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.
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.
And if they go with CachyOS and choose Limine as the bootloader, it will be set up automatically! You can also install after the fact, as I did, but I agree that having hooks before and after package updates is very helpful and has come in handy a couple of times.
Slightly worried for my use was because I have ukify images with dracut and sbctl. It generates the boot entries with that long id so I’ll maybe need to do some manual pacman hooks to modify the limine boot entries.
The thing might be simpler than a skim through tells me but I’ll need to set aside some time to get it right. Thanks for the call out, would be super neat if this works.