Interesting read! The A/B upgrade sounds a bit overkill, you can always just pop up a live distro or install a recovery system (on an old version) in a partition in case something goes wrong.
I recently moved to Arch after a few years of NixOS (preceded by years of Arch) and I think the fears of the author are misplaced.
Arch is definitely a very serious and mature distro and I'd trust them more than Valve.
The quality of the packages available for Arch is what made me move from NixOS.
The main repos are updated really fast and AUR has a lot of useful packages.
> The A/B upgrade sounds a bit overkill, you can always just pop up a live distro or install a recovery system (on an old version) in a partition in case something goes wrong.
You and I can, the overwhelming majority of computer users cannot. Valve clearly focuses on building for the average person, something that Linux distributions (as much as I love them) still don’t really do (well).
The system automatically recovering from a failed upgrade is essential in a low-maintenance OS at this point.
> The A/B upgrade sounds a bit overkill, you can always just pop up a live distro or install a recovery system (on an old version) in a partition in case something goes wrong.
Could, sure, but we have the technology to make it unnecessary and disk isn't that expensive, so why not?
I recently moved to Arch after a few years of NixOS (preceded by years of Arch) and I think the fears of the author are misplaced.
Arch is definitely a very serious and mature distro and I'd trust them more than Valve.
The quality of the packages available for Arch is what made me move from NixOS. The main repos are updated really fast and AUR has a lot of useful packages.