this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2025
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I realized my VLC was broke some point in the week after updating Arch. I spend time troubleshooting then find a forum post with replies from an Arch moderator saying they knew it would happen and it's my fault for not wanting to read through pages of changelogs. Another mod post says they won't announce that on the RSS feed either. I thought I was doing good by following the RSS but I guess that's not enough.

I've been happily using Arch for 5 years but after reading those posts I've decided to look for a different distro. Does anyone have recommendations for the closest I can get to Arch but with a different attitude around updating?

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[–] mactan@lemmy.ml 9 points 3 months ago (1 children)

vlc was already like this on arch for a long time, literally took just a moment to look at the optional dependencies and grab the latest "actually give me everything lmao" package group

[–] Ricaz@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 points 3 months ago

Yeah I can't believe he's been using Arch for 5 years and didn't even bat an eye over the massive pacman output

[–] lcb@lemmy.ml 9 points 3 months ago

I had the same problem, i did start with arch ,but man i remember doing a update after 4 days(4Gb of new updates) and my system faild to boot. From that moment i went debian route.

[–] Cenotaph@mander.xyz 9 points 3 months ago (2 children)

Opensuse tumbleweed or if you want to keep the arch featureset but with the rollback-ability of BTRFS check out CachyOS

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[–] slaveOne@reddthat.com 8 points 3 months ago (2 children)

You can mitigate this with Timeshift

[–] ada@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 points 3 months ago
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[–] OhVenus_Baby@lemmy.ml 8 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (4 children)

Honestly NIXos. Run it impermanent or traditional OS style. If your coming from Arch and want less breakage and more declarative configuration. Immutable or not. Pick almost any DE and all you maintain is your nix config. Nix config is your master file its not huge and the machine runs from it as you tell it. The machine does the rest. No system drift, no cruft. Just works and if you break it. Select your previous generation at boot and your back exactly as you were before.

[–] markstos@lemmy.world 9 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Downside: it requires knowing a new coding language, Nix, to maintain your laptop.

If you don’t understand it, it’s going to be painful to fix anything that doesn’t work.

[–] OhVenus_Baby@lemmy.ml 4 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

The syntax is cake but your point is entirely valid. If your config is commented and plain. There's not much of learning curve. I came from windows to mint, now to NIX. I did a full custom install luks, all my apps and settings pretty much loaded, settings and all, from my mint machine to make the transition easy as I could. Damn near like I never left and even more so now that I have backups, systems in place and working on impermenance and using a golden USB to boot my machine from any device, anywhere. Once I got gen 1 running the rest was simple. The day to day is zero fuss. It's totally mental burden free. That's what I wanted. To finally be stable and out of the way.

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[–] bitwolf@sh.itjust.works 8 points 3 months ago

I use Fedora its a good reliable in between distro if you like fast updates but want tested updates.

[–] Admetus@sopuli.xyz 8 points 3 months ago

I also noticed vlc has broken (installed last week apparently)

Using the pacman syntax:

pacman -Q -i -d vlc

showed a conflict with the vlc-plugin (which appeared to be uninstalled already) and no vlc-plugin-#### installed.

The dependencies were fully explained in the list, including the vlc-plugins-all dependency. I'm lazy so that's the dependency I installed on my EndeavourOS.

[–] peetabix@sh.itjust.works 7 points 3 months ago (3 children)

I'm running EndeavourOS and waiting for something like this to happen.

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[–] Maragato@lemmy.world 7 points 3 months ago

I left Arch for the same reason but in relation to my system's graphics. If you are an end user, an operating system should work for you, not you for the system. I installed Tumbleweed 5 years ago and its snapper tool gives great peace of mind when using a rolling system. My advice, try Tumbleweed, its package manager (zypper) already supports parallel downloads and although it is slower than pacman, it is more complete in package and repository management (an example is what has happened in Arch recently with firmware packages and that requires manual user intervention because pacman cannot make those changes automatically).

[–] cyborganism@piefed.ca 7 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I've been using Ubuntu/Kubuntu since 2004 and I've always been happy and had very little problems.

It's a good, no hassle distro that works and is fairly up to date, especially if you use the non-LTS ones. I prefer staying with LTS though. At least my OS is stable and I don't have to spend my free time troubleshooting anything.

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[–] procapra@lemmy.ml 6 points 3 months ago (5 children)

Debians testing branch might be a good shout. Packages stay pretty up-to-date and usually stuff doesn't break. Worst case you can pull a package from unstable when needed.

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[–] johnnyb@discuss.tchncs.de 5 points 3 months ago (4 children)

you should be good after installing the optional dependencies

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[–] DonutsRMeh@lemmy.world 5 points 3 months ago

Cachy OS has been treating me very well. Perfect all around. Very helpful people and very nice. I am not going anywhere

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