Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve seen a lot of content that’s ripping on Arch Linux, from pictures of stickers being removed from laptops, to comments about it having a lot of bloat or frustrating package management. Was there a change to their policies, strategies, or distro that has turned this once proud vessel into a floating psycho ward?
I don’t know, but I am here for it. I feel the same way, but also it seems unlikely anything will compete with package availability without introducing some other issues. I tried Tumbleweed and didn’t like package management there either, specifically because of patterns. Some of my issues might be fixed in a newer install or could be done manually with help via the wiki, like auto-updating mirrors so there never is an issue, but honestly I just haven’t bothered.
Well, some of my issue is probably just having DSL internet (6-8Mbps, also up to 3 other people using it) making updating more of a pain than it needs to be (including update frequency, trying other distros). Package sharing might be easier if my house had ethernet hookups, too (I’m using a not-very-good method now, a more official method that may be better was probably bugged when I tried it).
EDIT: I also wouldn’t say I can feel the bloat on my system, but I do have some dread about lots of dependencies it seems I can’t do much about (seeing a ton of python or KDE packages on update). The bigger issue is that I never have much luck updating the AUR stuff, also no-longer-available stuff (it got a bit better once with a re-install, but now it’s back to where it was). I tried flatpaks at one point but I got tired of updating those separately (I don’t know if hooks were added later or available manually, though I do wish I could choose major-versions only or some other way for less frequent updates of certain software).
I thought patterns are just meta/group packages. Do they do anything else differently?
what issues do you have updating them? are the no-longer-available packages orphans?
It’s been a while, but I remember patterns trying to re-install things that I removed and I didn’t like the work-arounds listed. I can’t remember what exactly it was, but I don’t think it was anything I really needed even with whatever other thing it was grouped with.
Doing a search and it seems other people have been annoyed by patterns because of “recommended” packages, I don’t know if it changed though.
Some of it is the internet again (especially pulling down things from git that are quite large), some of it is stuff that just fails during building. Basically I can do a system update just fine, but I can’t really expect the AUR update to go smoothly. I just pick-and-choose what of the AUR I try to update most of the time, luckily things often just continue working.
That’s an issue too, but no in this case I mean packages that have most likely changed names (or maybe removed) so replacements must be manually found. Unless there’s some tool I’m unaware of. Otherwise, they will just never be updated, which is often fine. A lot of them are libraries that I’m not even sure about.
No, I think that’s the default behavior but I believe I read somewhere that there’s a way to stop zypp from reinstalling these packages.
Do you know about chaotic-aur? It should solve most of your aur issues. There’s no pulling or compiling. When a dependency is removed from the extra repo you wouldn’t be able to install the chaotic-aur package until it’s manually fixed but I don’t think you’ll have any issues updating already installed packages.