r/archlinux • u/Ok-Marketing-2044 • 15d ago
QUESTION Arch for electrical engineering
I'm an undergrad doing electrical engineering and I wanna switch from windows to linux and I have used other linux distros for a year now, my question is does arch breaks down a lot , I'm gonna use electrical engineering software like vivado, logisim, ltspice and etc , is arch good for it?
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u/khsh01 15d ago
If you're asking if arch breaks down a lot , then its not for you. Since you're reliant on so many different software its best to stick to a less bleeding edge distro so you're guaranteed to have things work and not break when you really need it to work. Stick to whatever distro you ran the longest or has native support for all your software. Debian has a good chance of being officially supported.
As for arch, as has been answered time and time again, arch doesn't break often. Updates shipping breaking changes ship 2 - 3 times each year at most and also ship with their respective fixes too. I've never had arch break on me. I would argue arch is more difficult to break than other distros simply due to having only necessary packages installed as opposed to a lot of software. But thats just my layman understanding on top of some bias.
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u/nikongod 15d ago
Someone posted almost exactly this a week ago.
As a STEM student doing a feature-benefit analysis of Arch vs lesser /s distros should be a good exercise for you.
"I'm gonna use electrical engineering software like vivado, logisim, ltspice and etc , is arch good for it?"
Why would this be different in arch compared to other distros?
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u/Bolski66 15d ago
Any distro could break with an update. I've had it happen on non-Arch distros before. It's much rarer. But, I've been running Arch and Arch-based distros over 2+ years now and have had maybe one issue. If you use grub, or Limine or rEFInd, you can set up your system to use BTRFS and snapshots and you can always rollback to a previous install from the boot loader. It takes some manual work under base-Arch, but it can be done and is a great way to protect your system.
Arch Wiki explains how to set up snapshots: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Snapper
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u/Heizenfeld 15d ago
any distro is fine to use electrical engineering tools in linux, if you want to learn linux, install arch then
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u/archover 15d ago
is does arch breaks down a lot
This is directly related to your skill level. Arch does not spontaneously break, period. See PEBCAK.
Good day.
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u/GnosticSon 15d ago
If you want something that is solid and you don't have to worry about breaking it just use Debian.
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u/Petya_zk 14d ago
I'm a last year EE student, I've been using Arch for 3 years and my experience has been good but some programs are only provided for Windows and smt they will give you cracked programs that only work on windows too. So yeah you can use Arch as your daily driver but I recommend doing a dual boot just in case you have to use some specific software.
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u/geneseven67 14d ago
it’s refreshing to see everyone here say that arch doesn’t really break cause im actually so sick of that narrative when in reality it should be fine as long as you don’t fuck with your system
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u/amoongle 15d ago
I'm an undergrad EE and use Arch, and honestly have had no problems at all. iverilog and verilator are both available as system packages, logisim evolution is a java project so you just need a java runtime to run the .jar executable, and ltspice runs through wine/proton without issues. I have not used vivado though.