Sure, the drivers install real quick, but the whole model is rolling release. In three months, you can’t be sure that any one piece of software is actually compatible with the rest of your packages. Any long time Arch user will tell you about the weird manual tweaks they’ve had to make at one time or another just to make sure their wifi still works or soemthing like that. After like 26 months of updates, my version of wpa_supplicant just gave up the ghost and started crashing. Didn’t have this issue on Ubuntu, so the fix was clear. This wasn’t the first time some bizarre driver issue cropped up either. I’ve booted into black screens, my audio stopping working one day, I’ve had to patch my video drivers a time or two, and this is on a System 76 Galago Pro, so its not like I was using some exotic setup. I’ve just had to reboot from grub one too many times I think.
And thanks to the magic of downgrading a package, the issue is resolved within minutes. If any update breaks something, which never happened in 3 years of desktop usage and 2 years of server usage so far, you can just downgrade the package, to the previous version, ignore the upgrade and take some time to understand what breaks. But I understand, why this might be too much maintenance for some people, and they rather pay with their freedom, and let other people take care of their system. But for me, that is not what using Linux is about.
Sure, the drivers install real quick, but the whole model is rolling release. In three months, you can’t be sure that any one piece of software is actually compatible with the rest of your packages. Any long time Arch user will tell you about the weird manual tweaks they’ve had to make at one time or another just to make sure their wifi still works or soemthing like that. After like 26 months of updates, my version of wpa_supplicant just gave up the ghost and started crashing. Didn’t have this issue on Ubuntu, so the fix was clear. This wasn’t the first time some bizarre driver issue cropped up either. I’ve booted into black screens, my audio stopping working one day, I’ve had to patch my video drivers a time or two, and this is on a System 76 Galago Pro, so its not like I was using some exotic setup. I’ve just had to reboot from grub one too many times I think.
And thanks to the magic of downgrading a package, the issue is resolved within minutes. If any update breaks something, which never happened in 3 years of desktop usage and 2 years of server usage so far, you can just downgrade the package, to the previous version, ignore the upgrade and take some time to understand what breaks. But I understand, why this might be too much maintenance for some people, and they rather pay with their freedom, and let other people take care of their system. But for me, that is not what using Linux is about.