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OpenBSD won't update Firefox, advises users to switch to ESR

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Re: OpenBSD won't update Firefox, advises users to switch to ESR

#301

Post by celticmusic »

djsumdog wrote: post #154
celticmusic wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Frequently_asked_questi... ? > It is the user who is ultimately responsible for the stability of their own rolling release system. The user decides when to upgrade, and merges necessary changes when required. If the user reaches out to the community for help, it is often provided in a timely manner. The difference between Arch and other distributions in this regard is that Arch is…

They first time I tried Arch, I installed it, did a system update and libc completely broke and my system was unusable. I went back to Gentoo. I went through some hell when I ran Gentoo unstable(~) but for the past several years I've been on Gentoo stable and have very few issues. I've even used it on work laptops at three different companies. It is definitely more of a do-it-yourself distro than Arch for sure, but I…

I ran Gentoo until shortly after Daniel Robbins left the project. It just started to have problems. A good example is that installing KDE would break to the point of needing to throw everything away unless you installed a few other packages in a very specific order.

That never seemed acceptable to me and I ended up moving over to Arch Linux for a good 10+ years before the instability of it finally got to me and I moved to Ubuntu.

Having said all of that, I'm glad to hear that Gentoo is stable for you. I really enjoyed my time with Gentoo and I got the feeling that after he left there were mistakes made in terms of everything working reasonably.

Your description of Arch reminds me of an experience I had with linode and arch years back. Due to an internal hardware issue, they basically lost my server. When I went to recreate, I discovered that you couldn't just update the world because it would immediately result in a broken system. You instead had to reconfigure a few things before updating the world.

I no longer use Linode.

At some point the vendor has to take responsibility. That's a large part of why I like Ubuntu, they do. It works every day without me having to worry about it.

Re: OpenBSD won't update Firefox, advises users to switch to ESR

#302

Post by celticmusic »

bscphil wrote: post #292
celticmusic wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if that were true their FAQ wouldn't tell you that broken packages weren't their responsibility.

I don't think that's true at all. If you use Ubuntu, broken packages are ultimately your responsibility unless you're paying for support from Canonical. In both Ubuntu and Arch Linux, changes will be handled carefully by the maintainers to try to avoid breakage where at all possible. The difference is basically that on Arch you're supposed to be able to handle basic sysadmin tasks yourself, which means that Arch Linu…

> on Arch you're supposed to be able to handle basic sysadmin tasks yourself

And the reason for this is because you realize the latest update killed virtualbox and you require it for your work so you need to be able to downgrade and pin the vbox application to a specific version.

Meanwhile, Ubuntu catches the problem and refuses to update the package until it's fixed. Therefore I never even realize there was a breaking update to vbox somewhere.

The difference being that Arch tells me when to tinker because it blew up again, Ubuntu allows me to choose when to tinker because it doesn't.

Re: OpenBSD won't update Firefox, advises users to switch to ESR

#303

Post by celticmusic »

mratsim wrote: post #257
pnako wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not awesome at all, it means something happening every 6 months. In corporate environments this means all the ceremony around it: tickets, CAB, etc. Meanwhile you can use RHEL or CentOS and basically leave the thing alone for 5 years.

RHEL and CentOS are not targeting the same users as Arch. Distros targeting the same desktop needs are Ubuntu, Mint, Debian-flavors, Fedora, Gentoo, ... In corporate environment for critical software you would get a contract with an on-call duty and you would only have a limited choice fo supported distros.

absolutely, but the problem is that when I pointed out that arch is less stable than these other distro's, I had people trying to defend that claim.

There is no defending it, it's a fact of life. You get bleeding edge at the cost of stability.

Re: OpenBSD won't update Firefox, advises users to switch to ESR

#304

Post by celticmusic »

alpaca128 wrote: post #229
serf wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like Arch. I run it at home. That said, just because you had good luck doesn't mean that it's stable. Here's the most trivial way I can think to explain this: Check out Arch News.[0] Ctrl-F (Find) 'manual intervention'. Six years of results on the first page ; 13 instances of 'manual intervention required'. Reliability != stability. Stability usually implies a platform on which one can use and develop for without e…

I don't know about your experience, but if at most 13 little manual interventions in 6 years would be the only problem of most "stable" distros I would have never switched to Arch. I've had various non-rolling distros fall apart on all sides within 6 months. With Arch I've had one manual intervention(aka one copy-pasted command) in over a year and one minor issue where I needed to restart a service. That's amazing an…

> Not to mention with regular backups(that should be done either way) and delaying updates in critical time periods you can easily minimize the risk.

That's the minimum that you should be doing regardless of the OS. And thus, that's not where the risk is at.

It's probably more difficult to understand if you get paid regardless of whether you can get meaningful work done.

But for those of us who live on the other side, losing an unplanned half a day due to an OS issue that actively causes us to lose money, it matters.

Arch is bleeding edge, this means software bugs are far more likely on it.

Re: OpenBSD won't update Firefox, advises users to switch to ESR

#305

Post by celticmusic »

AnonymousPlanet wrote: post #240
chmln wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has to be one of the most inaccurate memes of all time. To counter with anecdata: I've been running Arch Linux testing repositories for over a year now with no issues whatsoever.

That's awfully nice for you. But my experience was horrible every single time I've tried Arch. The main problem is, every time you choose to update you have to brace yourself for possibly wasting another hour to repair the subtle breakage the new package version of some minor piece of software introduced. I had Arch on a laptop I used for my freelance business once and took notes of the time spent on maintenance. So…

BINGO.

100% my experience as well, down to the freelance. I made another comment pointing out that the ones who think it's just a minor issue with Arch get paid whether they're getting meaningful work done or not.

Re: OpenBSD won't update Firefox, advises users to switch to ESR

#306

Post by celticmusic »

mekster wrote: post #294
AnonymousPlanet wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That might be a factor, yes. Last time I tried Arch was around 2015. However, I come from a business perspective here. You really don't need an operating system that introduces new versions on a whim in the middle of operations. There's a reason businesses run RHEL/Centos or macOS and whatever has LTS in Windows land: cost of maintenance and reliably wide windows of no possible breakage. As a business, it's kind of a…

Apparently businesses don't use rolling distro. You don't want your PHP version to endlessly get updated during your operation when you build your app at a specific version. It would mean not only you have to take care of distro update gotchas but you have to go through all the breaking changes the language introduces. Stick with LTS. Rolling is for enthusiasts, though Arch does have put decent efforts on their wiki…

> You don't want your PHP version to endlessly get updated during your operation when you build your app at a specific version.

I think we'll figure out how to upgrade in the 2-3 years of support PHP has for each version. Trying to compare this to arch's rolling release style is bananas.

Re: OpenBSD won't update Firefox, advises users to switch to ESR

#307

Post by celticmusic »

otabdeveloper2 wrote: post #206
celticmusic wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I left arch linux because I got tired of all the breakages, so not a great example.

If we're honest: Arch is annoying, but the reason people (including me) run it is because they don't want their OS to explode in a shitstorm every time a 'major upgrade' cycle happens. (Looking at you, Ubuntu.) So, your comment is 180 degrees off the mark. Arch exists for people who don't want breakages to happen. (On the other hand, if you're conditioned by Windows to reinstall the system every year, then Ubuntu mig…

The difference is I that I know the dist-upgrade is coming and can plan for it. With Arch it's on that one day that I really needed to get work done, but Arch decided it wasn't happening.

I think I'll take the planned upgrade, thanks.

Re: OpenBSD won't update Firefox, advises users to switch to ESR

#308

Post by bscphil »

enriquto wrote: post #268
bscphil wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think the benefits of saving disk space by sharing libraries do not justify the inconveniences we, desktop BSD and Linux users, obtain from being forced to disrupt and upgrade hundreds of installed software packages, just because one single desired upgrade requires to pull its dependencies It's funny, from your point of view having a centralized repository with a (usually) single (usually) latest version of a lib…

> From my point of view having a centralized repository with a (usually) single (usually) latest version of a library is an awesome thing This reasoning assumes that future versions of software are always better. This is certainly not the case. I would like that a working program does not spontaneusly break because a third party "upgrades", thus introducing a new bug. I am willing to give up anything else to be assur…

I suppose I should clarify by "latest" that I mean a version of a piece of software that is actively supported and has all the security patches. Like it or not, the ecosystem is currently built around the assumption that you do want to have this, that nobody should still be running e.g. Firefox 34. The question is what the best way of shipping it is.

The conversation in the two posts you replied to isn't about whether you always want to be on the bleeding edge all the time, it's about whether it makes sense to have a centralized repository that contains the latest version on some supported channel, which isn't necessarily the same thing as the latest -nightly. I take the position that it is; that shipping a (potentially) different version of a library with every application is a bad approach which is often less secure and harder to maintain.

Re: OpenBSD won't update Firefox, advises users to switch to ESR

#309

Post by chmln »

celticmusic wrote: post #126
chmln wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has to be one of the most inaccurate memes of all time. To counter with anecdata: I've been running Arch Linux testing repositories for over a year now with no issues whatsoever.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Frequently_asked_questi... ? > It is the user who is ultimately responsible for the stability of their own rolling release system. The user decides when to upgrade, and merges necessary changes when required. If the user reaches out to the community for help, it is often provided in a timely manner. The difference between Arch and other distributions in this regard is that Arch is…

> The last straw was me sitting down to get paying work done and spending half my day trying to recover my work environment.

Maybe don't pacman -Syu before work or if you're working the next day? It's not strictly necessary to update every day.

And no one said Arch never breaks, I just provided anecdotal counterevidence that it's really not that bad.

Re: OpenBSD won't update Firefox, advises users to switch to ESR

#310

Post by bibyte »

Izkata wrote: post #276
bibyte wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes it feels like I am living in an alternate reality. After I started using Arch Linux as my main OS I was fully prepared for it to break every few months. But it's been more then 2 years (maybe even 3 or 4 ?) and not one breakage. Also keep in mind that I update it every single day. From time to time I check the Arch Linux news site to see if anything needs manual intervention. So far I haven't needed to do a…

> Also keep in mind that I update it every single day. I can't remember what I was looking at, but within the past week I ran across a comment that said Arch Linux only supports constant upgrades such as that, and any delays that result in skipping a version are what risk causing breakages. The commenter was very surprised that they were even thinking about supporting a version jump on whatever the thread was about (…

I also have another VM that I use from time to time. I think my longest update was about after a year. I don't remember having any problems like that.
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