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  • New idea
702 Vote

Keep Arch Linux on DigitalOcean

Hi all,

I really love Arch Linux so much, but DO is trying to move that out. I hope that you guys can try to vote for the fantastic distro to keep it on DO.

The following is the letter that I just wrote to the support ticket.
----

I'm very surprised about the maintainability of Arch Linux. Personally, I'm a heavy user of Arch, I do love the distro. Arch Linux is a contemporary minimalist Linux distribution. It provides a very clean, lightweight distribution of the Linux operating system.

While I was trying to launch another Arch server on DO, I was astonished about the announcement.

"""
We are deprecating Arch Linux as one of the standard base distributions. We haven't seen a large up take in the number of customers that have installed Arch and given the distro's rolling updates the maintenance work that it requires currently on our side does not allow us to stay up to date.
"""

Please, please don't take out my favorite distro from DO. The Arch community is very strong and powerful, you can ask anyone for help, even I can try to help you guys to maintain the Arch kernel for DO. I'm very sad to hear that you want to move the distro out.

Maybe I'll consider to move to Linode seriously if you really do so. :(

---

  • Anonymous
  • Sep 11 2018
  • Needs review
Droplets
  • Comments (83)
  • Votes (702)
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  • joao jose commented
    7 Oct, 2019 12:36am

    parabens 

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  • Tim Tampouris commented
    13 May, 2019 06:39pm

    Seriously...?????

    Arch Linux is a pain in the ass...

    What matters nowadays is not the most lightweight system, because cpu and ram are very cheap... but the need for stable systems, and to move away from having to troubleshoot / configure the OS, and focus on your apps...

    Yes, I worked with Arch in production, I didn't want to - I was forced... and it's definitely an unsuitable system for production servers.

    Ubuntu is way better!!!

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  • Moisey Uretsky commented
    11 Sep, 2018 05:33pm

    We've updated the latest version of the Arch image to use a new kernel which will not break under update and if you have a prior version of Arch launched you can click on the new settings tab on the droplet and select the Arch Linux kernel displayed which should allow you to launch your virtual server after you've performed an upgrade.

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  • Moisey Uretsky commented
    11 Sep, 2018 05:33pm

    Did you recently launch a new virtual machine and run an upgrade which broke?

    And if so can you provide some log or command-line output of which specifically wasn't working post-upgrade?

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  • fluweel commented
    11 Sep, 2018 05:33pm

    This is far from solved. Please add the lts kernel from allowed kernels

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  • Shawn Dellysse commented
    11 Sep, 2018 05:33pm

    I would also like to see this added. The linux-lts package is essential on a server. I was very disappointed to see that it wasn't available. I hope to see it soon, or else for my clients' sake, I might have to switch providers.

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  • Johnson Lin commented
    11 Sep, 2018 05:33pm

    Yes, please, if this didn't get implemented then you really shouldn't have put Arch Linux as a droplet choice.

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  • Johnson Lin commented
    11 Sep, 2018 05:33pm

    Same here I'd like to see it implemented as soon as possible. The kernel options at the droplets admin page for Arch Linux is constantly falling behind the newest kernel, if you have to put up a hand-wrapped custom kernel every 2 months or less so by your own guys at DO, that eventually will hurt you.

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  • Vlad Ionescu commented
    11 Sep, 2018 05:33pm

    Any updates?

    linux-lts for Arch is desperately needed.

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  • Bruno Delbono commented
    11 Sep, 2018 05:33pm

    The current Arch image will fail with pacman -Su. Here is how to fix it:
    https://www.archlinux.org/news/binaries-move-to-usrbin-requiring-update-intervention/

    But also if you try using other kernel revisions, you loose iptables and firewall modules.

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  • alex commented
    11 Sep, 2018 05:33pm

    I am saddened that this is not offered. I really want to switch from using Ubuntu 12.04 and Archlinux LTS makes that possible.

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  • Josh David Miller commented
    11 Sep, 2018 05:33pm

    This is extremely frustrating. I've run Arch Linux for many years, but I'm not even sure what to do with some of the packages installed to these directories (e.g. remnants of sysvinit); I don't know what's needed for DO and why some packages aren't installed from the official repositories. It's a server, so reliability is critical and I don't have time to mess with this kind of thing. As such, the Arch Linux image isn't usable for me.

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  • Anonymous commented
    11 Sep, 2018 05:33pm

    I'm thinking to leave DO if they finally deprecate Arch Linux.

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  • jmartins commented
    11 Sep, 2018 05:33pm

    I would like to help digital ocean and maintain the Archlinux images...

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  • alex commented
    11 Sep, 2018 05:33pm

    If DO does drop Arch and/or not add the LTS version, I will have to take all of my business - work and personal (multiple accounts) to Linode, which btw recently switched to SSDs...

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  • Don Thornton Jr. commented
    11 Sep, 2018 05:33pm

    I like Arch and I have a droplet running Arch but it has been broken due to the DO kernel being incompatible with some of the packages that were upgraded.

    I would like DO to continue supporting Arch but I will need to migrate back to Ubuntu 14.04 for my primary server if DO does not fix the kernel problem.

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  • Fabiano Furtado commented
    11 Sep, 2018 05:33pm

    DigitalOcean, please keep Arch Linux as an option on your droplets. What about the use of Arch LTS kernel? The kernel updates could be made once a month or ​​once every quarter.

    Thank you!

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  • Dee commented
    11 Sep, 2018 05:33pm

    It is a great distribution. And the more knowedlgeable and skilled you are the better it is. With those Arch makes a fantastic VPS. I have one now for a year. It;s a blistering, lean mean server machine. It's a shame to take it away from knowledgeable and skilled users who can utilize what Arch offers to its fullest. Even lacking kernel updates. I'll mention kexec-tools to address that issue but use with caution and read through the installation or you will break your droplet.

    The problem is that Arch users being in the minority, leaving DO actually furthers their aim. As, Bye! See yah! So that won't achieve anything but tidy up things for DO.

    What I would suggest to Arch users and DO is to reach out to each other. Why can't Arch users help maintain Arch on DO? I'm sure they'd be quite willing to do that? ANd I have no doubt they have the ability. Give them a droplet upgrade for their time and effort? I'll excuse myself from that, it isn't self-interest in suggesting this. I don't have them time. So I'll go on record, no I won't accept anything in exchage. But I really do not see with DO prominently displaying "Now Hiring" that a way could not be found to make use of the ability that exists within the Arch community to resolve this to everyone's satisfaction?

    Dee,

    please excuse any typos!

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  • Kristoffer Tangfelt commented
    11 Sep, 2018 05:33pm

    I also vote up for this, it's my favorite and goto distribution aswell. And i share the sentiment of the original poster aswell. It's clean and lean, and easily shaped unlike the bloated Ubuntu's and the alike.

    And as many says. There likely could be people in the community that might be able to slice up some time to test/maintain it. I could possibly myself even contribute if need be.

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  • e8hffff commented
    11 Sep, 2018 05:33pm

    I'm new to DigitalOcean. I tried to make Archlinux build but it wouldn't patch. I had to resort to Ubuntu. This problem is most-likely due to the background VM packages not being maintained, so without DigitalOcean onboard it's fruitless to use Arch.

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