I am currently using EndeavourOS, but am annoyed by the constant daily updates of 1GB and pacman not installing important dependencies automatically (ex: spell checker for document editor). I like the way Fedora works: you update whenever, important dependencies are downloaded automatically, and packages are recent-ish, but I don’t like that it takes forever to run dnf. I don’t want to use Manjaro (apparently it breaks quickly?), and the distro needs to support KDE. I know about Flatpak, but I don’t want to download 1GB of data for each app. Are there any good options?
(Yes, I can probably deal with Fedora, but dnf is slower than apt, and I don’t want to deal with external repositories for non-free software.)
EDIT: I do not want to tweak or edit configuration files, I just need something that has up to date packages and “just works”.
With a rolling release you don’t need to install every update every single day. You just need to remember to occasionally update to the latest. Updating every day on a rolling release is actually kinda dangerous. I wouldn’t recommend that in practice. Why not configure an auto-install script? You could probably make a systemd unit file that does a pacman -Syu overnight, if it can.
Here – someone did it already - its in aur -
https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/autoupdate
Isn’t this considered bad in Arch? Or was I misled?
You should ideally be updating manually so you can handle any issues as they arise and you don’t wake up to a silently broken system. Manual intervention is occasionally required. Usually it’s associated with a breaking change that’s announced on the mailing list, but sometimes it’ll just happen.
Automating updates is generally frowned upon, that’s when things can break. But waiting to run updates until you feel like it (instead of daily) is totally fine. I’ve been using Arch and its forks for years, and have always updated once a week unless something was wrong.
It is.
Why is it not dangerous to update only once a week or month on Arch?
Because minor patches are not always worth installing. If there’s a new exploit you should update immediately but you dont need to give a shit that every python package has a minor update. The point of a rolling release is to give you the option to use the latest and greatest.
That does not explain the dangerous part.
I would argue, that on Arch I can get a fancy update with a bug even if I only update every week, and I may have to live with it longer if I stick to weekly updates.
With this logic, it is always dangerous to update Arch, if you don’t look what is coming in. I know, that Arch is not that unstable it used to be. But people seem to warn about Arch updates, still. I wonder how the situation really is. I will never know for my self, because I will not install Arch again, anytime soon.
And I don’t agree that updating a rolling distro daily is per se dangerous. You can do that with Gentoo if you don’t unmask unstable (~arch) keywords and follow the news provided with eselect. I can even mask stable updates if I am not ready to deal with them yet.
If you update daily you will have a higher chance of running into bugs and shit that can break things due to doing more minor updates. Of course it also depends on how much stuff you got from the AUR.
Yes, it is. It’s why I never recommend arch and arch-based things to newbies, and certainly not without that disclaimer. Mind you I found it to still be incredibly stable provided you do the weekly updates.
Also, frankly, you’re wasting your time , disk space and internet updating every day. Granted not a lot usually but not needed.
Cool story bro. We’re talking about Arch.
NixOS users try not to talk about NixOS on every remote occasion they get chellange (impossible)
NixOS is the new Arch… BTW.