Comments by "eDoc2020" (@eDoc2020) on "Arch Linux Isn't A Beginner Distro But It Was Mine!" video.

I don't use Arch because it got in the way. It's fine when it works but it's the epitome of "move fast and break things." I (nearly) hosed my install because one day I didn't read the news page before updating. With Debian (and derivatives) I can do a standard package update and know it won't break anything.
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TLDR: I used Arch 11 years ago. I don't use arch anymore. My first Linux experience was from a CD found at a yard sale with Freespire Linux which I installed on an old (Celeron 466) PC. My first "real" distro was Arch, installed around 2013. Because I didn't religiously read the news page before every update I ended up without a copy of the shell. I somehow was able to use the existing bash window and fix the system. That put me off Arch. When I got my first ThinkPad I went with Debian and I no longer needed to worry about everything breaking. After that my distro of choice was Xubuntu, now it's Mint.
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@0x6a09 I don't remember all the details, it was over a decade ago. The related news "Binaries move to /usr/bin requiring update intervention" is from 2013-06-03. There might have been an unrelated error compounding the situation but I distinctly remember being unable to open a new terminal window or even login on the console, I needed to use my one window I already had open to fix everything. After thinking about it, that seems about right. I installed the update which moved bash from /bin to /usr/bin. So then everything (like the login shell entry in the passwd file) which was hardcoded to /bin/bash no longer worked. At the same time there was a filesystem update which replaced /bin with a symlink, solving the problem, but this was unable to be installed at the same time. If I had read the news post I would know I needed to remove all the "extra" files from /bin and then perform the updates in a specific order.
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@0x6a09 Like I said, if I read the news beforehand it wouldn't have been a problem. It gave the impression that it will break if not babysat. Also note I said I almost hosed my install. I was able to recover because I had kept my terminal window open and I was able to access the website through my old Windows 98 laptop. If I didn't have another computer with Internet access it would have been much worse. Also remember there have been various changes to the package manager over time, meaning an existing live CD most likely can't be used as a good recovery environment. I think I ran into that once or twice. Other than that I never had any major issues. I don't know how different modern Arch is but I'm sure of one thing: it's a bleeding edge distro. Every update might break something. Even when nothing breaks updates might mean interface changes which take time to adjust to. With a stable distro I can update and everything will work exactly the same. Major changes will come in the next version of the distro and there's an overlap in support window so I can safely wait until I have time set aside to deal with the changes and any possible problems.
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@0x6a09 The changes themselves aren't worse but the timing of the changes is. 99.9% of the time nothing breaks but I'd rather that number be closer to 100. With my luck the 0.1% of breakage would happen right when I need to do something important and don't have any time to waste. If it wasn't clear, I don't think there's anything wrong with Arch. It's a good distro and ArchWiki is great. Arch just isn't the best for me, it's better suited to people who are more of a software enthusiast type.
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