I am currently using EndeavourOS, but am annoyed by the constant daily updates of 1GB and pacman not installing important dependencies automatically (ex: spell checker for document editor). I like the way Fedora works: you update whenever, important dependencies are downloaded automatically, and packages are recent-ish, but I don’t like that it takes forever to run dnf. I don’t want to use Manjaro (apparently it breaks quickly?), and the distro needs to support KDE. I know about Flatpak, but I don’t want to download 1GB of data for each app. Are there any good options?

(Yes, I can probably deal with Fedora, but dnf is slower than apt, and I don’t want to deal with external repositories for non-free software.)

  • Aniki 🌱🌿@lemm.eeEnglish
    0·
    8 months ago

    With a rolling release you don’t need to install every update every single day. You just need to remember to occasionally update to the latest. Updating every day on a rolling release is actually kinda dangerous. I wouldn’t recommend that in practice. Why not configure an auto-install script? You could probably make a systemd unit file that does a pacman -Syu overnight, if it can.

    • poinck@lemm.ee
      0·
      8 months ago

      Why is it not dangerous to update only once a week or month on Arch?

      • Aniki 🌱🌿@lemm.eeEnglish
        0·
        8 months ago

        Because minor patches are not always worth installing. If there’s a new exploit you should update immediately but you dont need to give a shit that every python package has a minor update. The point of a rolling release is to give you the option to use the latest and greatest.

        • poinck@lemm.ee
          0·
          8 months ago

          That does not explain the dangerous part.

          I would argue, that on Arch I can get a fancy update with a bug even if I only update every week, and I may have to live with it longer if I stick to weekly updates.

          With this logic, it is always dangerous to update Arch, if you don’t look what is coming in. I know, that Arch is not that unstable it used to be. But people seem to warn about Arch updates, still. I wonder how the situation really is. I will never know for my self, because I will not install Arch again, anytime soon.

          And I don’t agree that updating a rolling distro daily is per se dangerous. You can do that with Gentoo if you don’t unmask unstable (~arch) keywords and follow the news provided with eselect. I can even mask stable updates if I am not ready to deal with them yet.

    • demesisx@infosec.pubEnglish
      0·
      8 months ago

      It’s not dangerous if you’re using NixOS. I roll my configuration every single day. If it doesn’t evaluate because someone broke something important, I don’t switch to it. Otherwise, I just comment out that package or even fix the broken component (fairly easily 99% of the time) and go about my day.