Ten years of using Arch Linux

2018-07-08

Just a quick log entry: About ten years ago, I made the switch from Ubuntu to Arch Linux.

Ever since, I have stopped worrying about upgrades. Not even once has an upgrade screwed up my machine. I only reinstalled Arch once in 2011: It was the easiest way to switch from 32 bit to 64 bit. (I got new hardware and my previous Intel Core Duo T2300 did not support 64 bit.) Or maybe I was just lazy, because there is a guide on how to migrate between architectures and it already existed back in 2011.

Virtually all upgrades are totally smooth. My Arch boxes require almost no maintenance other than

read the Arch news,
(bonus points for keeping an eye on the bug tracker and the mailing lists),
run pacman -Syu,
deal with .pacnew files,
and clean up orphaned dependencies (pacman -Qdt) if you’re bored.

That’s so much easier than dealing with massive release upgrades.

To all Arch devs, trusted users, the bug wranglers, and everyone else involved: Thank you so much. You’re doing an awesome job!

Keep rolling!

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