It’s almost 9 years ago, I think we’re good.

CentOS is dead.

It wasn’t because Corporate decided to use their OS to force their app store or cloud services onto people.

Ubuntu and the snap store say hi!

Good on you, I was a long time slackware user myself. I just wanted to make the point that just using any Linux doesn’t suffice to escape these shennanigans, the choice of distro matters as well.

LLVM was held back for a good reason, it was breaking things left and right. Even so, if you really needed it there were always AUR packages for it, or lcarlier’s mesa-git repo if you prefer prebuilt packages, so it’s not as if you were just SOL. I got my 7900XT in december, and instructions on how to get it running were already all over the forums and subreddit at the time and it was working on the same day that I got it.

I don’t know when you got your 7900XT, but it was broken on Ubuntu too for a good while, I’m not even sure that it currently works on 22.04 without using external PPAs. In the mean time, it now works with Arch out of the box.

As for the grub thing, I’m not sure how that could have been handled differently. Upstream introduced a change that created a compatibility issue, so Arch could either not update to a newer version of grub ever, or update anyway and tell its users how to handle the compatibility issue. The latter is what they did.

That’s how it is here in Belgium. I pay tax on the income I would get if I would rent out my apartment, even when I’m actually living in it.

Luckily the amounts are based on rent prices as they were in 1975. It’s indexed, which means it gets adjusted for (general) inflation, but not for the increased prices in the housing market which is much higher than inflation.

And “Good Times” by Edie Brickell, but for some reason nobody ever remembers that lol

No not for landlords, for homeowners. As it is, it’s just an unfair tax that increases the cost of homeownership, making it unattainable for lower incomes. If they wanted to target landlords, they should tax actual rent income instead.

Of course, no tax ever gets abolished because the government starts to rely on it in their budget, so we’ll be stuck with this forever.

Yeah but I think you’re unfairly blaming Arch for not being ready for a new GPU on release day, especially when there are still known issues with the upstream packages that are required for it.

I think you may also misunderstand what Arch is. It isn’t meant to be absolute bleeding edge. It’s meant to be a distro that’s as up-to-date as possible yet stable enough for everyday use. So the Arch team does curate upgrades and does QA before they release it to the stable repos.

I guess it depends on how you define “breakage”. The system being completely b0rked and unsalvageable? No, that has never happened.

Bugs, regressions or other gotchas or annoyances that needed to be dealt with? Yeah, several since I started using Arch in 2014.

• netctl hanging on boot (it was some systemd config issue)
• Very slow throughput issue with the Intel AX wifi driver (needed to rollback kernel and firmware until upstream fixed it)
• Intel NIC disconnecting under high load (was eventually fixed in a firmware update)
• Graphical artifacts in chrome and firefox after certain mesa updates (amdgpu related, eventually fixed)
• Black screen in google maps after a mesa update (amdgpu related, eventually fixed)
• Mesa update breaking high refresh rates in vkQuake (mysteriously fixed after several months)
• Grub introduced an incompatible update last year, so had to boot from USB and re-run grub-install
• An issue with vim syntax highlighting being broken for bash scripts. Was caused by upstream, and quickly fixed.
• A new readline version introducing bracketed paste by default. I’m not counting this as regression or bug, but it’s an instability because a default behavior suddenly changed
• mpv’s pipewire audio output was broken a few weeks ago leading to muted videos. It was an upstream bug that was fixed a couple of days later.
• mpv’s default subtitle handling behavior was changed around the same time as well, had to add subs-with-matching-audio=yes to the config to revert to previous behavior
• Currently still struggling with an issue with virtiofsd: my VMs can’t re-mount virtiofsd filesystems when they are rebooted.

And there were probably several more which I can’t remember.

Mind you, I’m not blaming Arch for this. It’s just what you can expect from a rolling release distribution, and if you are not able or willing to occasionally diagnose/fix things like this, Arch is not for you.