They’re just nearly equally reactive in two opposite directions.

You can absolutely make salts with acidic or alkaline properties by altering this careful balance.

It’s like two titans fighting until both are dead and peace roams over the valley. Or, more accurately, relentless robber meeting someone who desperately needs to give something away.

I would argue either RAID 5 or ZFS RAIDz1 are inherently unsafe, since recovery would take a lot of read-write operations, and you better pray every one of 4 remaining drives will hold up well even after one clearly failed.

I’ve witnessed many people losing their data this way, even among prominent tech folks (looking at you, LTT).

RAID6/ZFS RAIDz2 is the way. Yes, you’re gonna lose quite a bit more space (leaving 24TB vs 32TB), but added reliability and peace of mind are priceless.

(And, in any case, make backups for anything critical! RAID is not a backup!)

True!

Although, as another commenter pointed out, this will use Packman repo which is not official and apps there are not going through the same testing as in official repos.

So Flatpak is generally a better option. Still, if you want VLC as a native package, opi is indeed an easy and reliable way of providing it.

Fair point! Honestly, that’s exactly what I ultimately went for, I just know there are people around who strongly prefer native packages.

Flatpak contains all codecs etc., and works flawlessly.

Nice to know!

Guess we simply apply different meaning to the word “stable”. (you do you, though, and if it’s alright with your workflow, yay!)

To me, stable means reliably working without any special maintenance. Arch requires you to update once in a while (otherwise your next update might get borked), and when you update, you may have to resolve conflicts and do manual interventions.

Right now, I run OpenSUSE Slowroll (beta, not released yet) on one of my machines and EndeavourOS on the other. The former recently had to update 1460 elements, and one intervention was required - package manager asked me if I want to hold one package for a while to avoid potential dependency issues. Later, it was fixed, and otherwise it went without a hitch. This is the worst behavior I’ve seen on this distribution, and so to me it renders “acceptably unstable” for general use (although I wouldn’t give that to my grandma).

Nowadays Mint is practically the default newbie distro.

I would also recommend against immutables, since you seem to be a knowledgeable user. Immutable distros are severely limiting, some programs may not work at all, and in other places you’ll have to go through a lot of unnecessary hoops.

What I’ve learned with immutables is that you can do all that on a regular system, with added flexibility of installing packages the normal way if you need it. Just go with Flatpaks whenever possible, use Distrobox when not, and you’ll be golden. Should some need arise for a regular install of something or some tweak in system files - you would still be able to do so.

Honestly, what I went for after my experiments is OpenSUSE Tumbleweed - it’s bleeding edge, but also very stable and predictable, and if you set up volume as btrfs, it features well-preconfigured snapper to revert any mistakes you may make along the way.

You will get all the maintenance headache of Arch in a nice looking package. Absolutely not what OP asks for.

Arch is never “set it and forget it”.

Plenty of people seriously propose it as such.

It is not - at least if you’re not an enthusiast happy to tinker with your system all the time.

I’d say one issue in 8 years is a stellar track record!

But I agree they should have warned users a better way.

Anyway, I like how btrfs is treated within Tumbleweed - snapper is fully configured and enabled by default, and you can load a snapshot and rollback into it from the boot menu - all that would take you less than a minute, and any faulty update will be gone for good. With ext4, though, you might need Timeshift. But then, all that can be done within Arch with just a few more tweaks!

I see!

I do, in fact, use Endeavour on my desktop as well, simply because I like snappiness and choice of Arch and similarly don’t wanna bother with the pure one (and also EndeavourOS forums are more friendly in my experience). I run OpenSUSE Slowroll (an experimental Tumbleweed build, same idea as Manjaro, but actually done right) on my other laptop, so can speak from the experience on both ends.

With Slowroll (and my gf’s Tumbleweed) I’ve only once faced the need for manual intervention, and it was simply to resolve a dependency change by choosing which package to leave - literally enter one number, and then it went on peacefully and correctly installing 1460 updates (yeah, they pushed a big Tumbleweed dump, 3.5 gigs total). On Arch and EndeavourOS, the last intervention was just recently, that’s the one OP talks about, and they do happen more often and are more complicated than I’d like.

I don’t think it makes sense to gatekeep Linux only to those who has time, energy, and dedication to continuously check for necessary interventions and to familiarize themselves with all the terminal utilities in the first place.

That is a sort of elitism we need to carefully avoid - one, because otherwise it would halven the desktop Linux community, and two, because there’s a huge group of people out there who need what Linux offers, but cannot dedicate themselves to it in the way enthusiasts do.

For them, there must be an option to push the button and get a smooth update, with everything resolved automatically or prompted in a user-friendly way. Arch is not that.

You feel comfy doing this - alright, no one stops you, Arch is great and has a purpose. But we should never put blame on users for not using their system The Arch Way™, because it’s too technical, too engaged, and is just a poor fit for most. People will not and should not accommodate for this just to use their system. There’s no need to.

If someone chose Arch and complains that it breaks things, it could be useful to point out Arch doesn’t have required guardrails to make it operable in a way they expect, and direct the user to other distributions that have them and potentially least painful ways to migrate.

Having tried Arch and its derivatives, and recognizing their strong points, I can absolutely tell the person needs another distribution, and that’s alright! Whatever fits anybody is up to them. And for stable rolling release experience without the need for manual checking (but also without some of the power features of Arch mainly geared toward enthusiasts) there’s OpenSUSE Tumbleweed.

Edit: Tone.

A decent daily driver distro for regular user should not break on blind update - at most, it should warn the user automatically before applying updates. If user is expected to check news every time they want to update their system - it is not a good fit for anyone but enthusiasts.

Based on what you describe, I would strongly recommend going with OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. It’s just as bleeding-edge as Arch, but all packages go through automatic testing to ensure they won’t break anything, and if some manual actions are required, it will offer options right before update. Moreover, snapper in enabled by default on btrfs partitions, and it makes snapshots automatically before updates, so even if something breaks somehow, reverting takes a few seconds.

One small footnote is that you’ll need to add separate VLC repo or Packman for VLC to have full functionality - proprietary codecs are one of the rare things official repos don’t feature for legal reasons.

On Arch rant: I’ve always been weirded out by this “Arch is actually stable, you just have to watch every news post for manual interventions before every update, oh, and you better update very often” attitude.

Like, no, this is not called stable or even usable for general audience. Updating your system and praying for it not to break while studying everything you need to know is antithetical to stability and makes for an awful daily driver.

Data hoarders could be happy, but otherwise it’s mostly enterprise use.

Still, I personally hold about 4 TB of files, and I know people holding over 30 TB.

As soon as your storage needs exceed 1-2 games and a bunch of old photos, demand for space raises quickly.

Yeah I know :)

Fiddled with Gentoo a little, just don’t think it’s worth it for me anyway.

Normally it means you picked the wrong distance to the screen!

Tinker with that first - it might be much further or closer than you think, all depending on your screen and eyes.

Also, a hint: the central circle should stay straight in the middle, not closer to one or the other. At that point, below there will be three equally sized pictures, and then you can switch your sight to the central one.

Several hours for an update sounds insane to me lol

But I understand it’s the tradeoff Gentoo makes to add a lot of control and minor optimization

Yup, works, thanks!

Oh wait - it’s simple as that? Nice!

Guess that’s all I need.