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.
I run arch on a 2007 laptop. It was a cheap laptop at the time. Still runs very fine. Unless you want to keep the laptop running for the next 40 years I wouldn’t worry too much.
I think I can see it, codes added to the latest release is unnoticeable, but are you forced to use the heaviest software? or are you able to choose the older ones?
If you install from repositores you are forced to use the latest version. You can use older versions through appimages. In general, there’s no real reason to use older versions unless you need to reproduce something specific which was done in the past doing it in the same way.
The beauty of Arch is you only have to install the software you actually want.
You’re still in the mindset of Microsoft/Apple. “The latest” doesn’t mean software bloat. Hell, I just updated my packages last night, and the space they took up went down. Package updates typically bring improvements, and I’m always excited to see what optimizations they’ve added. Sometimes, major version changes (e.g. 5.4 to 6.0) bring big changes you might not want or need, but…
…nobody is forcing anything. You get to decide what gets upgraded and when. Arch/Debian isn’t some overarching company dictating when updates happen and what gets updated. It’s a community-driven project, mostly by hobbyists, and updates happen in a piecemeal fashion as individual package maintainers make improvements.
It sounds to me like you should try out both options in a VM. And if you’re planning on Debian, be sure to give PikaOS a try, too.
With Arch partial upgrades are explicitly not supported. You either upgrade all packages to the current version or you upgrade nothing. With Debian that’s different, you can upgrade a single package (with its dependencies) just fine. Technically you can do whatever you want of course.
That said, I wouldn’t really worry about upgrades, even on old hardware. Choosing a desktop environment is much more impactful if you worry about performance.
I’m not sure what you mean. There’s a specific section in
/etc/pacman.conffor ignoring specific or group/meta packages. You absolutely can ignore specific packages and run a typicalpacman -Syuto update everything else just fine.ETA: and you can upgrade a single package with
pacman -Sy <package name>You can if you know what you’re doing, but you shouldn’t. In the context of this question holding back an Arch package is not a feature of Arch OP should rely on in every day use. In Debian this is supported (up to a point).
I would agree with that wisdom in general. I don’t think any package manager would prefer a user piecemeal updates like that.
If latest release doesnt add bloat, what the software available is only the newest and bloated, for example the latest GIMP? What if you need older Photoshop version or something for ram or ssd?
You would run Windows software with Wine (Bottles is great for this). If you can find an older installer, you would (in theory) install it in a specific directory structured for Wine (called a wine prefix).
If software is too big or heavy, there’s ways to manually install a specific package version on Arch, or you can tell pacman not to upgrade a package you have already installed by noting it should be ignored via a specific section of your
pacman.conf
Same thing stands. I run Arch daily on a 10 year old mid-range laptop, and I used to run it on a 20 year old core 2 duo laptop.
It won’t become noticeably slower with time, that’s a Windows and MacOS thing.
Arch will update all your software to the latest version, but it will still not add anything. Updating your software can even make it faster. Of course, things like web browsers will get slower the more stuff they add, but that will be the same in any Linux distro or OS.
You can also just not update, it won’t suddenly stop working. I still recommend updating for the security patches, but if you won’t connect the machine to the internet, it’s perfectly fine to not update it.
I can see it, latest distro is still small, but do you have the choice between older and newer software? Are there compatibility issues with Arch’s nonstop updates?
The Arch repos only host the latest version of a package, so usually you can’t install older versions of a software. There are some exceptions (like with PHP or Python, where you may require a specific version of the framework), but there’s not that many of them. You’ll see that it’s usually not a problem, as it’s still recommended to run the latest version of every software, for the security patches.
If you update your system constantly, there shouldn’t be any compatibility issues with the updates. The official repos are carefully managed so that, at any given point, every package works with every other package. If a common library is updated, all the packages that depend on it are recompiled and updated to use the newer version.
If you stop updating your system, everything that you already have installed will keep working as it was.
For a while, installing new apps without updating will work flawlessly. But after a while, the new apps will start becoming incompatible with your system, due to outdated libraries and missing dependencies. In that case, you’ll need to update the system so that everything is up to date again and it works. The package manager will prevent you from messing things up, so don’t worry that much about it.
Arch is a rolling release, so it’s designed to be constantly updated. That’s the way I recommend people use it, especially if they’re new to the distro. But if you don’t inatall new software, it’s also perfectly stable without updating (and you can also install new software without necessarily updating everything, if you know what you’re doing).
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.
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.
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.
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.
Both the system have updates which are often rolled out. You can choose not to update, or can set the system to update automatically. You shouldn’t be worried about updates. The os will keep on working on your laptop regardless of how many updates it receives.
Unless by low budget you mean a 2010 cheap laptop, you won’t have problems with either of the systems.
Can confirm. I have an old 2015 laptop running Bazzite, and it still updates and runs like a champ (and though that’s Fedora, it should be functionally identical to Arch or Debian for most things).
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.
As others have mentioned, you’re not forced to. But Debian is indeed way more conservative in that regard if you use their stable release. Particularly I think you won’t have issues with either regarding hardware compatibility or performance. But for what reason would you want Arch or Cachy OS if you don’t mind me asking?
Just so you know, if you install Distrobox you can run pretty much any app from any distro (except drivers), regardless if you choose Debian or Arch. So if I were you, I’d choose Debian if you’re worried about stability, and choose Arch/CachyOS if you want to keep up to date features and drivers. Then use Flatpak and Distrobox to download pretty much any app you want.
I particularly use CachyOS and have zero issues with it with my Asus Vivobook with a Ryzen 5825U released on 2023.
