I am done with Arch Linux. I love the simplicity of Arch. I love "The Arch Way." I love the pacman package manager. But the arch guys change things too often. It is too bleeding edge for me. I had enough. I have removed it from my laptop, my wife's laptop and from my Raspberry Pi (RPi).

About a year ago, I came across Arch Linux. I went to their website, read their introduction, and fell in love with "The Arch Way." Afterwards, I removed ubuntu from my laptop and installed arch following their beginners' guide. I learned a ton about linux during the installation. I got it right at the first attempt. I enjoyed being in charge of everything on my computer.

But it cost me too much time. Every now and then after a system update one or two package would break, something would not work, some too much up-to-date software would contain so many bugs that those become unusable.

While I was keeping my own machine quite up-to-date by updating two/three times a week, I was not updating my wife's laptop that frequently. As a result, I forgot that they have moved /lib to /usr/lib and that if you are not careful enough you could break your system. Murphy's law was correct, I was not careful enough and I broke the system. It took me a few hours of wrestling with the system involving chrooting from an ubuntu live system. At this point, I thought that arch was taking too much time. After that I just removed arch from our laptops and installed ubuntu.

A few weeks back, I was able to break the Arch Linux Arm running on my RPi that hosts this website. I was upgrading from soft-float kernel to latest hard-float kernel featuring the turbo mode. Apparently, my /boot partition was not mounted by default and so while upgrading the system, the firmware and the kernel was not updated but all the libraries were updated. As a result, I had hard-float enabled library and soft-float enabled kernel. Moreover, I forgot about the /lib and /usr/lib stuff. Voila, I broke my system. Unfortunately, this time I was not able to fix it. I was not able to chroot the RPi since I did not have an arm hard-float kernel installed anywhere.

The next story was short, I gave up. I installed raspbian in my RPi in new SDCARD, moved my Wordpress installation to a it.

I am not going back to Arch Linux, ever. I learned a lot of stuff from it, but I don't need it anymore. I just can't afford the cost (time).