It was an arch kernel upgrade that brought this rant about, ironically.
If you pin your kernel version, your system is unsupported. If you upgrade, it breaks. If you have relatively recent hardware, you kinda need that upgrade in hopes the hardware support gets better…. And so the wheel spins.
yeah, with the introduction of hybrid graphics and the unstated deprecation of desktop gaming hardware this hardware issue is endlessly irritating.
it's mostly settled now, and in general the kernel on the live usb's are perfectly adequate for most gear.
really it's this idiotic new hardware that breaks old standards that is the worst part of it, and as i understand it, nvidia is the worst offender, though my experience with amd gpu's hasn't exactly been smooth.
it can't come soon enough that BSD kernels come back into fashion, most hardware makers are already writing drivers already for BSD kernels, but making them also work with the infinitely large linux kernel codebase is a total nightmare.
really, the monolithic kernel model is dead, people just haven't got around to burying it yet.
some sort of effort to deduplicate dev effort especially in hardware would be a great thing, but i'm not holding my breath.
as it is, the dispersion of effort on GUI dev is incredibly annoying. i run cinnamon now, it's the one that has the best features and doesn't keep breaking compatibility like Gnome.
that's another thing i'm sure has ruined your day more than a few times too. this gnome 4 stuff is just so unnecessary. i've not seen any actual new features in it, why did they bump the version and deliberately break half the APIs so my desktop looks like a dog's breakfast.
and who in the FUCK thought it would be a good idea to copy apple's idiotic two tone fucking windows. oof, jesus, as if theming and day/night mode wasn't already enough, let's double that.
Used to run Arch on the desktop on an old laptop back in the day, now I only have Arch on a couple VPS. I will admit Arch devs have been absolutely sloppy lately with package/system updates. I also had a kernel problem when I used Arch on Digital Ocean, but it was a custom unsupported install I did years ago before it finally kernel panicked. It's usually fine if you don't do partial system upgrades and don't use testing repo sources. FWIW Debian 12 on my X1 Thinkpad has been a very stable desktop experience. Coming from someone who has used Arch since 06, I would never recommend Arch on the desktop for development
I've been using Linux on the desktop for 20+ years. If I want it to just work, Debian is awesome. I find these days appimage, flatpak, and docker have eased a lot of the pain of running newer packages on a stable Debian core.
i've crossed in the opposite direction. i poked at debian but it wasn't any different materially from ubuntu or pop os. pop generally has been the best descendant of debian/ubuntu for gaming laptops i've found, but i got really fed up with a whole range of issues, debian, ubuntu, linux kernel, and gnome, and manjaro was just annoying with the setup.
arch has been as pleasant on my MSI bravo (which i had to sell to keep feeding myself while i work) and this old crappy lenovo ideapad 3.
several things that i have much preferred with arch is being able to set up a single efi partition with a single system partition on LUKS with only one password login, the "downgrade" program, which makes kernel management a dream, and cinnamon, i have tried several others, lxde, kde, mate, but cinnamon is just the best for a small display.
oh yeah, and i didn't mention wayland. i hate wayland, so much. wayland plus the recent version 6 kernels is such a mess, some kernels make outright garbage on the display, some don't let me change to other display modes, still others don't have working power management.
oh yeah and linux-hardened... i'm not tolerating any sniff of malware anymore after having several of my systems breached in recent months mainly by browser flaws. i had brave sync suddenly have a new unknown device appear on it. a youtube adblocker suddenly was being flagged as malware infected, and i do wonder now for how long. so i have also switched over to firefox and set it to lock everything down as well.
my system runs beautifully now, even on a 6.4 kernel, 20gb of ram with radeon APU and zram swap enabled, except for the nicer 144hz display and fast GPU i almost don't miss my bravo 15.
