I’m thinking of choosing Debian instead. I’m a student, low on budget, and wanna play with linux and laptops, and I think Arch or Cachy OS need updates or distro upgrades(?) weekly or something?
Solved: up to date Arch can last for 2 decades on my cheap laptop, and use Flatpak for older versions of software.
This isn’t like a phone OS where they add ressource-draining new features every 6 months.
If your computer can run the OS at installation, it’ll be able to run it for a long time.
One good reason not to use Arch is if you have a limited internet connection.
Updates are often 1 GB or more per week, depending on what you have installed.
So if that’s an issue, Debian is the better choice.“If your computer can run the OS at installation, it’ll be able to run it for a long time.”
but what if I have a cheap laptop? Arch will force me to download the latest, and using xfce feels not enough.
With Arch-likes its ever so slightly harder to roll back package versions but still doable.
Considering kernel maintainers are only now removing support for i486 and i586 you will be fine for a long time with anything from the past 2 decades.
And push comes to shove you can just tell your package manager to not update something and not worry about it.
Like mentioned though, there are a lot of upgrades and they are constant so if bandwidth is a problem, a Debian-like might be more for you.
“Considering kernel maintainers are only now removing support for i486 and i586 you will be fine for a long time with anything from the past 2 decades.”
That sounds great, but still you need to download the latest release, and the newest software.
That’s the neat part, you don’t need to. You can just install any Linux distro and not upgrade. Obviously bad for security but you aren’t forced to upgrade ever.
My server is running a Debian-like and I’ve found release updates to be the most nerve racking process ever. Updating package repos and waiting for the whole system to refresh all the packages and fussing over what needs backports because a package is not in the new release repo… I dread it every year.
For arch I just have a snapper pacman hook to automatically create snapshots for my btrfs system so I can roll back if an update is just not working. Then just wait a few days and try again.
That won’t really be a problem. If you have old/slow hardware, I’d just recommend a lightweight DE and you shouldn’t really have any performance issues crop up in the future.
And yes it’s best to update rolling release distros frequently. I update every day and with my internet (150Mbit/s) it takes like 1-2 minutes. Don’t worry if you’re away from your computer for a while though, weekly updates should actually be enough and it’s no problem if you’re away for a few weeks usually.
Yes, the system expects regular updating. But Arch is entirely pragmatic. What has enough popularity and a mainainer to do the work will be kept in the repositories, even more if you include the AUR (also stuff moving between them when popularity and/or demand of packages changes). And because it is constantly moving on with new packages a lot is kept in parallel: There are a lot of packages in the repos in different versions, one being cutting edge, one being the lower version dependency for other packages not upgraded yet.
For reference: Yes, Arch for example expected you to update to the new open source NVIDIA drivers the day NVIDIA dropped the Volta, Pascal and Maxwell cards (GTX 1080 and below). But at the same moment the nvidia-580xx driver was introduced to the AUR, including explicitly being supported officially still. And the same happened every time a set of hardware got dropped (nvidia-470, nvidia-390, nividia-340), still kept unofficially for legacy reasons as long as it’s technically feasible. So I can in fact still run graphics cards from 2006 20 years later…
Or for another example: Yes, Arch runs kernel 7.0.12 right now and updates the kernel on a weekly basis. Yet it also has the LTS version 6.18 (guaranteed to get support until end of 2028 upstream) fully supported in the repos. And again, including the AUR I can still run the oldest still officially supported (until end of this year) long-term-support Linux kernel 5.10.
And those are basically the most extreme examples in terms of losing support, one being the constantly developed core of the whole system, the other on proprietary drivers of a private company. Otherwise the amount of 1990s tech still support by Linux is actually insane.
— Written on an ancient toaster (AMD FX series from 2011, gtx750ti from 2014, non-EFI motherboard) running Arch… which nowadays runs -given: older- games with better performance than years ago, because “the newest stuff” does introduce constant improvements and optimisation instead of new drains on your ressources like you are used to because they want you to buy new stuff.
