I’m thinking of choosing Debian instead. I’m a student, low on budget, and wanna play with linux and laptops, and I think Arch or Cachy OS need updates or distro upgrades(?) weekly or something?
Solved: up to date Arch can last for 2 decades on my cheap laptop, and use Flatpak for older versions of software.
This isn’t like a phone OS where they add ressource-draining new features every 6 months.
If your computer can run the OS at installation, it’ll be able to run it for a long time.
One good reason not to use Arch is if you have a limited internet connection.
Updates are often 1 GB or more per week, depending on what you have installed.
So if that’s an issue, Debian is the better choice.
“If your computer can run the OS at installation, it’ll be able to run it for a long time.”
but what if I have a cheap laptop? Arch will force me to download the latest, and using xfce feels not enough.
You’re still in the mindset of Microsoft/Apple. “The latest” doesn’t mean software bloat. Hell, I just updated my packages last night, and the space they took up went down. Package updates typically bring improvements, and I’m always excited to see what optimizations they’ve added. Sometimes, major version changes (e.g. 5.4 to 6.0) bring big changes you might not want or need, but…
…nobody is forcing anything. You get to decide what gets upgraded and when. Arch/Debian isn’t some overarching company dictating when updates happen and what gets updated. It’s a community-driven project, mostly by hobbyists, and updates happen in a piecemeal fashion as individual package maintainers make improvements.
It sounds to me like you should try out both options in a VM. And if you’re planning on Debian, be sure to give PikaOS a try, too.
With Arch partial upgrades are explicitly not supported. You either upgrade all packages to the current version or you upgrade nothing. With Debian that’s different, you can upgrade a single package (with its dependencies) just fine. Technically you can do whatever you want of course.
That said, I wouldn’t really worry about upgrades, even on old hardware. Choosing a desktop environment is much more impactful if you worry about performance.
I’m not sure what you mean. There’s a specific section in
/etc/pacman.conffor ignoring specific or group/meta packages. You absolutely can ignore specific packages and run a typicalpacman -Syuto update everything else just fine.ETA: and you can upgrade a single package with
pacman -Sy <package name>You can if you know what you’re doing, but you shouldn’t. In the context of this question holding back an Arch package is not a feature of Arch OP should rely on in every day use. In Debian this is supported (up to a point).
I would agree with that wisdom in general. I don’t think any package manager would prefer a user piecemeal updates like that.
If latest release doesnt add bloat, what the software available is only the newest and bloated, for example the latest GIMP? What if you need older Photoshop version or something for ram or ssd?
You would run Windows software with Wine (Bottles is great for this). If you can find an older installer, you would (in theory) install it in a specific directory structured for Wine (called a wine prefix).
If software is too big or heavy, there’s ways to manually install a specific package version on Arch, or you can tell pacman not to upgrade a package you have already installed by noting it should be ignored via a specific section of your
pacman.confI run arch on a 2007 laptop. It was a cheap laptop at the time. Still runs very fine. Unless you want to keep the laptop running for the next 40 years I wouldn’t worry too much.
Debian on a Lenovo t400 here.
I think I can see it, codes added to the latest release is unnoticeable, but are you forced to use the heaviest software? or are you able to choose the older ones?
The beauty of Arch is you only have to install the software you actually want.
If you install from repositores you are forced to use the latest version. You can use older versions through appimages. In general, there’s no real reason to use older versions unless you need to reproduce something specific which was done in the past doing it in the same way.
Same thing stands. I run Arch daily on a 10 year old mid-range laptop, and I used to run it on a 20 year old core 2 duo laptop.
It won’t become noticeably slower with time, that’s a Windows and MacOS thing.
Arch will update all your software to the latest version, but it will still not add anything. Updating your software can even make it faster. Of course, things like web browsers will get slower the more stuff they add, but that will be the same in any Linux distro or OS.
You can also just not update, it won’t suddenly stop working. I still recommend updating for the security patches, but if you won’t connect the machine to the internet, it’s perfectly fine to not update it.
I can see it, latest distro is still small, but do you have the choice between older and newer software? Are there compatibility issues with Arch’s nonstop updates?
The Arch repos only host the latest version of a package, so usually you can’t install older versions of a software. There are some exceptions (like with PHP or Python, where you may require a specific version of the framework), but there’s not that many of them. You’ll see that it’s usually not a problem, as it’s still recommended to run the latest version of every software, for the security patches.
If you update your system constantly, there shouldn’t be any compatibility issues with the updates. The official repos are carefully managed so that, at any given point, every package works with every other package. If a common library is updated, all the packages that depend on it are recompiled and updated to use the newer version.
If you stop updating your system, everything that you already have installed will keep working as it was.
For a while, installing new apps without updating will work flawlessly. But after a while, the new apps will start becoming incompatible with your system, due to outdated libraries and missing dependencies. In that case, you’ll need to update the system so that everything is up to date again and it works. The package manager will prevent you from messing things up, so don’t worry that much about it.
Arch is a rolling release, so it’s designed to be constantly updated. That’s the way I recommend people use it, especially if they’re new to the distro. But if you don’t inatall new software, it’s also perfectly stable without updating (and you can also install new software without necessarily updating everything, if you know what you’re doing).