I feel like the people that perpetuate this meme have never used Arch. I’ve ran it on multiple computers for just over a decade and only once have I had an issue. And that one time, it was my fault. It’s been the most solid OS I’ve used.
Meanwhile, my headless Ubuntu server couldn’t do a dist-upgrade without shitting all over itself. I only ran Ubuntu because of the constant “never use Arch for servers” talk. I wish I had never listened to that. Everything I own runs Arch now and it’s so nice.
Be fair, let’s not compare to Ubuntu, we all know it’s shit. The reason you don’t use arch on servers is because of bugs in new package versions and manual intervention requirements every once in a while, not because it breaks a lot. Try Debian on servers. It’s rock solid, even more so than arch.
Debian is currently on neovim version 0.4.4 (august 7, 2020). Arch is on 0.9.1(may 29, 2023) (current). That’s just an example off the top of my head.
If you use a server exclusively for serving content and never modify configs on your server… php current version is 7.4 (past EOL since Nov 2022)…
Oh wait, I’m only on Debian 11, though its supported until at least 2024. I have “support” but its for old versions of software. I sometimes can’t even share a tmux config between my desktop and my server, because the versions are so different.
I have had similar issues with debian dist-upgrades just like I have with ubuntu. Turns out jumping from neovim 0.4.4 to 0.9.1 (jk, debian sid STILL only has 0.7.2) is the kind of version jump that goes straight past a deprecation warning in 0.5 and actual deprecation in 0.6, and now my config doesn’t work. So the options are “always be perpetually just a bit out of date because we cant actually update to new software”, or “risk breaking things by having large version leaps, from the woefully outdated to the pretty new”
So the solution to needing newer server software versions: run things in docker… Which they package version 20.10 in the “docker.io” package. Uninstalling that, and reinstalling from the docker official source to get docker-ce gets us up to 24.0.5, which is the same version as arch. So it’s possible to get there, just not out of the box. And by the time you start adding ppa’s to your distro, things stop being as stable.
tl;dr - If you need up to date software, debian is awful. It is rock solid, but often obsolete.
I use it for my server with the docker workarounds, but needing to do workarounds make it less fun. If I had to start over, I might pick something else like NixOS. I dunno. For “not going to crash” levels of stability, I can’t explicitly name anything better, but for “actually functions how i want it to” it’s definitely not at the top.
For servers I’m actually a fan of FreeBSD. There’s a pretty good learning curve coming from Linux, but it’s about as stable as it gets, the documentation is probably the best, and I personally love the jails system.
Granted, everything I do is at the hobbyist level, but after messing with a number of OSs, I landed there after working with Green as and haven’t looked back.
Amen, freebsd is amazing for servers, with a little automation jails make docker and lxc look primitive, just wish there was a way to convert docker-compose to a jail instance.
Tbf the main people who steer away from something like Arch for servers are enterprise Linux users who prefer stuff like RHEL for the 10 years of never having to upgrade anything until the very last moment when they fork out thousands for expert sysadmins to upgrade it for the next 10 years.
I like the rolling release for just about everything. Since package updates are spread out, you can usually figure out which package broke what pretty easily if something ever breaks down…, which shouldn’t, because I still can’t recall instance of such catastrophic failure just by updating.
Maybe so, but it’s much harder to learn from your mistakes and fix them on distros like Ubuntu.
I say this as someone who has recently switched to Arch because my Windows existence was aggravating me and I had never clicked well with Linux in the past. It felt too unfamiliar and I think I’m the kind of masochistic weirdo who benefits from their first proper go at Linux being Arch.
I still don’t have a fully working setup on my desktop yet because I’m working on doing it properly, but problems and mistakes are much easier to fix on Arch than on any other distro I’ve used.
Lol, that’s fair. If I would have spent significant hours researching all the changes and the new config files, I probably could have had a better time.
However, around that time I decided that dist-upgrades were: 1) for the birds, and 2) like Windows in that it’s easier & better to wipe and reinstall.
It’s how I was in my first few years of Linux too. I think I started reading to understand what’s happening around Ubuntu 10.04. These days nothing scares me. I had a power failure during a 20.04 -> 22.04 upgrade. Shrugged, finished the upgrade procedure manually once the power came on. That particular machine hasn’t been nuked and paved since 14.04 or 16.04. Once you’re confident in what the system does, e.g. what apt and dpkg do, you can use them to do a lot. E.g. you can use dpkg to verify that all installed files for all packages exist and are indeed uncorrupted. Or compare a modified config file to the package one. And so on. I literally did a system file integrity check with dpkg on my corpo workstation the other day, after its SSD decided to disconnect from the system while it was running.
Don’t do dist-upgrades of servers. Get a second server, set that up with the new OS and software, transfer traffic to the new server, shut down the old one.
I feel like the people that perpetuate this meme have never used Arch. I’ve ran it on multiple computers for just over a decade and only once have I had an issue. And that one time, it was my fault. It’s been the most solid OS I’ve used.
Meanwhile, my headless Ubuntu server couldn’t do a dist-upgrade without shitting all over itself. I only ran Ubuntu because of the constant “never use Arch for servers” talk. I wish I had never listened to that. Everything I own runs Arch now and it’s so nice.
Be fair, let’s not compare to Ubuntu, we all know it’s shit. The reason you don’t use arch on servers is because of bugs in new package versions and manual intervention requirements every once in a while, not because it breaks a lot. Try Debian on servers. It’s rock solid, even more so than arch.
Debian is currently on neovim version 0.4.4 (august 7, 2020). Arch is on 0.9.1(may 29, 2023) (current). That’s just an example off the top of my head.
If you use a server exclusively for serving content and never modify configs on your server… php current version is 7.4 (past EOL since Nov 2022)…
Oh wait, I’m only on Debian 11, though its supported until at least 2024. I have “support” but its for old versions of software. I sometimes can’t even share a tmux config between my desktop and my server, because the versions are so different.
I have had similar issues with debian dist-upgrades just like I have with ubuntu. Turns out jumping from neovim 0.4.4 to 0.9.1 (jk, debian sid STILL only has 0.7.2) is the kind of version jump that goes straight past a deprecation warning in 0.5 and actual deprecation in 0.6, and now my config doesn’t work. So the options are “always be perpetually just a bit out of date because we cant actually update to new software”, or “risk breaking things by having large version leaps, from the woefully outdated to the pretty new”
So the solution to needing newer server software versions: run things in docker… Which they package version 20.10 in the “docker.io” package. Uninstalling that, and reinstalling from the docker official source to get docker-ce gets us up to 24.0.5, which is the same version as arch. So it’s possible to get there, just not out of the box. And by the time you start adding ppa’s to your distro, things stop being as stable.
tl;dr - If you need up to date software, debian is awful. It is rock solid, but often obsolete.
I use it for my server with the docker workarounds, but needing to do workarounds make it less fun. If I had to start over, I might pick something else like NixOS. I dunno. For “not going to crash” levels of stability, I can’t explicitly name anything better, but for “actually functions how i want it to” it’s definitely not at the top.
For servers I’m actually a fan of FreeBSD. There’s a pretty good learning curve coming from Linux, but it’s about as stable as it gets, the documentation is probably the best, and I personally love the jails system.
Granted, everything I do is at the hobbyist level, but after messing with a number of OSs, I landed there after working with Green as and haven’t looked back.
Amen, freebsd is amazing for servers, with a little automation jails make docker and lxc look primitive, just wish there was a way to convert docker-compose to a jail instance.
Tbf the main people who steer away from something like Arch for servers are enterprise Linux users who prefer stuff like RHEL for the 10 years of never having to upgrade anything until the very last moment when they fork out thousands for expert sysadmins to upgrade it for the next 10 years.
Agreed. I’ve used it since 2006. There were times where it broke every few months years ago, but lately, it is rock solid. Updates aren’t scary.
I heard that Debian is pretty good for servers
Better than Ubuntu. Still, I feel like rolling release is great for a server
I like the rolling release for just about everything. Since package updates are spread out, you can usually figure out which package broke what pretty easily if something ever breaks down…, which shouldn’t, because I still can’t recall instance of such catastrophic failure just by updating.
The Ubuntu failure was likely also your fault. 😄
Maybe so, but it’s much harder to learn from your mistakes and fix them on distros like Ubuntu.
I say this as someone who has recently switched to Arch because my Windows existence was aggravating me and I had never clicked well with Linux in the past. It felt too unfamiliar and I think I’m the kind of masochistic weirdo who benefits from their first proper go at Linux being Arch.
I still don’t have a fully working setup on my desktop yet because I’m working on doing it properly, but problems and mistakes are much easier to fix on Arch than on any other distro I’ve used.
Lol, that’s fair. If I would have spent significant hours researching all the changes and the new config files, I probably could have had a better time.
However, around that time I decided that dist-upgrades were: 1) for the birds, and 2) like Windows in that it’s easier & better to wipe and reinstall.
It’s how I was in my first few years of Linux too. I think I started reading to understand what’s happening around Ubuntu 10.04. These days nothing scares me. I had a power failure during a 20.04 -> 22.04 upgrade. Shrugged, finished the upgrade procedure manually once the power came on. That particular machine hasn’t been nuked and paved since 14.04 or 16.04. Once you’re confident in what the system does, e.g. what apt and dpkg do, you can use them to do a lot. E.g. you can use dpkg to verify that all installed files for all packages exist and are indeed uncorrupted. Or compare a modified config file to the package one. And so on. I literally did a system file integrity check with dpkg on my corpo workstation the other day, after its SSD decided to disconnect from the system while it was running.
Standard Linux incel user blaming.
It’s true. Ever since I got married, intercourse has been at a premium.
Don’t do dist-upgrades of servers. Get a second server, set that up with the new OS and software, transfer traffic to the new server, shut down the old one.
That’s basically what I did. The only change was I installed Arch instead. No more dist-upgrades!