I want to switch from Fedora to Arch Linux, and I have a lit

[kmiller10]

Hi, I am a Ph.D. Student and I am a Fedora user for my whole linux time (But I tried Manjaro and Debian for a very little time and read some reviews about it), since it is between Debian (Stability) and Arch (Rolling release). And I have a friend who is an Arch Linux user and we hang out a lot after the end of quarantine. While we hang out I noticed the speed, simplicity, control and how resourceful and lightweight Arch Linux is and because he always boast how good it is. I also noticed how fast is pacman and how vast is AUR, it is very easy to install application in Arch Linux

$ pacman -S <app name>

and for application which is not in official repo (correct me if I'm wrong, I just had a little peak on how he used it)

$ git clone <app url>

$ cd <app folder>

$ makepkg -S

compared to Fedora which has a little "more" complex method in installing app and have a little more thing like update fedora 33 before installing the filesynced app. I also noticed that Arch is very minimal compared to bloated Fedora. So we had a little discussion about Arch and there's some question I forgot to ask him. So here they are.

I use Fedora because I can and want to update only every 9 months and only needs a little maintenance. He said that Arch Linux has more extensive maintenance and needs to be updated more often than most of the distros. So

(1.) How long I can hold the updates of Arch Linux, and how much maintenance it needs? He said I can use the LTS version of linux, but did not give any more details.

(2.) How stable is Arch Linux, it seems like he always broke his system since he always tweak and configure many things.

(3.) How do you consider your system as "broken" in Arch Linux? I consider broken as not system not booting and system getting corrupted, so my definition of stable is usable system with no too much or bunch of errors when

journalctl -p 3 -xb

is executed.

(4.) If I will install Arch Linux do I need to decrypt my Fedora encryption? my fedora setup encrypted my home drive, so do I need to decrypt it first before installing Arch? I never had that much experience in Linux since I settled at Fedora after trying and reading feedbacks about Manjaro and Debian for a day.

Cheers!

[pogojotz]

Hi,
long long ago I too came from Fedora to Arch and have no regrets. Sure Arch is a pain in the ***** to setup, especially if you are new to it, but the Wiki is vast, precise and for most parts correct (which is not necessarily the case for other distros wikis). You learn so much just from installation and maintenance that it is worth the time.

1) It is recommended to run an update at least every time you install a new package. I always do this `pacman -Syu <package>` to install new packages, which does include the update. Other than that, you should be fine with every 9 months. Just keep an eye on the arch-announce mailing list (https://lists.archlinux.org/listinfo/). If they post something there it's often better to react than to ignore.

2) Very stable once YOU stabilized it If you choose to fiddle around with it, you can break stuff, but that is easier to fix than with most other distros IMO.

3) That is really everyone own definition IMO. `journalctl -p 3 -xb` gives very little output for me, just because of the missing bloat.

4) You should first find out what kind of encryption you have there exactly through Fedora documentation and read up in the ArchWiki and compare. This might be a good start: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Dm-crypt. You could consider a side-by-side installation first, to see if you can "crack" the encryption inside Arch; but it might be really easier to just decrypt it.
As a side note: I would not reuse the user home directory as it is, if that is your plan. All user application settings are saved there and you might have different versions with incompatibilities etc. A fresh start is the easiest way into Arch. After that your installation might live for decades, due to the rolling release.

Good luck and have fun playing around