Arch is different…
“No way to prevent this” says only distro where this regularly happens
News from this year:
- virtualbox-ext-vnc >= 7.2.12-2 requires manual intervention (package won’t install)
- Active AUR malicious packages incident (the AUR is locked)
- Arch Linux 2026 Leader Election Results
- Breaking changes for all users of
varnish, which is renamed tovinyl-cache(it’s a proxy, only affects servers) - kea >= 1:3.0.3-6 update requires manual intervention (dhcp server, affects routers)
- iptables now defaults to the nft backend (affects pretty much nothing)
Repost.
Also, my Mint install broke, uh, shit I don’t remember, 5 times? Arch broke zero times. Zero times not my own fault for forgetting I was installing something and shutting off the computer, of course. Except for the times I tried the fucking installer python script, but since I never even booted the install it doesn’t count.
Mint broke for you? That’s the first I’ve heard of it.
Also if you have a habit of shutting down the PC during updates, check out atomic/immutable distros. They are almost impossible to break. You can pull the power during an update and it’ll be fine.
Mint breaks weirdly often but also it’s inconsistent in my experience. It’s a great example of it explodes for some people and others it’s a god like entity of perfection. Never in-between. Lol
Iptables change actually fucked me because I’d tweaked something stupid 12 years ago and forgot. Took lime 45-60 mins to fix
this year
And one post earlier (2025-12-20) that the image likely could be about:
NVIDIA 590 driver drops Pascal and lower support
Install nvidia-580xx-dkms from the AUR
Impact: Updating the NVIDIA packages [without manually changing to AUR packages] on systems with Pascal, Maxwell, or older cards will fail to load the driver, which may result in a broken graphical environment.
If Nvidia deprecates your driver you’ll be up shits creek on just about every distro unless you already used nouveau.
Yes, that was a while ago, so it’s a repost. Also, NoVideo deprecations affect all distributions.
If you’re running Virtualbox on Arch you deserve everything you get.
What’s wrong with it?
Let me put it like this: Imagine you’ve won this beautiful pristine house full of potential and it cost you absolutely nothing. You can rennovate and decorate and do anything you want with it. Endless possibilities.
Instead, the first thing you decide to do is call up Larry Ellison and invite him to personally come and shit on your kitchen floor. And one day you forgot his shit was still on the floor and you stepped in it and now Larry’s shit is all through your house. And then the phone rings and it’s Larry because he’s been monitoring your house and now his lawyers are suing you for stepping in his shit.
In addition to VirtualBox being a fucking awful piece of software, Oracle is the absolute antithesis of Linux - anti-user, anti-freedom. Why would you put that closed-source, privacy-trampling, proprietary bullshit on your pristine Linux install? . Use KVM virtualization instead, or even a more modern docker-ish like solution.
I dont get the bad press arch got. I use arch (btw) and can’t remember last time it wont boot after an update. It maybe happened to me twice in 20 years and at least once was my fault and the other was because i didn’t read the pacman post warning me
Once it happened to me because 6 years prior I’d made a change thinking ‘hah. That makes more sense’ and then things changed under me and I had to read journalctl in a tty. Low key enjoyed dealing with it. But here’s the thing: most ppl are dead at that point. No idea what to do. Arch is for nerds.
Edit: if you also read my other post about iptables, this is a completely different thing. I had two issues.
Active AUR malicious packages incident (the AUR is locked)
🤭 heh
To be fair, adoption as a concept is the problem not the actual aur.
The fundamentals of the aur was fine though that entire ordeal. It’s just one optional choice layered on top that wasn’t
Blaming the aur fundamentally for that choice is like blaming the city planner for when a idiot turns down the wrong way on a one way street.
We kinda just accepted the risk because the upsides were worth it. But some people are assholes and gotta ruin it for everyone.
This isn’t the first type of problem that the AUR has had. A few years ago it had problems staying up, because it had no scalability to speak of.
“Best hopes and wishes” is not an accepted engineering design strategy. If something can be abused, it will be. Not planning for it is just that, poor planning.
The AUR has been poorly put together and this wave of malware is just another symptom of a deeper problem.
Foot-guns are my PROTECTED SECOND AMENDMENT RIGHT.
Arch explicitly says “never do this”
Well yeah and cigarettes tell you not to smoke them
Lol. Care to explain how your analogy stands?
Arch will give you cancer
Arch can be traded for sex and murders in prison.
Hasn’t yet. Ubuntu, on the other hand, managed to piss me off completely
Ubuntu pissed me off back when Shuttleworth said, “This is not a democracy!”
Oh yeah, I did miss some crazy stuff in my windows days
What happened with Arch?
Wait, let me update real quick and reboot, brb
the fact that they wrote “be right back” 5 hours ago and then never came back is telling
Another 13h later, still nothing
almost 30h now, the arch update has to have bricked their hardware or something O.o
Maybe bricked the user too
Except the last arch news post is a month ago about virtualbox. I’ve blindly run pacman -Syu for years without issue
Just did it on two machines this morning actually…
Me three
Every hero has a journey.
Yours has just begun.
I warn you, this is not the easy path.
But I urge you to heed the call.
For though there will be trials and tribulations,
soon, my friend, you will own new socks.
It’s difficult to take people shitting on arch in here seriously. I’ll take 1h per year fixing whatever broke over a whole weekend upgrading Debian.
Oh and god forbid you need to compile yourself a package and maybe a few of its dependencies from scratch because that 6 years old bug didn’t make it through the freeze last release.
Whole weekend upgrading debian? I am confused. That’s not how debian works?
Upgrading major versions, e.g. Debian 12 -> Debian 13
Yes? Same thing… aptitude upgrade, aptitude dist-upgrade, edit /etc/apt/sources.lst to point to the new major version (s/bookworm/trixie), aptitude upgrade, aptitude dist-upgrade Done. Typically takes 1 hourish at most.
As someone who gave up on linux years ago, this sounds like one person driving a broken old alfa romeo shitting on someone else driving a broken old fiat. Whilst I watch on from a modern EV.
Hah, here come the downvotes.
This hasn’t been a thing in years at this point
That’s why I go for boring distros like Fedora
Yeah, lol. Arch people keep telling me that this never happens, and yet here it is.
Nah. Debian is fine for me.
You just need to keep an eye on the news and it won’t happen 99% of the time. Ive got it set up so news updates go to my email in a specific folder. That means i get the notification on my phone as well. Or just get into the habit of checking the page before updating
I don’t need more shit to remember to do. I need a computer that works without me micromanaging it
Thats fine, then arch just isnt for you. Use what you want, but if someone installs arch then complains that it broke because they didnt check the news (something that the maintainers recommend you do) then the blame/fault shifts to the user, not the system.
That seems like a pain in the ass. like the sort of shit why i left windows behind. noted: will not touch arch. thanks for the heads up.
It comes from a very different place than Windows, and the data here is very transparent, unlike your average Microsoft KB.
dont care. It’s still going into my “places i will never go.” box. dont need an OS cockblocking me from my games. that shit can fuck right off.
Besides, some of is use our OS for work. cant afford telling a job “wahh im too stupid to use a reliable OS” just doesnt fly.
https://archlinux.org/news/virtualbox-ext-vnc-7212-2-requires-manual-intervention/ dont worry you only need to shit your pants if you are using virtual box and dont read (sorry OP)
Who uses virtualbox on Linux having KVM, QEMU and virsh/virt-manager?
It’s gonna be slower, proprietary, and it’s not even as easy to install
It’s not slower.
proprietary
Only the extension pack, the app itself is GPL.
not even as easy to install
How do you mean? You simply install virtualbox (and virtual-guest-iso if you want). All the relevant packages are available from official repos, at least on Manjaro, including a linux-virtualbox-host-modules-meta package that maintains the required linux*-virtualbox-host-modules as needed automatically.
Also, I prefer virtualbox because it makes a lot of stuff easy to do.
File sharing with the host for example, it’s a matter of simply pointing at a dir in settings, as opposed to having to set up Samba on the host (which I don’t have and don’t want) and deal with wierd networking issues, or deal with virtiofs.
Don’t even get me started on selecting locations for the vm files. Whatever you think it should work like, virt-manager’s way ain’t it.
Nice bait there, I nearly started writing an actual answer.
Yeah i had this happen with devices that originally came with Windows sometimes, mainly laptops. It must be a combo of BIOS, firmware and hardware that increases the chances of update instability. Its just not feasible for every distro to have the same kind of hardware config testing support that Microsoft has for Windows.
Windows spying on you is not just for marketing, they grab your current environment and sanitize the result so they can get a nice list of hardware and application configurations for when they need to test.
Idk, I’ve had installs of Kinoite, Bazzite, and NixOS bork themselves unrecoverably. Arch, if something goofs, more often than not I can work my way back to a working system without wiping.
What specifically happened? Can you share the news item?
I think no rolling releases has gotten their act right. All eventually break with an update, and if you skipped several, the likelihood of reinstalling is high.
At least they teach you good backup practices.
My record with Arch is longer than 6 months without updates, and it completed the updates fine.
My oldest install is 4 years old, and it’s true, it became unbootable once. But it was my fault, for generating an initramfs without free space in /tmp, which caused it to fail. It was a quick fix once I figured it out.
All of this isn’t to say rolling is as stable as Debian, of course. Rolling is inherently gonna be more unstable, and that’s by design.
But if you take some care, you can actually make these rolling distros pretty stable. Hell, my servers run Arch (I’m working on migrating them to Gentoo to get rid of systemd, but I haven’t yet commited to it). And I haven’t had any serious breakages, even on Arch Linux ARM.
But it was my fault, for generating an initramfs without free space in /tmp, which caused it to fail.
I really don’t think that was your fault. A critical build process that’s not checking for resources and not failing gracefully and leaving the machine unbootable is not the user’s fault.
A build+install can fail for many reasons. It’s actually annoying how many critical system updates on Linux don’t use a staging process and a sudden power-off at the wrong time can leave the machine completely crippled.
Some distros have taken to doing a BTRFS snapshot before they start the upgrade but (a) they’re far and few in between and (b) that still doesn’t fix the upgrade process, it’s just sweeping the problem under the carpet.
I don’t mean it happened right now. I mean it often happens. Probably when i tweak too much or more installs from AUR.
That’s why I use archdebian gives me all the latest software 5 years later.
Why, what news? What I need to be careful this time?
Nothing. OP is imagining an idiot for imaginary internet points.
I don’t (and will never) use Arch, but I’ve heard nothing but how user-unfriendly it is. I don’t look for posts about Arch; they just seem to find me – like this one. I don’t hear anything about other distros. Why do people use Arch? Does it offer some outlandish advantage that other distros don’t? Is it for bragging rights? Seriously? I haven’t heard a single good thing about it.
Arch is mainly for people who prefer instant updates on every software. Like developers, some hardcore gamers want to tweak their system too deep and have too much time to fix if it breaks.
Snapshots are a big relief, as they allow you to directly boot into the previous working version. But if the bootloader itself failed, you might need a live USB to fix it.
Arch is not bad or unfriendly at all. It allows users to deeply customize their system how they want it, and that’s what causes an unstable system at the end. Also, the use of too many AUR softwares at the system level is another reason. It is not official. So by using AUR heavily, we can’t guarantee it will work with other system software.
If you use Arch with snapshots and only install a minimal amount of AUR system-level software, then it’s completely fine for daily use.
Other serious struggles.
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Very new releases bring a lot of bugs. Recently I saw my screen was flashing when I opened settings. Also, crashes can occur constantly. You have to report it to get an immediate fix from developers.
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Snapshots can take a fair amount of your storage. But you can control it in Snap.
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AUR packages are not tested for their authenticity or security at all.
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A breakage or failure to boot can terrify newbies. Unlike Fedora or Debian, there are no built-in recovery tools out of the box. Everything is the user’s responsibility.
Arch is all about user freedom. All those crashes and failures are not too hard to fix, but you have to spend much time on them. If you have pre-cations like a live USB and snapshots, then there is nothing to worry about at all.
Unlike Windows, Linux demands users know it more and read long wiki pages, which is good in a sense.
Many people in the Linux community want their system built from scratch. So Arch stands in between, distributions like VoidLinux and Gentoo.
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I think it’s like driving a manual transmission car in the US. You have more control and are more in tune with your car, but when you’re stuck in bumper to bumper stop and go traffic it sucks ass. Similarly some people make it their identity and that’s where the memes come from.
This, I can get behind. Excellent comparison.
i use arch because i find it much easier to start from a system with just a tty and install software i need than to have a full distro and to find and remove packages that i don’t want/need and replace them with the ones i need - makes maintenance easy and i know what’s running on my system. it’s also in my experience one of the few rare distros that package a non-broken fcitx5 which i rely on (but that’s specific to my setup). and the build system is awesome. the community might be a bit harsh on people who post error messages to forums without any attempts at basic troubleshooting.
i expect that people who make these memes installed arch because they heard that it’s a bleeding edge distro that all the kool kidz use, downloaded a bunch of packages from the AUR which messed up their dependencies after the update and now their system isn’t booting right. if you don’t skip updates for a long time and don’t do weird tricks with system packages, arch might be genuinely one of the easiest distros once you get past the installation which can be tedious if you’re used to automated installers.
Why would anyone want to use a distro that can break at any update unexpectedly or have to read articles first to see if it’s safe is beyond me.
It’s too much of a hassle.
That’s literally every distro ever. Fuck even debian can break on an update. Things happen.
No.
I don’t have to go read articles about the latest update to see if it’s going to break and have to sift through documentation for a fix or a workaround and troubleshoot on nearly every update on Debian. Or Redhat, OpenSUSE, etc.
Any distro can break at any update. If you’ve ever done a major upgrade on any fixed-release distro, you have very likely experienced some sort of issue.
And the solution is very simple (and the same for all distros): Enable Snapshots, roll back if important stuff breaks.
Any distro can break at any update.
Not atomic distros, at least not nearly the same risk. Every update is like a fresh install.
And that fresh install can also just fuck up. Have you never had a clean install go screwy? I know I sure the fuck have a few times over the years.
I’ve had bazzite kill it self twice so far on an update.
I wish arch didn’t have that reputation because I seldom have issues with it
Its like that subway meme where it goes “my brother in Christ you made the sandwich”
If arch breaks it’s 99% of the time user error, and that’s ok. But to say it’s the distros fault is incorrect imo.
I mean, they earned it…
yeah windows do be like that
It’s a problem regardless of what OS it happens to. I’ve personally/professionally found it much more frequent that an update breaks something on linux vs. windows, but it’s also much easier to fix those issues & they’re rarely the kind of critical failure you get with a M$ OS.
(and if you truly crave stability, Debian is always happy to welcome you back into it’s big soft embrace)
