenSuSE MicroOS. It's a rolling release, yet immutable, system. OpenSuSE does a great job of having a rolling release that works well, IMO. And the BTRFS snapshot system with OpenSuSE with the read only root file system makes it easy to roll back in case an update does break the system.
@@MichaelWilliams-lr4mb Manjaro had many packages broken, and eventually left me with a botched gnome 40. I switched to plain Arch and it's been great. Would never recommend Manjaro.
This is why you need to learn your package manager, especially for rolling distros - for the purposes of not just being able to install and remove software, but also to undo the upgrade, or hold particular versions of the software
Or just backup system regularly and revert to an older version when an upgrade is destructive
The average user is NOT expected to do any of that. The average User has the right to have a working system. And thats where Ubuntu wins.
You as a care driver are not supposed to know when to open and to close valves in your engine. That's the manufacturer's Job to finetune everything so that you only turn the key and press one of two or three pedals.
@@ArniesTech that's true. But average user is not supposed to run Arch or any rolling distros - for that specific reason. It's like one is buying a racing car and then gets frustrated by the fact the engine requires a maintenance every 100 miles
@@Ethorbit yes, backups is definitely an option, but that requires a self discipline. The similar option would be to chose btrfs or zfs with their out-of-box snapshot features but to pay a price of SSD drive to wear faster, than with ext4 + filesystem performance will be slightly worse for specific tasks.
@@marco31 no, not at all. He's very skilled linux user, but you know - there's always a place to grow :) I never seen him covering any of the cool topics like memory management, kernel modules, advanced usage of package managers (not the bells-and-whisstles one like nix or nala, but regular ones - there A LOT OF STUFF in there, when it comes to various techniques and approaches which could save your ass, if you prefer rolling distros). I know why he is not covering all these topics - there's just no such a demand from his audience, and it's fine. He's doing his job and I really love his videos and DT himself. But again, to me these videos they're more like linux advertising or entertainment, rather than the serious stuff everyone is ready to listen
Honestly I’ve never really had much of an issue with Arch updates breaking things, but yeah, I see where you’re coming from here. I’m glad that these options exist.
Same one small break in 3 years due to python 3.10, was the login manager. But I don't use artistic stuff.
Other "breaks" were my fault like postgres major updates which I should have pinned or be aware of the fact that it was intended to do some work after updating
I've been using arch for years, a little over 5000 packages installed, and I have never had anything break. I update 3 times a week. How do people keep running into these issues? I guess I am lucky. At least I know if something does break I can roll back in about ten minutes.
I Hate Linus Soysebastian but i Agree With Him about Manjaro.....Manjaro...is not Good...
whenever smth breaks its usually my fault
I used Arch for a short period alongside Gentoo but, unfortunately, Arch dropped the 32-bit version which, for me, was a good alternative option if I didn't want to sit and wait for Gentoo to compile on the same (usually slower) platforms.
Arch is a great distribution as long as you're not one of these people that constantly goes "bleeding edge" with constantly updating to the lastest software versions - to be fair, I think that's an issue for any binary distro.
The moment users start to introduce beta and test versions of software into a distro, they create a much larger combination of binaries and libraries, most of which have never been tested to work together anyway.
As Arch tends to attract more advanced Linux users, more of them are likely to be trying out "bleeding edge" and therefore introducing more instabilities into their Arch builds.
Have you tried Nix as your package manager, it works well for me and its mostly bleeding edge. You can use home manager with it to keep track of all the packages you want and version control it.
Hey DT. Why not use nix instead? Doesn’t it work on most distributions? It seems like it’s a better version of “snaps”. I haven’t really looked into using it yet though.
better to use NixOS itself with nix
Or Guix. Way easier to understand
@@9s-l-s9 GUIX has like a handful of packages.
Coming from the AUR or even NIX, GUIX just isn't enough.
I use Garuda on all my computers and they have an update function that helps avoid broken packages. They have a lot of features that make for a nice desktop distro
That's why I prefer Debian and Debian based systems on productive and semi-productive systems. They just work and work and work. For testing or tinkering machines Arch is fine and it's great to have the possibility to have a bleeding edge system, also for developing. Fedora seems to be developing the image of the best of both worlds at the moment, though.
Well, this is weird, but in my 1.5 years of using Arch on several machines (2 laptops and 2 VMs) I have never encountered anything like DT describes. Arch just keeps working for me!
Signed, Ubuntu derivatives user of 7 years, switched to Arch.
@@Booruvcheek If u depend on AUR you are doomed to have updates break ur system...
@@nathanoneiric The only thing that broke one of my VMs a couple of months ago was me deciding to actually upgrade Grub (as opposed to simply upgrading the Grub package).
AUR packages? I've had 0 issues with those.
@@Booruvcheek every couple of months something in my system stops working...like right now suspend closes all apps and doesn't work.
What OS and hardware are you running man? Did you do anything weird - like adding the testing packages by any chance? I've never had any crashes on gimp and libre; everything has been rock stable for me on Arch.
I feel like a lot of this is kinda stuff we accept playing with rolling release. A production machine running in an unstable ecosystem seems like the true issue. Especially with things like snaps and flatpaks working as well as they do. I've been running Endeavor for a bit now and I've found that the less I tinker, the better things go. I have a small ssd i save for tinkering when I get the itch. On a more productive note, I did take fedora for a spin recently and was really impressed with package availability and generally enjoyed it.
This is the best ad anyone could've made against using rolling releases in production environments. Thanks!!!!
Why would anyone with a brain do that anyway? You're describing a fix to a problem that doesn't exist in the first place.
Unless it's Slackware-current ;)
@@4tado As seen on DT video, bleeding edge does what it has in name - makes you bleed :)
@@4tado Point releases are stable and are designed to be upgraded. Rolling releases are the ticking time bombs, not point release or LTS distros.
@@PenguinRevolution Rolling Releasers should be label as "Nightly"or"Still in Development"version,using Arch to play the"cool pc hipster"is preety naive if you are not an Community s developer.
I've been there myself! :)
I am currently on Fedora 37, I found it to suit my needs really well, I was previously on EndeavourOS.
why did you switch ? I ask because I am in Endeavour too
@@Little-bird-told-me I found Fedora 37 to be more stable than EndeavourOS. I also prefer DNF/YUM over pacman
to be fair most the time the breaking changes aren't from the package manager itself it's the changes from the projects themselves or the dependencies they rely on
Arch still bears some responsibility making sure a -Syyu will never break any package from their repos.
@@SF-bh7rd By the way, please never use -yy; it's pointless, it just wastes bandwidth of the mirrors.
@@SF-bh7rd the issue is some may think that's the cause of the breakage when it isn't. Take DTs argument about gimp crashing every time since he updated also, libre office. both are absolutely fine on my install continually updated. Am I saying it never happens... no. but almost always it's either a conflict with maybe a config file or maybe even another package or library. The major snafu I can think of was the openssl breakage that happened not long ago but that in itself wasn't really the package manager fault either.
@@SkyyySi what's the -yy does?
@@Lewdovico +1
Enjoy your experiences, it helps understand the Information world better! Keep it up!
This reminds me of how Ubuntu's changes to the kernel broke OBS for me on an LTS release after an update. This has always been my fear with Arch anything, and I had not heard too much about it until Grub was broken I think last year for a short period and now this video. Kdenlive and GIMP are two of my most frequently used packages as photographer and videographer, so I cannot have those breaking on me in the middle of a workflow simply for trying to keep my security patches and packages up to date!
Happy Thanksgiving man
Enjoying your content since 2021
This is the exact same problem Microsoft had back in the late 90s. It was very nasty. I would think the Open Source system designers would have learned from MS' mistake. They need to find a architecture/infrastructure to address libraries updating to side break applications. Planning to swap the last machine at my house to Linux within two months. Hoping Flatpaks will address this for the critical applications I'll use.
I gave up on Rolling Releases. First with OpenSuse Tumbleweed where update often lead to problems I always had to fix. Moved to Arch and it got so bad I was afraid to update it anymore because I never knew what it would break next. Then I moved to Void which was great and seemed super stable. Never had the issue of system or package breaks, however I did have much more limited repos. I really like XBPS otherwise. Now I run Debian stable and happy I do. It just keeps ticking no matter what.
This is why I only update things if the changelog specifies fixes for bugs I've actually experienced or additions for features that I want. I also never update to non-stable versions.
As the old saying goes, ‘If it ain't broke, don't fix it.’ One of the reasons I despise Windows so much is because it tries to force and/or sneak in ‘updates’ without my consent.
@@4tado Huh? Non-sequitur much?
Literally gave up on Arch (Endeavour) a few days ago and have been distro hopping since trying to find a replacement. As much as I love the AUR as a concept, the U part of the thing is what ultimately makes it incredibly unreliable. I must be one of the 1000 people in the world that still uses an iPod, and one of the 10 people that uses that iPod with Linux; therefore gtkpod (even if it's deprecated and hasn't been maintained for years) is a crucial piece of software for me to be able to sync my music to it. The gtkpod AUR package hasn't built correctly for months, with solutions to the problem almost always being some sort variation of "Take some time out of your day and debug the source code yourself", which led me to having to always install the package in another distro through distrobox (Which doesn't always work the way it should btw), a few days ago a package as essential as the Spotify client also suddenly stopped working after some bad push from the package maintainer, I think it's getting close to a week without it being buildable and someone in the comments had to provide a fixed PKGBUILD for it. Arch has a ton of great things, but the over-reliance on the AUR as a clutch for not packaging software that really should be on the core repos (e.g. Spotify or the AppimageLauncher) and leaving that work up to users is a practice that has to end. I'm currently on Linux Mint while I find a distro that satisfies my needs better than Arch does.
Hyperbola is both Arch-based and LTS, in addition is it fully libre. Might be up your alley, especially with the addition of agnostic (non-libre) packages?
Regardless, from pacman to snap is a step in the right direction. After that, it's only a small step backward from snaps to flatpaks. Then a major step up to appimages. And before you know it, you're using nix and guix exclusively, the way God intended 😁
I think the main reason people dislike snaps is because of canonical's stranglehold on them, just like with systemd: it's not that it works poorly, it's that people hate the idea of being made dependent on it.
I like using Appimages with AppimagesHub, it's like you install that Appimage on your system, and you can update from there, it doesn't delete the older version.
I also think that snaps on GNOME are slow, but on other desktop like Plasma are ok
I’ve been using NixOS. It’s a bit of a learning curve but it’s well worth it. Never had any problems with the nix package manager and they have almost as many packages as the AUR
Can you tell me more about NixOS it’s look like something new
Me too, I've used to use arch, but after nixos I don't get frustrated with those things
@@MaxHeroGamer can you tell more about it ?
correction: nix has more packages than AUR
@@emmanuelezeagwula7436 It's more stable than debian with MORE packages than arch... the best part is there's no chance of dependency errors!
One issue we've run into including snaps as part of our install is that the snap store sometimes slows downloads to a crawl. It hasn't happened too often, but a couple of times prevented us from helping people as quick as we'd like to.
I've had issues with snaps for one of the programs I use to run old games, but it's worked just fine as a flatpak, and once I learned how to write shortcuts for flatpak run commands into the bashrc file (or even created my own apps using the same commands,) it became just as efficient as any other method of launching the games I wanted to run. So I guess I love flatpaks.
In the last few months I had serious issues with Manjaro and ArcoLinux related to updates. Too many things broken. I got so frustrated that I reinstalled Ubuntu on all my machines. I had enough. I wasn't a big fun of Snap and I was wrong. I totally forgot how easy snap makes everything and guess what everything works now. I love Ubuntu server (it's my os on my server) but I never thought I could be so happy to have Ubuntu little brother (desktop version) running on my computers. Believe me I know what you are saying brother!
@Hoxton lol I like fooling around a lot so I change distro often but on some machines (my home lab consits of 6 computers) I was running Arco but something is getting worse and worse with this distro so here go jumping back to the past and getting Ubuntu on there. No bad at all and snap gets you right where you need. I forgot the convenience of universal packages
arco from what i've seen is heavily modified which introduces all kinds of chances for broken changes especially with new or changed features of applications.
Just install arch and you shouldn't have any problem tbh, had one minor break in 3 years
Arch Linux is just that wannabe cool hipsters from United States distro, i dont like that.....
I love Arch, but I've recently switched to Fedora, as it gets that new software that I love about Arch, except the reliability of something like Debian. If you still want a rolling release distro, something like OpenSUSE Tumbleweed might be a good idea.
I've been having the same issues, including the Kdenlive parallel processing thing - ugggh! Your video is the confirmation I needed. Gonna try a snap - Thanks for this!
Have you considered Nix as an option, I know you did a video about a year ago on the topic.
I thought I could never leave Arch and AUR. Now I love my Linux Mint.
Mint is a great distro.
I just don't get the need to complicate things. When I see videos about a new distro, my finger is quick to scroll past them. Linux Mint just works for everything I do. It just works period. ;-)
I never blame Arch. On Arch, you fix the very few things that "breaks". Almost nothing "breaks" on Arch the last 10 years. It was more prone to break 15 years ago, but I stayed and learned what _I_ could do to fix it.
Lamer! ;)
Snap and flatpack seems to be a good way of getting working packages. What I've wondered is how much does it add to the size because it is putting it's own copy of a library that is already there. Right? And have you done a mount command and gotten multiple pages of virtual drives for the snap and flatpack packages.
Disk space taken isn't really big issue, because there is some base platforms for flatpaks, that most packages share. So if you have 22.08 base, all packages that need it will be able to use it.
So flatpak isn't space efficient if you use it for 1 or 2 programs, but if almost all you GUI apps are in flatpak storage overhead is quite small.
81flatpaks here (apps, NOT runtimes) total disk size (using btrfs compress) 11gb. On ext4/xfs:19gb. Tarball for send? 6.6gb. Ok for me. Zero dependency hell, easy instalation. Ostree deduplication + filesystem compression = perfect. View statistics on ghub vmath3us/arch-start
so instead of trying out "rofi -show drun" you installed snapd? Do you at least have apparmor to protect your system since snaps run as root?
I get making the move towards dependency-neutral formats, but don't snaps specifically have proprietary elements that make them undesirable? Seems like AppImages were working fine for you at least from what I picked up from the video
That's why i use a Debian based distro!
This is why I switched to Tumbleweed, none of this shit happens anymore. I let zypper and snapper do whatever they want and nothing ever breaks.
edit: krunner picks up flatpak apps by name, thanks KDE!
Thing is, system-wide package managers should track shared libraries. And other files, if possible. RPM does this quite well, hence why both DNF and zypper are very solid, thanks to the combination of RPM + libsolv (which uses a satisfiability solver algorithm, plus RPM's shared library tracking).
Deb also does this via deb-shlibs, although that requires an explicit declaration. RPM does this automatically (calls 'ldd' for every file that belongs to the package, declares those dependencies automatically).
As far as I know, pacman doesn't do this. Packages' shared library requirements are satisfied implicitly: they're compiled and recompiled to fit together, so that Arch's latest snapshot is always a concise whole (of course, mistakes could happen here, there aren't super strong validations AFAIK).
This also means AUR packages need to be recompiled once shared libraries are no longer ABI-compatible. Not sure if there are tools to detect this breakage, there probably are.
Still, the remote build infrastructure provided by COPR, OBS and LaunchPad, plus shared library tracking... yeah. It's good stuff.
I'm having the inverse experience to you with pacman, weirdly enough. When I had a laptop on Manjaro pacman used to completely break everything, and it caused me to rely on debian based stuff and appimages for quite a while. Recently I upgraded my desktop and switched to daily driving linux on that for the first time, and due to a first look vid you did for Garuda long ago, I decided to try Garuda out, which uses pacman with chaotic AUR. I've been really happy with that choice, it's been the most consistent experience I've had with a linux distro so far, which was the opposite of what I expected based on prior arch-based distro experiences. It's even been smoother than Solus, which was what my laptop had settled on. The update command is garuda-update, just wrapping pacman with extra hooks, and I've had almost no breaks- most of the few serious issues have been solved by a reboot, and by lucky timing I avoided the one big showstopper a while ago when grub updated and removed some arch users bootloaders. The one program that's a hassle to run is Discord, and that's discord's fault. Appimage integration when updating doesn't behave perfect either.
All that said, I'm not doing anything fancy with package management and that's probably a big factor. I don't want to consciously downgrade apps, track versions, pin static dependencies, since I don't yet have a need to do so. None of that stuff is part of my workflow for any reason, so I want it all to remain fully up to date. The distro itself is smart enough to warn about breakage if using the pacman command in isolation. That might really be the fundamental difference here.
My Arch experience has been going great as well. Any problems I've had in the last six months have all fixed themselves.
Pacman For me is just an Old Game
Similar experience with Garuda here. It's been my daily driver for 15 months. I supposed garuda-update and hot fixes have kept me stable all this time. I have my doubts on some of the (interesting) performance tweaks though.
I recently noticed that the aur version of caffeine was basically broken. The gnome extensions version works, but I'd prefer to use either cinnamon or kde over Gnome
I didn't see this video coming but you make a very clear and convincing argument. Ideally one can do a little mixing and matching with packaging formats to reap the benefits of all.
I am not sure about the argument being convincing, because I can't still believe the premise. Haven't had a single crash in over a year, so it is really weird to hear systematic and monthly crashes.
My solution is to just timeshift or snapper back. Wait a bit before I do an update again. Someone eventually finds the solution. The flaw in DT idea is that if we all switch to snap/flat/app than bugs won't be discovered and resolved as fast.
I'd argue that mixing packaging formats is one of the worst things that you can do.
Jonathan, you're not doing much with the thing, that's why...
It's my daily driver, but it's true - I do use gimp, krita, libre office and blender occasionally. Never used kdenlive (as I don't produce videos).
Actually what startles me is that I haven't also heard this anywhere else yet that pacman keeps breaking (except for AUR in Manjaro but that's different).
rofi does read desktop entries. And you can add executables that alias to flatpaks even though it will take some work. The lack of scriptability is definitely one of flatpak's greatest weakness though, it is not made for command line.
I haven't had any package issues with NixOS, and it seems that on it dmenu recognize flatpaks out of the box once they're installed, so that's nice for me
Kind of the same happened to me several times last year. I had Arch on my 3 computers I use for everything, and have had that setting for about 5 years without issues. This year I got several dependency errors in packages, starting with pandoc stuff, which I use a lot, and then GDAL just didnt run, and all my work depends on GDAL. It stayed broken for months, and then I decided to totally switch to Slackware 15. I havent had any issue at all with Slackware, but I hope if something comes up I would be able to figure out and solve it, as is pretty much compiling your own stuff besides the base software. Totally liked coming to a stable distro after being so much time in a rolling release.
that's what you get when you use bleeding edge. When a rolling distro rolls in bleeding edge all the time, there can never be any kind of protection for the API and (worse) ABI.
For my old head that's a nightmare. You can't just roll in untested things that might not work, might break other things, and potentialy cause crashes on the hardware level, and expect *your every day working environment* stay stable under these conditions.
That's why no matter how long and far I dabble into other things, I always come home to my good old Debian. "Stable" actualy has meaning.
I hear though Fedora is good for a stable work environment and from my recent travels around the Linux space looking for things to tinker with, I can say (for me) Void is a thing to play with for a while. (actualy I am really impressed)
But Debian is home and it will always be, since forever, and for good reason
Just do a minimal install and build from there. You be happy... bored out of your mind , but happy 🙂
In other words, imperfect software made by imperfect humans doesn't work as intended sometimes.
Hey DT, isn't the snap store close source (or is it just the GUI app on Ubuntu?)?
Is it really good for you, who publicly says your channel is to advocate for FOSS, to says that you prefer a close source solution to your problem instead of tweaking an open source solution (make dmenu works with desktop files, or use rofi etc...)?
I don't think you can blame Arch for Kdenlive not being stable ;)
👋
@@porterhouse937 Kdenlive is just "bad" software, when you know that you pin a version that works or use an appimage/flatpak as he said, there are usually no problem with Arch, had one minor break in 3 years
If you change the window manager and package manager etc.. is there any point to using Arch? What makes you stay with Arch instead of changing to another distro? Would you consider a more stable distro for your production and rolling on your personal PC?
Window Managers have nothing to do with Arch as none of them come preinstalled, changing the package manager however is a good thing to think about, but it's not like all of his packages are snaps, only a minority are, and switching to a different distro for a couple of packages doesn't really make much sense if you love the rest of the things that a certain distro does eg. the rolling release nature of Arch, together with the AUR, and the fact that it doesn't come with bloat preinstalled
This remembers me of The Big Bang Theory’s “anything can happen Thursdays”, who’d imagine a future where we have DT sidelining with Snap Packages! Linux world is so crazy!
I was a Arch fan guy a long time ago but honestly I fed up to eventually spend my time to fix my driver regardless of whether there is timeshift, timeshift-snap. I switched to SUSE tw and Fedora and no pain in a…
Like you said in an other video, I use NixOS BTW, I switched this summer and love it, it just take me time to adapt because it is different
That is why I've switched from Arch to Nobara, not so bleeding edge, very stable, based on Fedora and has a lot of improvements for gaming, content creation etc. Nobara since I have it never failed me. Give it a try. For me it was switch from "I hope it will not broke everything" to "I'm not affraid of updates"
Tip: just alias the "flatpack run ..." command in the bashrc file as the program name. This only has to be done once. It's very easy to do, no need to change an entire package manager...
It's what I thought but I don't know if dmenu can find the executables.
I had a wonderful time with Arch myself, never had any issues with packages breaking until one update to glibc broke the only game I play. The issue was with my nvidia (as usual...) and its drivers having some deprecated hook to glibc and there seemed to be no fix in sight. I tried rolling back the package but that just broke other things, being a c library.
I'm happy and content on Void now, been using it for almost a year now. I probably won't be going back any time soon, void has all the good sides of arch but is just a bit more conservative on some fronts when it comes to updates.
@@rishirajsaikia1323 No, why would it? I can't say I've looked at it too closely. I don't quite understand the question.
for anyone hitting the same issue as DT with flatpaks not shown in dmenu, there seems to be a relatively nice workaround called j4-dmenu-desktop, which allows dmenu to also pick up .desktop files.
I would love to see you try out the Nix package manager, or even NixOS! I was having your exact issues and found Nix to be a great solution with dependency hell and applications constantly breaking. Plus, you get really good roll-back capabilities out of the box.
While I've had minimal friction with Manjaro so far, I've started messing with NixOS in a VM as well.
Love the concept, and will hopefully make the switch when I'm certain the experience wont be a downgrade (needed flake to get newest LeftWM version for example).
He did try NixOS! That's how I heard about it, seen a video from DT.
Plus, daily driving NixOS would make for great content on the channel!
The Flatpak solution for us TWM users is simply to use ROFI, instead of dmenu, rofi will provide a menu of .desktop apps just turn fine.
I do wish you people would say "Tiling Window Manager" because in my world, "twm" is the default window manager that comes with Xorg that nobody ever ends up using anyway.
I use Manjaro KDE and it is pretty stable for me. Never experienced things breaking, only bugs getting fixed. I guess it has a small testing buffer to check Arch updates. KDE on Wayland is still kinda experimental but I use it every day with occasional bugs.
Manjaro - stable! 😂😂😂👍😂😂😶
a couple of weeks ago 'konsole' broke and i had to make a new user for a while, how do they even let this happen?
give opensuse TW a try! It is rolling release. but the automatic testing they do works really well.
OpenSUSE,TW or Leap are the Best Choice for this people....
Hey DT! I would recommend you to move your workflow to NixOS. It seems like your distro. You don't have to deal with dependency hell nor with appimages (Which are basically the windows way of installing software). Arch sucks for stability, I still get nightmares when I got ICU broke, so I moved to NixOS.
Can you tell me more about NixOS I’ve never heard about it
@@emmanuelezeagwula7436 There are some reviews, you can search for them on YT, also read documentation on their site. Basically NixOS is distro built around their Nix package manager, focused on solving dependency hell and stable rollbacks. Also you can try using Nix package manager on other distributions or OS like MacOS.
@@emmanuelezeagwula7436 NixOS is very unique distribution: You configure your whole system (packages, services, etc.) in one config file, making it the same on any computer you use it on. When you install a program, instead of just installing the program and it's dependencies as a normal distro, it symlinks the dependencies and program version: this approach makes having programs that depend on different versions of the same library work seamlessly on your system. And because you use symlinks, it is super easy to go back to your previous build of the system (although I say build, I don't mean compilation wise, I mean previous version of the configuration file). This is why I have started using NixOS. There is also the standalone nix package manager, which offers a big part of what I have just said, but without the configuration file. If you want to know more about NixOS, you can read their official documentation (nixos.org/manual/nixos/stable/), but the first thing you have to do is install NixOS (which is super simple, being even simpler than something like arch or debian, having the graphic calamares installer).
Just wondering how you set global settings for all users of an computer if you use flatpak? I have 4 users on my computer, all should have same directory on nas as standard save and load
And even worse with snaps, sounds like everyone just sitting with one user
*Snap installed programs always take few extra seconds to launch* when you power up the system and it's noticeable.
*Some snap installed programs may have odd behaviors* like smplayer for example it can't play any media content from a (hidden) .folder.
*Snap is useful* indeed in some cases especially if you want a recent version of a program without adding a specific repo.
Imho this is a great time to probably switch to NixOS ;)
Thanks for doing this video, you'll perpetuate the myth that arch is unstable when it's not and make happy all the people insecure about arch (although they shouldn't) that have never tried it and thus can't relate, great service.
Arch is unstable because it attracts advanced Linux users who are more than likely to introduce "bleeding edge" software versions in what would otherwise be a very stable distro release. No OS will retain stability if you introduce untested software versions unless, like in Gentoo, you compile from source each time you make an update.
@@terrydaktyllus1320 Arch is unstable in terms of "packages are always updated" not in term of software stability, every package worth being available in the official repo certainly has a great coverage in term of automated tests and you don't get alpha versions either, those are in the AUR for you to try, experiment and give feedback.
From my experience things rarely break, if you install random packages from the AUR that's an other story although I haven't even experienced much problem either.
@@heroe1486 What you are describing, whilst factually correct, is not mutually exclusive to what I described.
Any user running testing or "bleeding edge" packages in any distro is likely to suffer more problems and instabilities that someone only running stable packages in the same distro.
Linux starter question.
Is there a tutorial somewhere on how to install a program that is not on the list of this so-called. apk store
What activities. Commands.
Do you first download the file from the installer to downloaded and then these commands? Clipgrab and Ferdi need to install and there is no repository.
Thanks.
Ps...is it the same in Debian and Arch...or other steps.
Last time I tried (I believe shortly after ubuntu 20.10 came out), the default snap installed firefox just refused to launch a second time (as in it starts up very slowly the first time, then when I close and try to reopen, nothing happens), which is why I hate snap. They can break as well.
I feel your pain, I use gentoo and 3 apps are not working with me (because deps) and I use flatpaks so sometimes I will compromise on flathub, but I WILL NEVER use snaps
Which apps aren't working?
Flatpaks are generally better than snaps imo, so much so that distributions like Fedora Silverblue kind of build their whole system more along the lines of how Flatpaks separate from the rest of the base operating system.
Thank you, I was having issues with Kdenlive on Manjaro and the Flatpack fixed those.
Alright, DT. One of the things I found that differed between each of these self-contained packages is the uninstall. AppImages are contained in a single folder and this makes them very easy to remove. FlatPak must use --delete-data to get a clean removal. Snaps, however, I've found can spread across folders making it harder to totally remove all remnants and clean up after.
What's your take on this?
xbps, nix-env or NixOS itself will deliver also fresh packages, but better stability.
i wish nixos was more popular. literally it's great but too niche
For exactly what you are saying I switched to Void and my dependency hell went away...
Info about snap startup times take one, execution takes about the same problem is that before it can get executed it takes a bit while they go from being single files on a drive somewhere to becoming file trees with all deps and that can take a while if lots of small files are involved like with browsers. I know how to remove most unneccessary stuff to get faster app start times but uts long complex and not exacly that significant process in long run as if you have somewhat fast drive(ssd) and enought space it will be fast enought and on second and later runs it only executes
Hello, I have had problems with Arch Linux update four times, the first time with the sound card, twice with
kvm and once the computer shuts down for a long time and it is strange that the software is not tested before the release of each update
it is time to enter the void: rolling release but with a focus on stability, i have never had a package break in void linux
Finally, someone else is speaking about these problems.
So when are you installing slackware?
You can do that or you can push it even to extra stability with Fedora. Stable native packages + Flatpaks.
(and you can do minimal install so you can rice it with favorite window manager)
I may check out some snaps after seeing this video. As a Manjaro user, I never have to worry about packages breaking with updates, but with it being a stable release, I have to use Flatpaks for some packages when I want to be on the latest version, and configuring permissions for them (like I had to do with Steam since a few games would crash when opening some cutscene videos and minigames) gets to be a bit of a headache. Cheers.
"Arch Linux is The Ideal Beginner's Distro"
shilling garbage distros leading to being a broken man
even windows would be a godsend for production
this person is crazy
for launching flatpaks I recommend j4-dmenu-desktop it's a wrapper of dmenu that uses .desktop files instead of just scanning your bin directory
FYI j4-dmenu-desktop is a standalone utility and a wrapper for dmenu, not a version of dmenu.
@@grtcdr yeah, I just didn't know how to say that
The universal package managers are a pragmatic solution, but not an ideal one, imo. I've never understood why the distro-specific package managers don't have the ability to containerize software or to maintain parallel sets of shared libraries. Something like that would be more in line with the heterodox nature of linux. A universal solution shouldn't be necessary. "One size fits all," is simply not the linux way. While the universal package managers offer a solution for now, I think that the various distro maintainers should be looking to render them obsolete, considering they offer a feature that should realistically already exist. Multiple package managers can very quickly snowball into a difficult mess by the time you have your distro's PM, multiple universal PM's solving respective niche use-cases, npm, pip, etc. It over complicates the idea of package management to a degree comparable to having to go to the website as if you're running windows, and this is counter-intuitive for users of all skill levels, but particularly for new users trying to learn the basics.
Agreed. I feel like a universal package format would really just be a standard format for every distro. That way it wouldn't have 1gb downloads for a single program, but rather it would connect with already available dependencies and if it's incompatible with the available dependencies it would have segregated dependencies for anything that requires that specific version. Then you could have distros sharing repos and have less fragmentation of the infrastructure. Something like a base install necessary to get a system up and running and every distro would build from there. Like if LFS had a package manager. That would be true universality, unlike what we have with FlatPak, Snaps and AppImages, and I say this as someone who actually likes AppImages.
so basically Nix / NixOS is what you want?
@@TheExileFox I've never looked into Nix
That seems to be the main problem with rolling release distros. If you update everything, you'll update dependencies for software that hasn't yet been updated, and you have to wait for them to release an update before they're working properly again. I've noticed that if I haven't updated in a while, if I try to install a new program, it won't install because I have outdated versions of its dependencies on my system which can't be updated because other software depends on those versions. So a full sudo pacman -Syu is necessary. I really should update more often than I do. But I forget. Maybe I should add a script to my i3 Blocks to check for a certain day, and display a message to remind me all that day. Then I'll have no excuse. lol
How are your snaps not constantly breaking? I have more problems with snaps breaking than native packages (frozen or rolling release) or flatpaks.
I'm also on Arch and I've had none of these problems except for pipewire.
if you use pacman to update and your internet is down it breaks itself and wont ever synch or update again
ive had to revert back using btrfs several times because of this
You know what, I would not mind if snap packages had splash screens in the short run. I currently have Firefox, Bitwarden, and Audacity all as snaps in my Lubuntu setup.
I like snaps because they're easy to work with on the terminal. Flatpak is not just different, it's more work, to say the least.
I really want to like snaps, but for whatever reason I keep having issues with fonts in the UI. I see everything as squares, and I still can't figure out a solution for this problem. Another thing that keep me off snaps is the fact that they don't follow my desktop theme, and they usually don't talk to d-bus, so Global Menus don't work. But hey, I really look forward to use them as soon as these problems get fixed... if they will. For the time being I'm using flatpaks (flatseal is the killer application snaps still don't have to manage permissions) and native packages when I can't. Unfortunately flatpaks don't support CLI programs.
I feel your pain. I have the same experiences with Arch.
Won’t be long, though, before some fanboy jumps in and falsely claims they have been using Arch for years and have never had anything break from an update.
@ok a short time, perhaps, but not years. Arch updates over the years have broken Network Manager, Grub, etc., which are packages most users need.
Honestly speaking Ubuntu and Ubuntu based distros are good enough but somehow people hate them for no reason just for being too normie distros and too boring. Ubuntu LTS is a good base for a distro... Arch based distros are just too unstable.
Arch based aren't unstable, unstable in term of "it's moving" yes but not software stability, maybe his artistic programs but otherwise no, one minor break for me in 3 years with near 2k packages.
Ubuntu isn't good enough, I don't want to spend time installing packages or getting newer versions with all the PPA hassle, the AUR is just too good.
Great work Thank you
I've been fine using Arch for years and then the past few months I've had a few things just completely explode
*uses bleeding edge rolling release distro* - "why is stuff breaking".