[HN Gopher] Using the same Arch Linux installation for a decade
___________________________________________________________________
Using the same Arch Linux installation for a decade
Author : meribold
Score : 376 points
Date : 2022-08-16 15:20 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (meribold.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (meribold.org)
| numlock86 wrote:
| I am running Arch on my server (VPS) for over a decade and
| therefore haven't even noticed the X and audio issues. The only
| time something broke was when the Ethernet interface suddenly was
| named eth0 instead of the vendor specific (?) enXsX or whatever
| it was. And I had configured systemd-networkd to use the absolute
| and exact names and not some wildcard like e*. Error was located
| fixed within five minutes.
| unixsheikh wrote:
| I don't get what the fuss is about.
|
| I run several Arch boxes, a couple I believe is on 15+ years. One
| such installation has even been mirrored from one disk to
| multiple other disks and put into other machines, just because it
| was already set up as needed. Only once did a package I ran
| require manual intervention during upgrade, but as always, that
| was clearly described on the Arch website.
|
| This also goes for Debian, FreeBSD and OpenBSD.
| vkoskiv wrote:
| I have a similar experience. I have a 2005 Fujitsu LifeBook S2110
| I keep for sentimental purposes. I installed Arch on it in ~2015,
| and I've been upgrading it ever since. I've had 2-3 breakages
| over the years, but every time I've just googled the issue and
| found an obvious solution to resolve the issue. I've been so
| happy with the Arch rolling release that I now use it on my main
| daily driver desktop. I switched over full time from macOS last
| year.
| kache_ wrote:
| I love arch linux. It just works. Even with video games. Steam
| deck is based on it.
|
| Linux really did win desktops. Running on arch for 3 years now.
| qbasic_forever wrote:
| Arch wiki is a real treasure too. I don't even run arch but use
| their wiki info all the time.
| nfhshy68 wrote:
| I switched off Ubuntu to arch because I got sick of
| inconsistencies between Ubuntus hacks and developer defaults
| talked about in archwiki.
| kache_ wrote:
| Precisely. The best part about it (linux distros) is that you
| can actually fix your issues, while with windows/apple you
| have to suffer until you get a bug fix, since you don't
| control the software that runs on your computer
| sophacles wrote:
| Arch wiki is what made me switch to arch - I was tired of
| translating from arch-wiki -> whatever debian flavor I was
| using.
| throwaway1777 wrote:
| Having to debug X or audio breaking several times even over 10
| years is a non-starter. Had these issues 0 times over 10 years on
| mac, albeit on several machines, but I think it's extremely rare
| for someone to reinstall Mac OS ever. Only time I did it was when
| I tried to setup a hackintosh and that really broke some things.
| Bolkan wrote:
| For me, having to setup X or audio is a bigger deal breaker.
| Unless it's on nixos. It provides a nix config file that works
| like a translator between you and all the bazillion different
| system configuration files.
| zdragnar wrote:
| I get that some people don't like tinkering. They want
| something that will always Just Work. Some of my friends who
| were long time linux uses switched to macs and stayed there.
|
| MacOS wasn't that for me- brew was the cause of no shortage of
| pain, but even that could have been lived with. It's also not
| exactly stable- one company I worked for (about 7 years total)
| had a blanket request that people not update OSX to new
| versions for a few weeks or months while it was tested to make
| sure that the bugs had been ironed out- anyone who upgraded
| before then was on their own if they ran into issues.
|
| Even that, I could (and did, when I had to) tolerate.
|
| I _hate_ the UI. It doesn 't jive with how I want to operate.
| Settings exist for some things, but not others. It's just not
| my cup of tea, and I'm happier tinkering a bit to get exactly
| what I want.
| axby wrote:
| I recently got a macbook for work and I can't believe how
| many minor things just can't be changed. I don't think you
| can change the date format in the top right. It seems like
| you can't get rid of that damn dock entirely without killing
| important processes and breaking things. (I'm able to hide it
| and put it in the left, so it's mostly out of the way, but it
| seems so anti-user to force this interface on everyone).
|
| I haven't yet looked for a "how to effectively use mac
| keyboard shortcuts" comprehensive guide, instead I've looked
| for things as I need them. I can see the benefits for
| introducing "cmd" where "Ctrl" is usually used on other
| operating systems.
|
| But I'm very disappointed by cmd tab and cmd backtick. Often
| I want to press a single keyboard shortcut to switch between
| three windows or so: usually a few browser windows, a
| terminal, and an IDE. cmd backtick switches between windows
| of the same program, cmd tab switches between programs.
|
| Can any more experienced mac user tell me the way to do this
| properly? How to switch between a few separate windows, like
| alt tab, without having to think about what program they are?
| zdragnar wrote:
| I used https://www.hammerspoon.org/ to write custom
| keyboard shortcuts for switching between specific
| applications. I don't have it anymore, but it didn't take
| too much perusing the docs to find a way to bind a keyboard
| command to look for a specific window, focus it if it was
| found, or open the application if it wasn't. SO much better
| than cmd+tab/backtick or mission control.
| nullwarp wrote:
| What i've discovered is you really need to buy and/or
| install a bunch of 3rd party applications to get that
| horrible UI to work in any usable fashion.
| axby wrote:
| I've seen a lot of people recommend this approach when
| searching for solutions online. I was trying to embrace
| the apple way, rather than forcing it to match what I'm
| used to. Your comment might be the push I need to just
| give up and force it to match what I'm used to.
|
| But if this is the case, why do so many developers buy
| and enjoy macbooks? It seems ridiculous that you have to
| pay such a premium for a nice laptop, and then find
| random 3rd party applications to make it work the way you
| want.
|
| If I wanted to endlessly tinker then I'd be happy with
| Linux. I was under the impression that macbooks would
| "just work". I've also been disappointed by poor UX in
| some cases, like randomly showing "enter your password"
| dialogs.
| alin23 wrote:
| For the Command Tab issue, I created rcmd to fix it:
| https://lowtechguys.com/rcmd
|
| It became really annoying to press tab 5 times just to get
| to the app I need.
|
| If you're interested in technical writings, I recently
| wrote about my journey to creating rcmd here:
| https://alinpanaitiu.com/blog/window-switcher-app-store/
|
| The dock stops being a problem once you set it to
| automatically hide and find ways to use the mouse less.
| Shortcat is another tool that helped improve my mouseless
| workflow, and is kinda of like a vimium for the whole
| system but with fuzzy search: https://shortcat.app
| axby wrote:
| Thanks, this looks great. I'll definitely read this
| later.
|
| But why doesn't the base macbook install support more of
| these features? I was led to believe (perhaps
| incorrectly) that I wouldn't have to tinker with a mac as
| much as I have with Linux. (I suppose that fine tuning
| keyboard shortcuts is very different from trying to
| desperately fix a video or wireless driver)
|
| I assumed that apple optimized for a good user
| experience. Are "power users" (or even people that just
| want alt tab) not included in apple's UX goals?
| alin23 wrote:
| Indeed, power users are not really what Apple optimizes
| for. They try to dumb everything down, and it helps them
| in their ultimate goal: get more market share.
|
| You've actually stumbled upon the least configurable
| components of macOS: the Window Manager, and the Desktop
| Environment.
|
| On Linux you can choose your own, and you have so many
| different paradigms. I still miss i3 wm..
|
| On macOS you don't have this choice, and you have to use
| apps to get to the workflow you need.
|
| I was a Windows power user for a few years, and now I use
| both Linux and macOS daily since 6 years ago. In the end,
| I feel more productive on macOS nowadays, mostly because
| there are many quality apps to get anything I want done,
| I don't have to worry that basic OS function will stop
| working when I update some dependency, and there are some
| macOS-native features that really improved my workflow.
|
| For example I didn't know how useful Live Text would be
| until the first time I noticed that Command-F search in
| Safari also searches text in images, or when I double
| clicked on a phone number and I could just call it with
| my iPhone (which was in another room) but keep talking
| from the MacBook.
|
| I can't even imagine how I would do that on Linux (surely
| doable, but nothing beats "already done and usable"), and
| it's just one of many features like that.
|
| I will end with some more software recommendations: yabai
| for window management
| (https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai) and skhd for
| hotkeys (https://github.com/koekeishiya/skhd)
|
| They are more Linux-like, using config files, free and
| easy to forget they aren't native.
| throwaway1777 wrote:
| Your points are all valid, but I will point out homebrew not
| working isn't really an apple issue. Also this isn't quite
| same level as X or drivers not working. It seems intuitive
| that less configurability in is in fact a reason why macOS is
| more stable
| cevn wrote:
| I tried to use Centos long term, that was a disaster. Ubuntu and
| Fedora both broke a few times but I was able to recover them.
| However, Manjaro / Arch feels the most stable in my experience.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| > I tried to use Centos long term, that was a disaster.
|
| What was a disaster about it? I would expect pain crossing
| major versions, but you could plausibly have installed CentOS
| on a machine and just stayed there for 5-10 years with nothing
| more than the odd `yum update && reboot` and I would have
| thought it would be fine.
| jandrese wrote:
| Usually the pain comes when you find you need to use a
| feature in some software and the feature wasn't introduced
| until after the version that Centos ships. This happens more
| often than you might expect. Even fairly "modern" versions of
| Centos come with some really old and crusty packages.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| Yeah, that's fair. I guess I was reading it as a complaint
| that the _existing_ system had issues, but EL certainly has
| a painful tendency to not keep up with new stuff (which is
| rather the point, but that doesn 't make it not painful:])
| cevn wrote:
| After a while I believe there were no more updates for Centos
| 7. What is impressive about this story is that I was able to
| drag it into the modern era with rocky linux 9 but it was a
| ... rocky transition. My biggest pain point was when the
| networking stack was broken and Yum refuses to do ANYTHING
| without loading sources from the network. I couldn't get
| around it without flash driving RPMs to the server..
|
| The uptime of the machine was great on Centos, but it came to
| a point I was afraid to reboot because of the package changes
| that could apply.
|
| edit: I think some software I was using was EOL'd just for
| Centos maybe also prompting the switch.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| CentOS 7 "active support" ended in 2020 (which I'm guessing
| is what you mean?) but it's supposed to keep getting
| security support until 2024 (thus hilariously outliving
| both CentOS 8 and CentOS Stream 8) -
| https://endoflife.date/centos
|
| Although certainly I can sympathize with the software
| eventually getting very long in the tooth, and jumping EL 7
| to 9 could definitely be quite a change.
| sam_lowry_ wrote:
| So what, I likely had my Arch Linux for a decade as well. Just
| copying it to the new SSD every time I had a new device.
|
| I even have 2 bootloader entries: for intel and for amd devices
| so I do not need to reconfigure anything. ARM devices such as
| PineBook or Olimex are a PITA, though. Never had patience with
| them.
| B-Con wrote:
| I reinstalled Arch once since 2009, and it was to resolve a long-
| standing bug that I could not fix for the life of me. FWIW, it
| worked. (This was probably 6-ish years ago, I don't remember what
| the bug was.)
| seletskiy wrote:
| As another Arch Linux user, I can attest that it is the rock-
| solid foundation for your computer.
|
| I use double boot to host both Linux and Windows; when I need to
| use Windows, I just put Linux into hibernation. This greatly
| extends the amount of time it can go without being rebooted.
|
| Driver and X problems still cropped up occasionally, but things
| seem much more reliable now than they did a while back.
|
| This is a also the distro I'm familiar with from my time working
| on servers, where I've used it with ZFS with great success.
| Jnr wrote:
| When I don't need Windows for gaming, I just boot the physical
| windows partition from Linux using Virtualbox. This way I don't
| even have to hibernate and interrupt any work.
| scarygliders wrote:
| I have a libvirt VM running Windows with GPU passthrough to
| the GTX1070 (the main GPU is the RTX 2070 Super) and use
| looking-glass-client and scream to pass the audio to Linux,
| which I use for gaming. No need to even multi boot, though I
| do still have the Windows boot available if I need it, which
| is rarely.
| seletskiy wrote:
| Yes, I do it too, but getting it to work is a bit tricky with
| UEFI.
| janci wrote:
| Isn't windows "Installing new hardware" every time you boot?
| And the license is still active? I was always affraid it will
| break the system after few switches between virtual and bare-
| metal boot.
| WfAjWDYpDHDYCN5 wrote:
| Nah, when Windows installs new hardware it doesn't
| uninstall the old hardware. Good luck on the license front
| though, since Microsoft has decided you can't move around
| the item you purchased from them...
| franga2000 wrote:
| I've been running this setup since 2017 and while there
| were occasional graphical and sound glitches, usually after
| a Windows update, over all it works great. It did the
| "installing new hardware" thing only after updates as well,
| so I didn't run into it too often.
|
| It does like to deactivate itself after a few reboots, but
| that's nothing a bit of mild piracy can't fix. I have at
| least two spare windows licenses in a drawer so I don't
| feel the least bit bad about it.
|
| I also have a big ugly powershell script that runs during
| startup and does some things differently depending on where
| it's running. Things like not launching all my background
| stuff in the VM, remapping drive letters between physical
| disks and VM folder shares...
|
| Another thing to look into is RemoteApp. I did some
| experiments with it in a VM and the performance was way
| better than "seamless mode" (which doesn't exist anymore
| anyways), but getting it to work on non-Server editions is
| a pain.
| pjvsvsrtrxc wrote:
| Seamless mode still exists in Virtualbox 6.1 which is the
| latest version.
|
| (Windows _did_ just crash when I was testing it but, as
| it also crashed twice before I got that far, I don 't
| think it's related)
| janci wrote:
| Did Windows 10 start to crash in VBox for you too? I had
| to move to libvirt/qemu as I was not able to resolve.
| Downgrading nor upgrading VirtualBox did not help.
| Removing last windows update helped a little, then it
| started crashing again.
| Jnr wrote:
| Installing new hardware doesn't happen often and it shows
| the unlicensed watermark when booted from Virtualbox, but
| booting natively restores the activation status.
| drbawb wrote:
| I have a similar experience, though only now am I faced with the
| existential crisis that "2013" is going to be "a decade ago" in a
| few months. My Arch Linux install started life as a VMWare
| Workstation image. It made it through two major init systems
| (sysvinit -> systemd), different audio subsystems (alsa ->
| pulseaudio -> pipewire), different WMs (gnome2 -> kde4 -> i3 ->
| sway), three filesystems (ext3 -> ext4, ext4 -> brtfs -> ext4,
| then ext4 -> zfs), several different versions of VMWare
| Workstation (7 through 14 I believe), different storage
| substrates, etc. It's also lived on three different uArchs (AMD
| Bulldozer c. 2012, Intel Skylake c. 2016, and Ryzen c. 2020) but
| VMWare abstracted most of that away, of course.
|
| Eventually I got fed up with Windows and decided to `zfs send`
| the install to a real disk and booted it on bare metal. It has
| been my daily driver since then for the last 2 years or so. (I
| did drop into the Arch installer a last year to unfuck my
| bootloader while trying to get rEFInd & ZFS Boot Menu to work,
| but that was just building a new initramfs; I haven't run
| "pacstrap" since I built the image c. 2013.)
|
| The flexibility this operating system has provided me with is
| nothing short of amazing. I do have to say though: since
| switching to Wayland + the in-kernel AMDGPU driver, I can't
| remember the last time my system was rendered unbootable.
| (Excepting the one time I tried to change my bootloader, but
| that's user error.) In hindsight I feel like the vast majority of
| Arch's reputation for breaking systems is overblown, and the
| blame rests mostly on DKMS + NVidia's proprietary drivers.
| alufers wrote:
| May I ask: What prompted you to change the file systems? I
| recently reluctantly switched over to btrfs and I see no
| meaningful difference between ext4, so I am curious.
| Animats wrote:
| One of my systems, a public-facing server:
| Server status at 2022-08-16 11:39:24 System status:
| Database up for 1644.44 days.
| zh3 wrote:
| The software install on my daily driver dates from 1999 (though
| the oldest file in /etc is dated 1994) and was originally an old
| Red Hat release. It runs XFree86-4.x (last rebuilt 2004) which
| works fine with nvidia-390.132 (no more than a few years old) on
| a GTX780Ti and an i7-3770K (maybe a decade old itself now?).
| Desktop is currently Xfce-4.something (was FVWM for many years);
| applications only get upgraded as needed (autoconf and make FTW).
| It's been triplehead pretty much forever (easier now only one
| graphics card is needed, current running 3x27" Dell something or
| others).
|
| I don't normally explain why it's so fast, just smile quietly
| when people comment on how instant the response is.
| waynesonfire wrote:
| xfce is great
| oedo wrote:
| Yeah, this is a thing.
|
| To enjoy years of stability on Arch[0]: -
| occasionally upgrade your system - before upgrading, glance
| at https://archlinux.org/news/ to see if anything requires manual
| intervention
|
| [0] I use Arch btw
| capableweb wrote:
| > - before upgrading, glance at https://archlinux.org/news/ to
| see if anything requires manual intervention
|
| I simply have https://archlinux.org/ as my homepage when I open
| my browser on the desktop computer. Shows the same news in a
| slightly better format (personally), and also shows latest
| package updates on the right side, in case some favorite
| software of mine has been recently updated.
| thekoma wrote:
| I've been using informant
| (https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/informant).
| dmz73 wrote:
| I tried using arch based distributions but the need for constant
| manual babysitting has turned me off them.
|
| Packages randomly break and require hours of work to fix. Non-
| rolling distribution will usually only break when there is major
| upgrade which can be scheduled for when you have the time to deal
| with it.
|
| Pacman only works in interactive mode so using it on a headless
| means at least weekly session. Randomly that will use up an hour
| or two when something breaks, and it will. Ubuntu based LTS
| distribution will last a couple of years without needing manual
| intervention after initial installation, and much longer if you
| don't upgrade to next LTS until the EOL.
|
| Finally, if you need old software to build old version of
| something, Arch based distribution is useless. On Ubuntu I can
| download and install version 14.04 without much hassle (and even
| older with a bit of work) and build that old Android or sdk for
| device that is no longer supported but with Arch...don't waste
| your time, its not happening.
| Retr0id wrote:
| > Pacman only works in interactive mode so using it on a
| headless means at least weekly session.
|
| What do you mean by this?
| loudmax wrote:
| The Arch Linux install on my ThinkPad X230 is about twelve years
| old now. For most of the time it was my primary laptop, until a
| couple of years ago when I turned it into a sort of home server
| with built-in KVM and battery backup.
|
| In contrast to my experience running Gentoo or Fedora, I never
| experienced significant breakage when doing a system update.
| Having said that, I've always run a fairly minimal desktop
| environment and I've been conservative with wifi and audio
| software. So maybe I wasn't pushing it very hard, but still full
| credit to Arch for having a rock solid foundation.
| orangepurple wrote:
| I push my Arch installs hard. I install a large number of
| applications. I even have Arch Linux running in a proot on my
| Android phone. I have had occasional breakage every 6 to 12
| months. It is usually a vendored binary that depends on an
| older version of some library. And that library changed its ABI
| upon a minor version upgrade. Arch has packages for old major
| versions of libraries. For example Telegram Desktop and
| Ungoogled Chromium can break, but rarely. Breakage is resolved
| within days on stable.
| uptheroots wrote:
| I've had the same Arch installation running since Spring 2020 on
| a desktop from 2012 or so. It's not my daily driver, but still
| works just fine. Even with some long periods between updates, I
| don't recall any serious stability issues.
| l72 wrote:
| I am currently running Fedora 35. I haven't reinstalled since at
| least Fedora 21 (maybe older, I can't quite remember)! Every 6
| months, I do the standard fedora upgrade and keep on going! This
| reminds me, it is time to update to Fedora 36!
| spear wrote:
| I avoid reinstalls as well and one of my systems hasn't had a
| reinstall since Fedora Core 4. This system actually started on
| Red Hat Linux 8 (the precursor to Fedora, not RHEL). It was
| upgraded to RH9, then FC1, etc., but I had to reinstall once (I
| think disk failed during upgrade). I have been able to rescue
| other upgrades that failed.
|
| I have upgraded literally every component multiple times so
| it's a Ship of Theseus.
| isodev wrote:
| I use Fedora as a VM for development on other systems. I just
| love the stable and smooth experience.
| antongribok wrote:
| I'm on Fedora 36 laptop that started from Fedora 25, and at
| some point in the middle I moved from Dell XPS to LG Gram.
|
| To migrate machines I didn't use rsync, used dd instead.
|
| Zero upgrade issues, however I generally wait 2-3 months after
| release before upgrading.
| BirAdam wrote:
| he uses arch, btw
| danjoredd wrote:
| What a chad. I wish I was that consistent. I distro-hop about
| once every other week
| kelp wrote:
| I always love hearing these stories, especially because I'm too
| fickle to stick with something that long. I've mostly been a Mac
| user since maybe Puma or Jaguar, but I disto hop every few years.
| Spent a good while on Debian, Ubuntu, Arch, FreeBSD and OpenBSD.
| Still have an OpenBSD Thinkpad x1 Gen 6 around somewhere. That
| OpenBSD install could age like this, but I fat fingered a dd
| command and nuked the system disk in mid 2020, so it got a fresh
| install then.
|
| Had various Arch installs on desktop and Thinkpad that I used as
| my day to day for while, but I always just ended up back on my
| Mac. And I get a new Mac every few years.
|
| Any Linux I've had always ends up getting torn down at some
| point. I get a new computer and do a fresh install.
| rockyj wrote:
| This is so good, but Arch only annoys me in 1 way - that every
| week I need to download 500MB of updates. If I go away for a
| couple of weeks, my computer will most likely have 2 GB of
| updates pending.
| capableweb wrote:
| How many packages (via pacman I assume?) do you have installed
| in total?
| mastermedo wrote:
| I'm in the same boat. Never saw a need to reinstall, there's been
| hiccups where after an untimely upgrade the system won't boot.
| But it's a 30min fix every 3-4years.
| jesse__ wrote:
| I had one of the worst debugging experiences of my life
| installing Arch (before I knew anything about linux, or
| programming), followed by probably the most delightful computing
| experience of my life using that installation for the next
| several years.
|
| I don't use Arch anymore, but I think about going back to it all
| the time. Hopefully one of these days I actually pull up my socks
| and install it again.
| renewiltord wrote:
| I left my computer in storage for a year while I lived elsewhere
| and I couldn't upgrade through pacman. There was no simple viable
| upgrade. The constraints just couldn't be met. Fortunately, all I
| had to do was reformat / and go again since I keep most user
| config in /home
|
| Really enjoyed it otherwise
| ablob wrote:
| You probably cant test it anymore, but I think it might have
| had something to do with the keys. I had a similar problem with
| failing upgrades once, until I updated the keyring.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Ah. Good tip. Thank you. I'll keep that in mind for next
| time.
| vladvasiliu wrote:
| This.
|
| The easy way, usually, is installing the previous keyring
| packages from the archive.
|
| And maybe peruse the "news" page for any manual intervention
| required. There aren't many, so for a year of missed updates
| it should be quick enough.
| traverseda wrote:
| Weird AUR packages?
| renewiltord wrote:
| I just had the one nvidia dkms one. But that one actually
| worked fine.
| janci wrote:
| This. When I took my old Arch laptop from drawer after few
| months it was impossible to upgrade without removing half of
| the system.
| codeflo wrote:
| The keyring issue that other commenters mention has to be the
| dumbest misfeature ever, because upgrading is guaranteed to fail,
| yet nobody fixes it. To make things worse, one of the top Google
| suggestions is a pacman command that can cause libc to be
| upgraded without a full system upgrade, which will make your
| system unusable immediately. No process will launch after that. I
| had to do very desperate recovery steps when that happened to me.
| To be honest, I'm still not entirely sure how to safely fix the
| keyring issue when it happens.
|
| Other than that, and this may sound very strange given the last
| paragraph, Arch is _fantastic_. It 's the most usable and useful
| system for general software development I've ever owned.
| Basically, you follow the wiki, and everything just works, sound,
| graphics, wifi. I never had that with Linux, not with Ubuntu, not
| with SuSE.
| demux wrote:
| Booting with a live USB, mounting the root dir and doing a
| manual downgrade of libc could work
| codeflo wrote:
| Yeah, something like that. I don't remember the full steps I
| took, but it involved pacman-static from the AUR, which is a
| pacman build that works without a working libc. I think I
| used the USB boot method you mention, but with pacman-static,
| I was able to go forward and do a full system upgrade.
| nyadesu wrote:
| This matches my experience as well, been using it since 6 or 7
| years ago, and it feels nice to know I can rely on my OS install.
| If something breaks I have to learn how to fix it and that
| knowledge builds up over time. Way better than other operating
| systems where I'm totally screwed if something breaks up and the
| only thing I can do is run in circles.
|
| I also use i3wm btw
| [deleted]
| Legion wrote:
| I wonder how many, if any, original install components are still
| present in that Ship of Theseus.
| IceDane wrote:
| I never quite made it to a decade, but I think I definitely hit 5
| years.
|
| Yes, there have been breakages, but none very bad and thus not
| very memorable. Interestingly, some breakages were due to windows
| update doing something bad since I was dual booting.
|
| Before switching to arch, I used ubuntu for years, and that was
| not nearly as pleasant an experience. Upgrading ubuntu versions
| always failed in some horrible way for me and I had to just
| reinstall the new version instead, and the way ubuntu is put
| together made it a horrible experience if you ever needed to
| install software that didn't jive with it(like something that
| required an updated version of some gnome dependency).
| cosmiccatnap wrote:
| I had a laptop in storage and went on a trip. I didn't want to
| bring an expensive MacBook but I did want something that could
| take a note or two and check my email so I took a very old Dell
| latitude with me running arch on an intel 2xxx something
| (ancient)
|
| When I booted it up I realized to my surprise I had been running
| arch not windows...so I checked my email and then decided on the
| hotel wifi to try and update it.
|
| I will admit after about 6 years there was quite a bit of
| fumbling with pacman sources and keyrings and the delta to
| upgrade on a laptop that old and hotel wifi wasn't great but
| after I left it for an hour it finished.
|
| I rebooted it and there I was in i3 without a thing wrong. Wild
|
| Maybe if I used gnome it would have been a different story but I
| think the point of the article holds that arch is much more
| stable than people give it credit for if you are willing to learn
| a bit about how it works.
| valbaca wrote:
| Exhibiting the self discipline to not distro-hop in 10 years is
| more commendable...but I guess that's Arch Linux for you.
| malermeister wrote:
| Yeah Arch is basically the final destination all that distro
| hopping gets you to.
|
| No reason to hop once you've arrived.
| dhruvmittal wrote:
| That said, I strongly recommend letting the distro hopping
| take you on a journey before you land on Arch-- don't skip to
| the end. It's nice to see how things are done elsewhere
| (defaults, etc.) so that you've got some opinions by the time
| you get to Arch and configure your own take on things.
| colordrops wrote:
| If you can get past the learning curve, Nix is the final
| destination.
| bstamour wrote:
| I used arch around 2008 or so, then distro-hopped to
| Slackware, when I remain to this day. Some of us escape.
| bananaowl wrote:
| I started on slack and hopped on over to arch eventually.
| But lately been considering going back to Slackware again.
| Circle of slack.
| evh wrote:
| s/Arch/Gentoo/
|
| I did run Arch for a while around 2010 but it didn't take.
| It's nice to find a permanent home - I've been on Gentoo
| since 2013 and an acquaintance has been on Slackware since
| the 90s.
|
| Those three seems to be where us tinkerers end up.
| isatty wrote:
| +1 - Arch is fine, but it doesn't have Portage.
| malermeister wrote:
| Those three do seem like the popular ones amongst the
| tinkerers.
|
| Could I ask what your favorite things about Gentoo are?
|
| For me, with Arch, it's how up-to-date the repos are and
| how it doesn't make me compile everything myself. Should
| something not be available in the repos, chances are I can
| still compile it myself and build a package using AUR.
|
| Another thing I like is the excellent wiki.
| daxvena wrote:
| I thought the exact same thing until I switched to NixOS. I
| love Arch, but I'd never go back.
| isatty wrote:
| Never had the urge to distro hop after settling on Gentoo, 12
| years ago. I've not seen a better package manager in all that
| time, just amazing.
| craggyjaggy wrote:
| I'll be coming up on 10 years as well, mostly just because of
| the AUR. Whatever obscure/proprietary program you might need,
| there's a decent chance some helpful person has packaged it up.
| Also has the advantage of easily being able to uninstall the
| weird 10 year old perl/python/mono version the thing needed to
| run that would otherwise probably stay on my machine forever.
| encryptluks2 wrote:
| What I love about the AUR is that if it doesn't exist, it is
| extremely easy to create a package. Debian packaging and Red
| Hat packaging were just not very intuitive. PKGBUILDs are
| simple and effective. Alpine also has similar packaging as
| Arch.
| flaviut wrote:
| 100% agreed.
|
| I've spent quite a bit of time modifying deb source files
| and rpm source files to do upgrades/downgrades/patches.
|
| I could never start from scratch in making a package. I'd
| be so incredibly overwhelmed by all the different options
| and obtuse syntaxes and level of background required.
|
| Writing a batch script that installs everything into a
| `$pkgdir` directory is so much easier to understand and get
| started with. And if you publish to the AUR and have some
| small issue, someone will eventually show up and tell you
| what's wrong with your script.
| tedajax wrote:
| When I was first getting into Linux ~2006-2007 I distro hopped
| constantly until a friend told me about Arch and then there was
| no more reason to distro hop :)
| Enginerrrd wrote:
| I distrohopped a lot for my desktops and then stopped when I
| got to arch.
|
| For servers, I've used CentOS, Ubuntu, and debian. I never did
| get too into the the CentOS redhat side of things. I'm not sure
| why that is except that I just was used to the debian way of
| doing things... In general, my go to is debian or Ubuntu.
| Ubuntu is the only distro where every damn time I've managed to
| break it in ways I can't figure out how to fix. Arch and debian
| are the only distro s where I've been able to fix something
| screwed up without a full nuke and reinstall. And I HAVE
| screwed some things up pretty bad.
|
| Arch though is just so good. I just don't quite trust it to
| handle updates unattended so I don't use it on servers.
| edoceo wrote:
| I've been using the same base-install of Gentoo since like 2010.
| Switched from Gnome to Xfce some time ago; new machines just
| `rsync` the stuff over. But when the root partition when from
| /dev/sda3 to /dev/nvme0p3 there was some switching.
|
| Back in my Windows days (1990-2001) I was _NEVER_ able to do
| anything like that; copying that damned registry. Had to make
| special files; apps would never work. It was a game changer to
| find a system that was as simple as copy the files to the new
| hardware.
| 5e92cb50239222b wrote:
| I haven't tried this in a while, but Windows 10 can too be
| rsynced between different systems. Fixing the bootloader is a
| major PITA though, and I had to relearn doing that every time.
| Of course, it then spends half an hour installing new drivers
| for everything, but it is expected in that world.
| bombcar wrote:
| In the Windows 2k era I would do it, but it involved somehow
| tricking the system to think it was doing "first boot after
| install" and using default drivers for everything (especially
| the chipset). With some trickery you could get it to work
| (sometimes you had to preinstall the new chipset driver where
| it could find it.
|
| Wasn't worth it usually.
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| I always reinstall from scratch although I could just Debian
| "dist upgrade". My thinking is this: if, ten years ago, I somehow
| missed a security patch or some 0-day owned my machine before it
| was patched, then I'd potentially have been copying / dd'ing /
| rsync'ing a rootkit for ten years.
|
| By installing from scratch at every new stable (or unstable)
| release, I get rid of a lot of potential security issues.
|
| Now as an anecdote: ten years with the same install is nice
| but... I've got a dedicated server at OVH with 3400 days of
| _uptime_. You read that correctly. Nearly ten years of _uptime_.
| Once in a while I give temporary ssh access to people here and
| there just so they can type "uptime" and see. Kids: don't try
| this at home. Yes, it's insecure (although there's a firewall and
| only the SSH port open). No, it doesn't do much nor is it very
| useful. But it's fun to think I own one of the computer in the
| world with the biggest uptime.
|
| I plan to kill it once it reaches ten years \o/
| WfAjWDYpDHDYCN5 wrote:
| If you have a rootkit that you're concerned about copying
| around, that can somehow persist through pretty much everything
| on the system being upgraded at some point or another... you
| should probably also be worried about the various vectors that
| the rootkit could use to persist across OS reloads.
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| I don't disagree with that but some OS re-installs also
| correspond with buying an entirely new machine. And I'm the
| kind of paranoid person which burns instal DVDs and then
| checks the DVD's checksums from an offline computer before
| doing an install on my desktop, for example. Now, sure, the
| rootkit may try to hide in my Git repos (but that's not the
| easiest trick to pull) or shell scripts (but they're
| versioned with Git) etc.
|
| I still like it that way: a good old write-once DVD,
| checksum'ed, and a brand new install. Ideally on new hardware
| but that's not always the case.
| sascha_sl wrote:
| It doesn't really need to be well hidden if you're not
| actively looking. A shell script and a crontab entry / bashrc
| exec / init system entry is very low tech.
|
| Pair that with a slightly higher (but still low overall) tech
| LD_PRELOAD libc shim so it hides itself and you got something
| just stealthy enough that you wouldn't find it if you don't
| look for it.
|
| Remember, the easiest privilege escalation is aliasing sudo
| and patience.
| Symmetry wrote:
| I reinstall with every new version of Ubuntu for that, and to
| force myself to exercise my backups and install from scratch
| scripts.
| burntsushi wrote:
| This is the best I've got, almost 2 years: $
| w 15:25 up 725 days, 6:06, 1 user, load averages:
| 1.31 1.21 1.30 USER TTY FROM
| LOGIN@ IDLE WHAT andrew s000 192.168.1.200
| 15:25 - w
|
| But! This is a system in my office at home. Not in a data
| center somewhere.
| LAC-Tech wrote:
| I'm more impressed you didn't get a single power cut in that
| time.
| burntsushi wrote:
| Oh I have. We get power outages all the time where I live.
| At least a few a year that last 8+ hours. Have even had
| some multi-day outages.
|
| I have all my machines plugged into UPSes and we have a
| standby whole home generator. So the only way any of my
| machines shut down is if I do it explicitly.
| trashburger wrote:
| Is that plugged to a UPS or is your power just that stable?
| burntsushi wrote:
| I get lots of outages. At least one a year that is 8+
| hours. It's plugged into a UPS and I have a whole home
| standby generator.
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| Coming from the author of ripgrep, which is a tool I use
| daily, I've got to say it's an honor to see you answering my
| silly comment!
|
| Office at home certainly beats datacenter hosted but by 5x?
| Not sure... ; )
| burntsushi wrote:
| Hah. The only way it's possible where I live is with a UPS
| combined with a whole home standby generator.
|
| (I got the generator not just for uptimes haha. Got it
| because we get a lot of outages and we were losing a lot of
| spoiled goods from our fridge. About half our neighborhood
| has generators of some kind.)
| jmnicolas wrote:
| Don't you need to reboot after kernel updates?
| burntsushi wrote:
| This particular machine is a mac mini. Otherwise, I have a
| lot of machines. I just don't get around to updating and
| rebooting them that often.
|
| I very rarely use the mac mini. Basically just for testing.
| So at some point, it got to a crazy uptime and now I'm
| purposely trying to see how long I can go haha.
|
| In theory the battery in UPS will eventually need to be
| replaced. Otherwise I don't see it ever losing power given
| that I have a generator
| sleepydog wrote:
| I reinstall every 2 years or so simply to re-evaluate what
| tools I have and decide if I really want them enough to install
| and configure them again. It's part of the reason I resist
| systems like Nix, Guix, or even dotfile management tools.
| hollerith wrote:
| That doesn't make much sense because Nix doesn't prevent you
| from reinstalling, and after you reinstall, you are not
| forced to copy your old configuration.nix to your new
| /etc/nixos/.
| kevincox wrote:
| In fact I think Nix is much better here. Instead of
| reinstalling you can just audit your configuration for
| anything that you don't want. You don't need to worry about
| stray packages, config files or services like on other
| distributions. And of course if you accidentally clean too
| much it is easy to revert via source control of your config
| file.
| colordrops wrote:
| Funny, I've had the opposite experience. Because Nix is so
| stable and allows risk-free easy experimentation and
| rollbacks, I'm always re-evaluating and upgrading my system.
| An added benefit is that the changes you make stick, and
| you've got a paper trail of the changes in git. You can
| create a whole set of changes behind a single flag or config
| file, and flip back and forth between different setups nearly
| instantaneously.
|
| With Ubuntu I was afraid to change anything because I might
| break things and not know how to get back to a working state.
|
| With Nix, you are always on a fresh, pristine system, because
| the file system is mostly read-only and an exact reflection
| of what's in your config. It's impossible to get crufty.
| romeoblade wrote:
| I reinstall once a year. Nowadays, with PXE booting, preseed
| files, and automation like Ansible, everything is pretty much
| automated for me.
|
| This goes for both my personal and work laptops. Both have been
| running some version of Debian for the last ten years. For the
| previous four/five years, I've been on Debian Sid, and I may
| run into an issue about every other year that requires me to
| use timeshift to go back to yesterday's OS backup.
|
| With the proper backup and automation strategies in place, I do
| not see a point in not doing a reinstall periodically. It
| definitely gives me peace of mind knowing I can be back online
| and 98% percent functional in under an hour in most cases on
| just about every device in the house.
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| > It definitely gives me peace of mind knowing I can be back
| online and 98% percent functional in under an hour in most
| cases on just about every device in the house.
|
| It is also a good test of disaster recovery.
|
| By wiping your devices and doing a fresh install, you catch
| hidden assumptions.
| dralley wrote:
| > But it's fun to think I own one of the computer in the world
| with the biggest uptime.
|
| The top 500 entries on that list are almost guaranteed to be
| mainframes.
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| > The top 500 entries on that list are almost guaranteed to
| be mainframes.
|
| That's very interesting. Your comment got me searching and I
| found a link here on HN: "Stratus: Servers that won't quit -
| The 24 year running computer" with quite a discussion (123
| comments) on the topic:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13514909
| aarchi wrote:
| According to Guinness, the top is Voyager 2:
|
| > The computer system that has been in continual operation
| for the longest period is the Computer Command System (CCS)
| onboard NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft. This pair of interlinked
| computers have been in operation since the spacecraft's
| launch on 20 August 1977. As of 29 October 2020, the CCS has
| been running for 43 years 70 days.
|
| https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-
| records/635980-lo...
| ansible wrote:
| 43 years without a single reset or revision to safe mode (a
| common feature on spacecraft)? The linked article says that
| they've updated the software many times, by live patching
| it, instead of rebooting?
| ISL wrote:
| Not a lot of bugs in space, so it is hard for them to get
| in....
| adastra22 wrote:
| Hate to hear your Hubble, but there are systems with decades of
| uptime. Great accomplishment though!
| easytiger wrote:
| Circa 2003 i used the same Debian install for 4 years without a
| reboot.
|
| Fine
| number6 wrote:
| ITT: people telling each other that they use archlinux.
|
| BTW I also use archlinux
| odiroot wrote:
| Well, I use Manjaro. Does it count as insufferable too?
| number6 wrote:
| No Tux is insufferable
| bombcar wrote:
| Gentoo user here.
| number6 wrote:
| Your distro is literally named after a penguin, so what's
| your point? :D
| bombcar wrote:
| Gentoo users are widely known to be insufferable.
| number6 wrote:
| Gentoo wiki is top notch. I almost used gentoo once, but
| after 30 minutes in compiling vim I gave up...
| bombcar wrote:
| Gentoo _is_ really nice if you want complete
| customizability over your install.
|
| I started using it long ago when RedHat 6 or something
| pulled in X just to install _mpg123_.
| chlorion wrote:
| Are they actually? Have you spent any time in the Gentoo
| community or talked to actual Gentoo users?
|
| I see people parrot this around a lot but from my
| experience the insufferable thing is the constant
| complaining and sweeping accusations against a large and
| varied group of people who happen to use a certain
| distro.
| encryptluks2 wrote:
| Because it is awesome!
| Sebb767 wrote:
| I actually switched to i3/sway on my Arch install ;-)
| Skunkleton wrote:
| It's certainly my favorite. Pragmatic, simple, and complete.
| What's not to love?
| jarbus wrote:
| Out of all the distributions I've tested, pure arch has been the
| most stable, most documented, most fixable distro yet I've dealt
| with yet
| rodolphoarruda wrote:
| > "With Ubuntu, I would've had to upgrade (...) five times to end
| up with the latest LTS release.* And these release upgrades don't
| always go smoothly either."
|
| I read this in the exact moment I was upgrading to 22.04.1 end it
| stopped due to lack of space in /boot. A rare case of
| synchronicity in my life.
| ElDji wrote:
| $ head -1 /var/log/pacman.log [2014-03-24 23:03] [PACMAN]
| Running 'pacman -S yaourt'
|
| Eight years so far ...
| discreditable wrote:
| I've had the same install going since January 2012:
| > head -1 /var/log/pacman.log [2012-01-22 14:55]
| installed filesystem (2011.12-2)
|
| In that time I've converted the install in-place from x86 to x64,
| migrated from legacy boot to uefi, replaced the entire RAID set
| twice, motherboards, CPUs, etc. It's my own ship of theseus. Many
| of these tasks people would say to do a reinstall, but I've
| always been able to find a guide on the arch wiki to do it in-
| place without losing anything.
| Max-q wrote:
| What is the advantage of keeping the installation instead of
| starting from scratch when buying a new computer?
| ReactiveJelly wrote:
| No idea. I think of /home as the important part. Everything
| else is disposable.
|
| If I could painlessly flip the FHS, I'd have something like
| /system, /data, and /config.
|
| /system would be "Files you can download from your package
| manager verbatim". This is what apt and pacman create and
| update. If I lose it, who cares, just re-install the OS.
|
| /data would be human-made and only human-made. Not even program
| preferences. This is the only thing I really care about backing
| up.
|
| /config would be all the dumb little dotfiles that won't put
| themselves properly in $HOME/.config. This is stuff that might
| be important, but since I didn't choose the names of the files
| or for them to exist, I don't want them cluttering up /data,
| and I don't want a program complaining if I delete a file in
| _my_ /home that the _program_ thought belonged to it.
|
| I think Android does something kinda like this. Android is
| right twice a day.
| sleek wrote:
| I a million percent agree with this. I've NEVER had major issues
| with Arch. It's my forever linux.
| oleg_antonyan wrote:
| So basically you use Arch Linux? (:
|
| btw, I use openSUSE Tumbleweed - more stable rolling release and
| it's awesome. Never going back to regular release with painful
| major updates every few years
| kakwa_ wrote:
| Personally, I am using Debian Sid. The only somewhat painful
| part are the proprietary Nvidia drivers when a significant
| kernel upgrade occurs, but it's usually just a matter of
| selecting an older kernel in grub for a few days. Other than
| that, it's really up to date, and with an extensive choice of
| packages.
| hs86 wrote:
| My last clean Windows installation was in 2007 with Vista, and
| since then, I ran in-place upgrades to get to the next immediate
| version. It survived multiple mainboard changes and moved from
| MBR IDE HDDs to GPT SATA SSDs. (With the help of Acronis/Macrium
| images)
|
| The next big move would be to change to a Mainboard+CPU with
| Windows 11 support and an NVMe disk. I wonder how feasible this
| will be.
| ht85 wrote:
| In my experience fresh no-bloat windows installs boot in
| seconds, which gets slower and slower every major soft or
| hardware upgrade.
|
| Is your boot still fast?
|
| Nice username btw.
| hs86 wrote:
| No, it is not booting up very fast, but it is still ok as I
| usually don't reboot that often. I remember one severe
| increase in the user login duration, and this was caused by
| the high number of files in a temp folder which Disk Cleanup
| somehow did not delete.
|
| Manually deleting those solved this issue, and over the
| years, I have only used the standard tools included in
| Windows to maintain the system. No tuning or cleaning tools
| that defrag the registry, download some RAM or do some other
| magic.
| buttersbrian wrote:
| have an Arch install that's been running for ~8 years. It's
| solid. Went through the same growing pains as others. Most
| recently the pipewire change.
|
| Love Arch.
| endorphine wrote:
| Kinda off-topic: how does Arch compare to Debian, in terms of UX
| and stability? (I'm a programmer and I use i3)
| david_draco wrote:
| Did this with Gentoo for a decade, even across two computer
| changes. boot into a rescue disk, set up grub, then for each
| partition do ssh oldcomputer "gzip</dev/sda5"|zcat>/dev/sda5,
| then resize the fs.
| thesuitonym wrote:
| When I say Arch is not stable, I don't mean that you can't leave
| it running for a long period of time. I mean that it changes.
| Debian is not stable because you can run it for a long time
| without crashing (You sure can, but you can also run Debian with
| daily crashes, depending on what you're running). Debian is
| stable because it doesn't change. You get security updates, but
| you don't get feature updates, because feature updates introduce
| change, and the way you thought something was done is not the way
| to do it anymore. Flags change, output changes, inputs change.
| None of this is bad, but with Debian you know it won't happen
| until you're ready to move on to the next version. "Unstable"
| distros can introduce these changes at any time, making it harder
| to review what will change.
| dima55 wrote:
| Debian releases do what you say. But you can also run
| Debian/unstable, which is the bleeding edge rolling "release".
| It works quite well, and many people run that on their
| machines.
| vladvasiliu wrote:
| While I agree with your definition of "stable", in my case its
| effects are reversed: I much prefer having to deal with one
| change from time to time, than having to apply a big update
| where possibly "everything changes" all of a sudden. Although,
| granted, this is much more likely to avoid "yoyo changes",
| where a rollback is necessary because the new shiny is actually
| broken.
|
| I didn't take notes and don't remember the specifics, but I
| have a small VM running on some cloud that only hosts LXC
| containers, so not much is installed on it. I did an update
| from Ubuntu 20.04 to 22.04: multiple dozens of packages were
| removed, and multiple new ones added.
| gjs278 wrote:
| Linda703 wrote:
| ISL wrote:
| I'm fairly certain that my current Debian installation dates from
| ~2006, whenever I tired of running Gentoo for its amd64 support
| and returned to Debian, which I had used from 2001-2004.
|
| It is wonderful that these distributions maintain an ongoing
| upgrade path that lets us move smoothly through our computing
| lives limited disruption. Support your local distros and package
| maintainers!
|
| (Typing this comment reminded me that I hadn't donated to Debian
| in ages. Just did.)
| fareesh wrote:
| I stuck with Ubuntu (eventually Kubuntu) for many years because I
| thought it was the best for a no-fuss distro for folks who wanted
| things to just work (TM). I was afraid of things randomly
| breaking and interrupting my daily work. One day I eventually bit
| the bullet and installed Arch instead. The experience has been
| phenomenal, and if anything it feels _more_ stable than Ubuntu. I
| was underestimating my own Linux knowledge, and it really isn 't
| difficult to setup/configure at all if you have a reasonable
| understanding of how Linux works. The initial installation can be
| done by just following one of the many YouTube videos that break
| down the process step by step - you may even learn something if
| you don't already know it. I can't ever see myself going back.
| vlunkr wrote:
| For me the big difference with Arch is that you choose all the
| different pieces (networking, disk setup, desktop environment,
| login manager, etc.), so when something goes wrong, you know
| exactly where to look. If something goes wrong in Ubuntu,
| especially as a beginner all you can do is google "Ubuntu wifi
| disconnecting" or whatever. It's definitely more work to get
| installed, but you come away with something very personal, that
| you understand very well.
| mikewhy wrote:
| Nowadays arch install ISOs have an `archinstall` script that
| can get you going for basic setups.
| capableweb wrote:
| > The initial installation can be done by just following one of
| the many YouTube videos
|
| Even easier, the ArchWiki has detailed steps you can follow
| along at your own speed, together with links to each topic for
| a deep dive (which isn't required, but nice to have when you do
| need it). Reading through and following the "Installation
| Guide" + "General Recommendations" pages would take you 2-3
| hours at most, and you'll end up with a fully installed and
| ready system :)
| minimilian wrote:
| With the Arch Wiki and a little determination you don't need
| any prior knowledge of Linux.
| okamiueru wrote:
| I was in the same situation. My fresh install adjustments to
| Ubuntu consisted of a long list of apt packages, removing snap,
| dep packages, ppa's and some make builds.
|
| I finally tried arch, and my long list of custom manual
| shenanigans was reduced to packman + aur. I'm seriously
| impressed, and it gave me a renewed hope for OSS.
|
| I've used Linux, Windows and MacOS. For what an operating
| system does, the only flaw Linux has is due to lack of software
| and driver availability, neither of which has anything to do
| with the operating system itself. Because for what it is, and
| what it does, Linux and gnome is imo, absolutely excellent.
| herpderperator wrote:
| I'm the same but with Gentoo, which is another rolling
| distribution. I've had it installed for over 12 years on multiple
| servers without any issues.
| cb321 wrote:
| Hrm... $ qlop -tvm|head -n1
| 2007-01-18T19:50:33 >>> x11-base/xorg-server-1.1.1-r4: 9'23''
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| Likewise, I think my oldest install is a Void Linux system
| (another rolling release). Unfortunately, I have no clue how
| old it is; musl doesn't keep login records (wtmp?), and this
| install has lived through not merely multiple machines (moving
| hard drives from one box to another) but multiple filesystems
| (rsynced from I think ext4 to f2fs to zfs) and I think one of
| those jumps lost timestamps because the oldest time I can get
| is younger than I think the system is. Regardless, there's
| something special about that degree of continuity - at work, I
| like cattle, but at home I actually enjoy having a pet around.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| My preferred distro journey went: Mandrake -> Gentoo -> Debian
| -> Gentoo -> NixOS
|
| I rage-quit Gentoo the first time (2002ish?) for Debian when
| stable portage got a broken version of gcc, making it very hard
| to recover. The second Gentoo was by far the longest, maybe
| 2003 through 2018? I'm 4 years into NixOS now and _very_ happy
| with it. I actually run into issues with switching to new
| release channels almost as often as I did the few times I
| experimented with Ubuntu, but it 's just _so much easier_ to
| work around these issues by mixing-and-matching packages from
| different channels[1] that it just doesn 't bother me.
|
| It also got me to love systemd. Configuring systemd units
| (especially timers!) with nix is so much more ergonomic than
| the bare files that I pity anyone who has to do it by hand.
|
| 1: 95% of the time it's already fixed in unstable, the other 5%
| of the time I pull in the version from the previous release
| channel.
| daxvena wrote:
| For me it was: Windows -> Xandros (1 year) -> Ubuntu (6
| years) -> Arch (4 years) -> NixOS (4 years)
|
| Except I never actually installed Xandros myself, my dad just
| brought it home from work one day and installed in my
| computer.
| silasdavis wrote:
| Windows -> Solaris -> Windows -> Gentoo -> Arch -> NixOS
|
| I feel much more satisfaction pouring hours into NixOS over
| doing the same on Gentoo and Arch. The hours on nix are in a
| source file I can carry around. The hours on Gentoo and Arch
| I'm doomed to forget and have to repeat.
|
| I do miss the AUR though. I haven't been able to package a
| rust program that has a build with a transitive dependency
| that expects internet access (https://github.com/foundry-
| rs/foundry). Something something sandbox, crate2nix. But a
| frivolous install of a little binary that isn't packaged is
| not necessarily an easy endeavour.
|
| Overall I'm very happy. Nix unstable feels equivalent to Arch
| more or less. You can pull in master with flakes easily
| enough too.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| Yes, builds that expect internet access are not friendly
| with nix. It's particularly annoying when such packages are
| in something like cargo:
|
| A: "We built this nice tool named cargo that manages
| transitive dependencies for you and will automatically
| fetch and build them from the internet"
|
| B: F-this, I'll just download a tarball from the internet.
| capableweb wrote:
| Ironically, what cargo does is just downloading tarballs
| from the internet for you.
| entropie wrote:
| Same here. My gentoo installation on my previous machine was
| setup as I bought the PC, somewhere around 2008.
|
| I tried arch but it does not feel like home.
| [deleted]
| Rackedup wrote:
| How often did the upgrade process broke? I've been using it for a
| few years and it broke a few times... but overall very happy.
| delusional wrote:
| My install has been alive since 2014. I've never had the
| upgrade process outright break. One in a while it requires some
| manual intervention like holding something back, or ignoring
| some package while upgrading. The only really "big" problem was
| when i switched from Nvidia to AMD and had to boot from a usb
| to restore the video drivers after failing to completely
| configure them.
|
| This install has moved 4 disks in this time. Never a reinstall,
| just an rsync a a new fstab.
| Rackedup wrote:
| > Once in a while it requires some manual intervention
|
| that's what I meant by breaking
| radium3d wrote:
| I've had good luck once I get a system going with arch. Only
| rarely are there manual interventions required for updates, I
| just run pacman -Syyu every few days. I just try to install very
| few packages, only what I need for the server.
| ddggdd wrote:
| I bought a samsung np900x3g about 5 years ago for the reason it's
| too cheap and put archlinux on it. then I used it as my main
| computer, bought 2 ryzen rtx gaming laptop since then, but only
| use them to play some games. it's a 8 years old computer and I
| suspect with arch I can use it for at least several years more,
| and I doubt any people here is still rocking a i5-4200u , but it
| work perfectly for me.
| luciusdomitius wrote:
| Mine is around 6-7 years old. Started off as an Antergos on
| T450s, then moved to T480 and later on I replaced the extra repos
| and the startup logo with EndeavourOS after the Antergos ones
| went dark.
|
| However, I can see a noticable slowdown and some services
| occasionally acting weird - once every few months i need to
| switch to a terminal and use loginctl to unlock my session. I am
| seriously considering a reinstall, no matter how humiliating that
| sounds.
| nfhshy68 wrote:
| I tried to do a reinstall a while back. Gave up around 4 hours
| in. Installing arch was easy, getting it how I liked it on the
| other hand. That was gonna take another couple weekends of
| figuring out what I did 5 years ago to make X work just right.
| luciusdomitius wrote:
| I expect the same, but on the other hand many things related
| to X configuration have improved since then (dpi, multi-
| screen, etc), so I was hoping the result would be better. I
| need only xfce, appmenu and plank anyway.
| powersnail wrote:
| Also a rolling release, I've used the same openSUSE Tumbleweed
| install for 4 years. The benefit is that if something breaks, I
| just reboot and rollback, and wait for a few days until they fix
| it. I've never had to worry about tinkering with failure due to
| update.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| I don't think I've _ever_ done an Ubuntu release upgrade without
| having at least one thing break. Admittedly, my sample size is
| rather small because I stopped using Ubuntu for that very reason.
| jandrese wrote:
| Funnily enough my main box is an Ubuntu 22 machine that started
| life as an Ubuntu 16 machine.
|
| The only problem I have at the moment is the root filesystem is
| on an early 64GB SSD and it's getting a bit cramped. Well, that
| and Ubuntu 22 really took a big steaming dump on Firefox. :( It
| has to run out of a container that cripples it.
|
| I only update on even years though, so only 3 major updates.
| Not really all that exciting. I also have a FreeBSD box that
| started out as FreeBSD 8 something and is currently FreeBSD
| 13-RELEASE. This had some issues because the software RAID I
| was using became deprecated and I had to move all of the data
| off to a backup drive and rebuild the data drive at one point.
| wing-_-nuts wrote:
| I recently switched to an arch flavor because the AUR had a lot
| of little small utilities that make life better on wayland. Also,
| it's quite easy to install the latest version of golang and rust,
| etc.
|
| Pros: Documentation is excellent. Better than even Gentoo or
| Ubuntu's docs.
|
| Cons: Arch doesn't have an installer, and seems almost militantly
| against providing one, or a lot of other little utilities that
| could improve the user experience. I get the same sort of 'I
| suffered, therefore you must suffer, learn to RTFM noob' elitism
| that I saw with slackware 20 years ago. I'm a grizzled vet, I can
| figure this stuff out, but it doesn't help your average
| technically literate joe.
|
| Updates seem to break for odd reasons. I had to uninstall nodejs
| to be able to do a system update. Why? There should be some sort
| of automated way to address this.
| [deleted]
| zdragnar wrote:
| For me, Manjaro has been a fantastic base on top of Arch to
| start with- installer, desktop configured for the flavor you
| pick, and things Just Work out of the box, including the usual
| suspects like wifi, media keys (speakers, backlight, etc).
|
| My only real complaint was that I wanted to do a fairly
| extensive change to the sway configs, and tracking down where
| they put all the config files took a bit of time.
| oblak wrote:
| But with Manjaro you don't have to personally babysit every
| computer in the house. Imagine not having your wife and/or
| child mad after the occasional update breaks things and
| they're helpless because they simply refuse to get intimate
| with the OS their own computer! What kind of world would that
| be?
| zdragnar wrote:
| Well, the wife has a chromebook, and the kid is moved out
| on her own and pretty much only uses a phone anyway, so
| it's a pretty nice world, to be honest :)
|
| At some point I'm tempted to get a fat server going so I
| can do my dev work remotely to it using a super light
| weight / long battery life laptop, but that's a
| complication too far at the moment.
| xxpor wrote:
| There're some Arch-derived distros that are basically just Arch
| + some choices made for you + an installer, like
| https://endeavouros.com/
| wing-_-nuts wrote:
| This is exactly what I'm running :^)
| cycomanic wrote:
| Should have scrolled down before replying. I agree endeavour
| is excellent.
| kingaillas wrote:
| Another vote for Endeavour.
|
| I already run Ubuntu on my NUC, and when I was looking around
| to install on my former gamebox (i.e. computer with a
| graphics card unlike NUC with onboard graphics only) I wanted
| something with good steam/nvidia integration. It came down to
| either Pop! OS or Endeavor... because while I develop
| software I also want to play games without futzing around too
| much.
|
| Very happy with Endeavour: pacman or yay for nearly
| everything, no hassle graphics drivers updates (system always
| suggests a reboot after and I always do that).
| 5e92cb50239222b wrote:
| I think you misunderstood the point of the distribution.
| There's no installer because Arch developers have no need of
| one. They're creating the distribution for themselves, and if
| you find it useful (I do), that's great. There's no expectation
| that an "average technically literate joe" is going to use it
| because he's not in its target group.
| wing-_-nuts wrote:
| Arch isn't some small LFS niche distro anymore. At a certain
| point, you have to embrace at least some small amount of
| usability, or at least not reject PRs to add it. I found it
| quite embarrassing when one of the most popular distros out
| there had a worse installer than deb or slack from 20 years
| ago. That's not 'oops we forgot', it's not 'it was never
| really a priority' that's blatant user hostile elitism.
| bee_rider wrote:
| I don't think you should be embarrassed. An offer to
| provide code review, continuing development, and community
| support for this new feature is quite generous of you. They
| might not have decided to prioritize it, but at least you
| can be proud of the fact that you aren't just nitpicking
| from the sidelines, right?
| ratorx wrote:
| Any decent installer is non-trivial code and you cannot
| expect unpaid volunteers to write or maintain code that
| they don't want to write or maintain.
|
| I don't see what the size of the distro has to do with it.
| Regardless of size, if there are users who have the time
| commitment and knowledge necessary to get commit rights and
| build and maintain an installer (as there is now), then it
| will have one. Otherwise it will not.
|
| There's no user hostility necessary for this sequence of
| events to happen.
| _Algernon_ wrote:
| That is only true if the Arch developers seek user growth
| beyond the niche they currently have. You are not entitled
| to them spending their time to meet your demand, though you
| are free to build your own distribution on top of it (or
| use one of the many available ones).
| evh wrote:
| > blatant user hostile elitism
|
| ...and that's a _feature_. There 's nothing wrong with Arch
| doing its thing, there's always
| Debian/Ubuntu/Fedora/Manjaro/whatever - and Gentoo for
| those with taste.
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| It's "maintaining an installer is a tedious chore I don't
| want to do as my hobby." Not elitism, eventually they did
| attract someone who wanted to maintain an installer as
| their hobby and now they have archinstall.
| collegeburner wrote:
| actually no you don't have to go change your project's
| philosophy bc different ppl start using it and demand
| different stuff. this is the kind of attitude that makes
| ppl hate maintaining FOSS anything.
| girvo wrote:
| Except there is an installer now, so your arguments against
| it are moot.
| johnchristopher wrote:
| You just proved parent's point.
| loudmax wrote:
| I don't know that it's elitism so much as not an interesting
| problem to solve. Like a lot of software, it's straightforward
| to automate the easy parts of an installer. But for it to work
| reliably, you have to account for so many corner cases and that
| it can become tedious and take a lot of dedication to get
| right. I think most Arch maintainers would rather spend their
| time working on Pacman or system stability issues that benefit
| themselves rather than new users.
|
| I think most people who want easy access to Arch just go with
| Manjaro, which is close enough and gives you access to the AUR.
| twelvedogs wrote:
| Endeavour os lets you install barbones arch if you untick
| enough checkboxes in the installer, I tried manjaro but they
| put on too much extra stuff
| cycomanic wrote:
| If you want an installer and some utilities to make life a bit
| easier while staying on arch I can recommend endeavouros. It is
| really just vanilla arch with an installer and some convenience
| packages.
| Skunkleton wrote:
| I would like to defend arch here.
|
| In my experience, Arch's main focus is on upholding a simple
| consistent architecture. There are tools that do something like
| the bare minimum required work, and then excellent
| documentation so that the end user can correctly perform the
| remaining required work manually (or via their own scripts).
|
| As a result, there are certain features that will probably
| never be implemented. For example, if you wait too long between
| upgrades, your signing keys will be out of date. The solution
| is to upgrade the "archlinux-keyring" package first. Should
| pacman automatically do this? It would be nice, but it would
| also introduce a special case into pacman. Would that special
| case be abused to do unexpected things?
|
| Another example is installers. Writing a basic installer for a
| single machine is easy. Writing an installer that covers any
| machine is very hard. Writing an installer that covers any
| machine with any configuration the user might want is
| impossible.
|
| Put another way, everyone likes that Arch has up to date
| packages and an excellent wiki. Would either of these exist if
| there was a bunch of extra complexity that needed to be
| integrated? Is there any need for an excellent wiki if
| installers automatically resolve all your problems?
| wolletd wrote:
| I love that Arch has no extra configuration system. I'm
| building Debian images at work for like three years now and
| still don't really get how debconf works.
|
| Also, the amount of patches, workarounds and custom
| configuration files in most packages and maintainer scripts
| is just wild. Coming from more than ten years of Arch, it
| took me a while to learn to check the debian packaging source
| if upstream doesn't match the behaviour on my system.
| sam_lowry_ wrote:
| >Arch's main focus is on upholding a simple consistent
| architecture
|
| I though it is all about doing it the upstream way.
| wyclif wrote:
| That's the flip side of the coin.
| WfAjWDYpDHDYCN5 wrote:
| They're talking about an installer for Arch itself (which
| could and should support the bare minimum options that most
| users want), which is what it didn't have until recently; not
| installers for packages within Arch, which it has always had.
|
| So, would it add a bunch of extra complexity? Not really;
| it's actually tiny compared to making a package manager and
| maintaining its library.
|
| Would it take away from maintaining the package library? I
| guess a bit.
|
| Would there still be a need for documentation? Of course.
| giantrobot wrote:
| > Another example is installers. Writing a basic installer
| for a single machine is easy. Writing an installer that
| covers any machine is very hard. Writing an installer that
| covers any machine with any configuration the user might want
| is impossible.
|
| This is a cop out. An installer doesn't need to cover _every_
| option a user might want. An installer only covering popular
| options /configurations is only a problem if the installer is
| the only way to install the system. If it's just an option
| itself during the install there's no issue. The weird corner
| case can still be handled manually while more common options
| can be handled by an installer.
| chrsig wrote:
| I'd call it more likely a form a neurosis than a cop-out.
|
| It can be hard to resist some analysis paralysis when faced
| with an incredibly broad problem. There's a strong urge to
| find one solution to cover all cases. Trying to do
| everything at once being so overwhelming that it's
| impossible to get even started on it.
|
| Of course, you're correct that the best thing to carve out
| the most common cases and then iterate. I've found that it
| takes time and experience to gain the wisdom to learn the
| perfect is the enemy of the good.
| __del__ wrote:
| arch used to have an installer. it didn't work for
| everyone, and caused a lot of complaining. turned out
| most people could do the steps themselves.
|
| it has an installer again. maybe the userbase will
| change.
| ratorx wrote:
| I think the historical opposition of Arch devs to an
| installer is more maintenance. Most advanced users end up
| scripting their own specific system or getting a muscle
| memory for installing it (and that's if they install Arch
| frequently at all).
|
| Most if not all Arch devs are likely advanced users, they
| didn't need to maintain a user friendly installer for
| themselves so the old one got out of date and was removed.
|
| What's probably changed recently is that Arch has grown
| enough to get devs/trusted users who actually wanted to
| write and maintain an installer, so now it has one.
|
| I find the Arch dev justification/perspective for most
| things much better than many users on the forums who tend
| to pick up the basic idea and cargo cult it whilst losing
| the context behind it.
| superduperuser wrote:
| Being that Arch is maintained with arch users in mind[0],
| building an installer for that user base would have to
| entail a wide range of option for unique use cases because
| that's whats expected of their users[1]. There isn't a
| "cop-out" or "plea" to users outside of the community
| because it was never a goal to appease them.
|
| [0]https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Arch_Linux#User_central
| ity
|
| [1] https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Arch_Linux#Versatility
| WfAjWDYpDHDYCN5 wrote:
| No, it wouldn't, because that versatility can be attained
| by... not using the installer, the _exact same as the
| situation without an installer_.
|
| An installer, if anything, _improves_ "user centrality"
| because you're making it more accessible and usable to
| most users with just the most common few options.
|
| _Not_ having an installer improves "dev centrality"
| (the few users who matter are the devs and other advanced
| users), over and against user centrality.
|
| You could use the same thinking to argue against having a
| package manager. You might have to install a package
| manually anyway, so why bother providing packages at all?
| d_tr wrote:
| At the end of the day, as others have probably already
| said in this thread, the maintainers are unpaid
| volunteers and choose to focus on certain things for
| their own reasons and using their finite resources.
|
| There are other distributions that focus on other things
| and people can choose. If Arch chose to implement lots of
| convenience functions, that choice could be to the
| detriment of other strong aspects of the distribution.
| girvo wrote:
| ...which they chose to use to write an installer for Arch
| after all, so I find your arguments against it somewhat
| amusing.
| d_tr wrote:
| I am aware of the fact that they wrote an installer. I do
| not think this invalidates my previous comment though.
| arccy wrote:
| also, keys: https://lists.archlinux.org/archives/list/arch-
| dev-public@li...
| sophacles wrote:
| > Arch doesn't have an installer, and seems almost militantly
| against providing one, or a lot of other little utilities that
| could improve the user experience
|
| This just changed! The archinstall package is included on
| install media now and is not considered experimental (according
| to the wiki page history, that happened on 2022-07-08).
|
| https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/archinstall
| Macha wrote:
| Huh, it took a while for the wiki to be updated to reflect
| that. The official announcement was on april 1st, 2021 (the
| date was almost certainly a joke of how unexpected it was to
| people now following its development, but the release was no
| joke): https://archlinux.org/news/installation-medium-with-
| installe...
| rthomas6 wrote:
| Welp, looks like I'm switching back from Manjaro for my next
| Linux install.
| boomfunky wrote:
| I recently adopted Arch onto my laptop and didn't even
| realize 'archinstall' wasn't always a thing. I looked up a
| traditional Arch installation and think I might have skipped
| it had the installer not been present when I was distro
| hopping.
| wooque wrote:
| Arch has installer since April 2021
| https://archlinux.org/news/installation-medium-with-installe...
| adamdusty wrote:
| As a Linux noob i actually picked arch because it doesn't have
| an installer. Just installing arch I learned a lot about how
| computers work and how much is actually done by other operating
| systems like windows. I just followed the installation article
| in the wiki and didn't have any issues I couldn't solve. There
| are plenty of nicer distros for people that just want to use
| Linux. In my field of work RTFM is pretty standard so I don't
| mind it in the arch community.
| adastra22 wrote:
| You should try Linux from Scratch.
| coldpie wrote:
| Seconded. It's a terrible end-user experience, but a
| fascinating and extremely educational project for a
| developer/sysadmin.
| xfalcox wrote:
| > I recently switched to an arch flavor because the AUR had a
| lot of little small utilities that make life better on wayland.
|
| Same for me after more than a decade on Ubuntu. Switched to
| Manjaro Sway so I could have a better life in Wayland.
| collegeburner wrote:
| i am in favor of gatekeeping out ppl who are completely
| unwilling to go read the extremely helpful and well maintained
| wiki. it helps maintain a better atmosphere and keeps the
| forums clean(er) of the same 10 noob questions that everyone
| asks without looking for prior responses.
| RealStickman_ wrote:
| > Updates seem to break for odd reasons. I had to uninstall
| nodejs to be able to do a system update. Why? There should be
| some sort of automated way to address this.
|
| That usually happens when a package depends on a specific
| version of a dependency, with e newer (major) version in the
| repo.
|
| It should only be an issue if you're using AUR packages or
| other package management systems. Official packages are updated
| for new dependencies afaik.
| setuids wrote:
| For the most part that does seem to be the case. Though I
| have had problems with Qbittorrent and qt6 not playing nicely
| unless i hold back qt6. Seems to be resolved now
| maurodec wrote:
| The thing is that it used to have an installer that was removed
| at some point. It was a simple menu that just covered the
| basics and would leave you with a working system withing
| minutes. I don't know why it was ever removed.
| pxeboot wrote:
| There actually is an optional installer included with the
| official installation media now [1].
|
| [1] https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/archinstall
| wing-_-nuts wrote:
| This must be new, but it's definitely a step in the right
| direction.
| Macha wrote:
| The previous installer was deprecated in 2012, so a 10 year
| period of no installer.
| benbristow wrote:
| Quite a good video about it -
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OtWWLN3wGNE
|
| Used it to create a dual boot on my main machine and works a
| charm.
| mkopec wrote:
| Arch actually now has an installer script built into the
| installation ISO.
| z3t4 wrote:
| Installers often get configured for the average user, and the
| average user doesn't exist. Also remember to do a full system
| backup before you upgrade!
| [deleted]
| meribold wrote:
| I can provide some details regarding the times things did break
| that I mentioned in the article.
|
| * In September 2014, X broke, and I created an
| `/etc/X11/Xwrapper.config` file with the lines `allowed_users =
| anybody` and `needs_root_rights = yes` to get it to work again. I
| don't remember and don't have notes on why that helped. It sure
| does sound like a pretty terrible hack. I don't have that
| Xwrapper.config file anymore, and I also don't know when I
| deleted it.
|
| * In June 2017, audio stopped working, but all I had to do was
| add my user to the `audio` group.
|
| * In May 2018, X broke a second time. This time I downgraded the
| `xorg-server-common` and `xorg-server` packages. A few weeks
| later, I ran another system upgrade, and this one went fine.
|
| These weren't the only problems, but they were the most
| disruptive. Generally, things like TrackPoint driver updates
| changing how the cursor responds or Firefox changing its UI have
| been far more annoying than Arch Linux issues :)
| lifeeth_ wrote:
| I am glad I am not the only one. I run have been running arch
| on a "experiment" VPS for ~11 years now. Been `pacman -Syu` ing
| every month :)
| andrewstuart2 wrote:
| I definitely had some rough edges with the pulseaudio, and then
| pipewire, upgrades, and a few cases where almost everything
| broke because in my infinite genius I had compiled my own
| (insert dependency) for a bleeding edge feature, forgot to
| revert when it made it to mainline, and then later down the
| road a major version bump meant some `.so` was missing, and I
| had to USB liveboot to fix it.
|
| I've also been on Arch for over a decade, and it's almost never
| been broken, even when I was playing with some seriously
| bleeding edge components. Almost always, it's been surprisingly
| straightforward to un-screw the few screw-ups I've made.
| codeflo wrote:
| > Almost always, it's been surprisingly straightforward to
| un-screw the few screw-ups I've made.
|
| That's been my experience as well. With Arch, everything is
| exposed. There are usually no wrappers or layers of
| abstraction or weird modifications added to the upstream
| components it ships. That makes problems so much more
| straightforward to troubleshoot and fix.
| rocqua wrote:
| I yearn for my arch days where 'ls /etc' only yielded
| things I knew about.
|
| These days I am stuck with WSL, and that sadly does not
| work with Arch. As far as I can tell the Arch community
| does not want to support WSL because of philosophical
| disagreement.
| carlhjerpe wrote:
| WSL2 should have no problems running arch at all.
|
| https://github.com/yuk7/ArchWSL
| andrewstuart2 wrote:
| Exactly. And having gone through the install process to the
| point of a usable desktop, I learned a ton about what I'd
| need later to fix the issues myself, quickly. And then when
| everything just worked, much better than Ubuntu, I
| installed Arch on a few other machines and got even more
| practice.
|
| The learning curve may have been steep but it definitely
| paid off in my understanding of how to maintain and fix
| issues going forward. And just my understanding of Linux
| overall.
| grimgrin wrote:
| So to recall the above, had you blogged about this, wrote in
| your journal, or just queried your damn memory??
| meribold wrote:
| I try to take a note whenever I fix some major issue with my
| system. Querying my memory doesn't yield much; definitely not
| specific dates :)
| abrookewood wrote:
| If only we could add some indexes ...
| agumonkey wrote:
| I had a similar life with arch. A handful of boot blocking
| issues, let's say 5. 4 out of them were solved after joining
| #arch on now-dead freenode and realizing this was explained on
| arch main page. 1 of them was a deeper borkage that arch team
| didn't catch early and required a bit of surgery. The problem
| was gone in 5 minutes.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| You didn't get bitten by a painful glibc upgrade? It's been
| long enough that I don't recall details, but I thought that was
| a big one.
| Macha wrote:
| The biggest upgrade I remember on my similarly aged system
| was initscripts -> systemd, and that had some steps to follow
| but went off smoothly.
| cycomanic wrote:
| The glibc upgrade which was painful (and essentially required
| recompiling everything) was much further back than 10 years.
| I think I was running LFS at the time, but recall it was
| painful for all distros. I don't think there was a glibc
| upgrade that was disruptive since then. There was the
| introduction of multi arch on Debian some years back which
| caused a bit of disruption (I was running Debian unstable at
| the time IIRC), but pretty much everything else has been very
| minor since then. I've been running arch for 2 years or so
| now, before I was running tumbleweed. I have to say that
| rolling releases have been much less eventful in general than
| release based distros (I administer my partners Ubuntu laptop
| and lts upgrades are a bit more disruptive).
| xorcist wrote:
| The a.out -> ELF migration had some sharp edges, too, but
| that was before Ubuntu and Arch.
| LukeShu wrote:
| In Arch, the glibc package upgrade associated with the
| `/lib` + `/usr/lib` merge in 2012ish was painful. I assume
| that's what the parent post was referring to. I assume
| you're referring to the libc5-libc6 upgrade?
| cycomanic wrote:
| Yes I think you're correct libc5 to libc6 is the upgrade
| I was talking about. I just had a look that's more than
| 20 years ago. Funny how people still talk about "painful
| libc upgrades".
| Macha wrote:
| Hmm, I remember UsrMerge being a non-event from a user
| POV. The official instructions seem quite short too:
| https://archlinux.org/news/the-lib-directory-becomes-a-
| symli...
| LukeShu wrote:
| For many users it was a non-event; but if you missed that
| news post, and didn't pass `--ignore glibc` to your
| `-Syu`, then your system broke. And a sizable minority of
| users missed the news post. (Shamefully, I was in that
| minority.)
| entropicdrifter wrote:
| The current glibc version broke Easy AntiCheat support for
| Proton games, but that's the only break of note in recent
| memory, and it only affects people playing multiplayer
| games on Linux, which is a minority (multiplayer gamers) of
| a minority (Linux gamers) of a minority (Linux users).
| WfAjWDYpDHDYCN5 wrote:
| glibc updates have recently broken lots of Electron
| software (and probably other stuff using similar
| sandboxing), by using a new syscall (clone3? or
| something) to implement some library methods.
|
| Pretty much every glibc update breaks _something_ ,
| honestly.
| LukeShu wrote:
| That breakage is because of the dumpster-fire that is
| seccomp. Your seccomp policy (in this case, the one that
| comes with Electron) whitelists syscalls, but which
| syscalls glibc uses to implement things is considered an
| implementation detail, not part of the contract. So
| seccomp was designed in a way that makes it broken-by-
| design with the most popular libc.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| > The glibc upgrade which was painful (and essentially
| required recompiling everything) was much further back than
| 10 years.
|
| Ah. I'm old. Somehow traumatic glibc upgrades were not how
| I expected to find out.
| panzagl wrote:
| Glibc upgrades are how you become old.
| LukeShu wrote:
| I suspect you were thinking of an Arch Linux-specific
| glibc upgrade related to Arch's `/lib`+`/usr/lib/` merge
| in 2012ish, not a painful glibc-itself upgrade that other
| distros would have noticed?
| laumars wrote:
| glibc and the file system update were both horrible updates
| in Arch.
|
| The systemd transition was annoying as I liked Arch's unit
| system but it was just an annoyance rather than breaking
| change.
|
| Recently I ran into an issue were I had to revert to a LTS
| kernel because the main kernel hangs during boot each time
| (spent hours debugging and haven't found the culprit. But the
| LTS kernel is working fine so I'm going to stick with that).
| fonkyyack wrote:
| I had the exact same problems you mentioned!
|
| Also, Nvidia gpu drivers are the worst (I was on Manjaro back
| then) to seeif I could get rid of Windows for gaming purposes.
| I used Linux for games for about 6 months and had to quit and
| get back to Windows.
|
| I should retry now with all the steam deck fuss!
| xvedejas wrote:
| Proton is a game-changer, but Nvidia drivers remain the most
| unstable thing on Arch. Find a version that works well with
| your card, and avoid upgrading it, if at all possible. It's
| performant, but I have games that crash once every few hours,
| but only specifically on certain machines.
| queuebert wrote:
| This is true everywhere. I have some very expensive Lambda
| Labs GPU blades, and even their Lambda-stacked Ubuntu
| upgrades break CUDA stuff occasionally. I think Nvidia's
| driver ecosystem is held together with chewing gum and duct
| tape.
| ensignavenger wrote:
| Or get an AMD GPU, like what I did for my recent gaming PC.
| WfAjWDYpDHDYCN5 wrote:
| That's great! But what it doesn't say is what's actually
| relevant: how much time you spent maintaining it in that period.
|
| Stuff being obviously/"disruptively" broken usually has an undue
| amount of weight given to it, even though it generally (a) occurs
| at a time the administrator has chosen and should be planned to
| minimize the effects of any disruption (i.e. when you're doing
| updates or potentially problematic config changes), and (b)
| usually takes significantly less time to deal with, overall, than
| regular maintenance (upgrades, config changes caused by them,
| etc).
| stop50 wrote:
| I switched between arch and debian and the only real unstable
| thing i encountered is KDE. even before i changed something my
| whole desktop crashed. I had to login as root and kill my
| usersession (as root so that every process that belongs to my
| user is stopped).
| jklinger410 wrote:
| The issue isn't so much whether a person can keep an arch install
| stable, it's whether arch is stable for most people, most of the
| time.
|
| As modern hardware and DE choices change and conflict, arch has
| to be manually tweaked to stay working. Those tweaks (aka config
| choices) are essentially the entire purpose of a normal distro.
|
| Arch isn't designed to do the tweaks. It's just that simple.
|
| Saying you kept arch running is either a brag about how well you
| manage it, how minimalist your environment is, or how simple your
| hardware is. Not to mention whether your needs drive you to try
| any of the edgier stuff.
|
| Congrats to this guy though.
| vladev wrote:
| I would say that Arch's philosophy is about Exposed simplicity
| vs Hidden complexity. The wiki is extensive and covers a lot of
| cases one might stumble upon. Sometimes it feels like Arch's
| goal is to teach you how it works end-to-end. As a byproduct
| you get a working OS.
| dj_mc_merlin wrote:
| The best thing about the rolling releases is that the OS feels
| ageless. If I leave a Thinkpad sitting in a corner for 3 years
| and boot it up again to pacman -Syu, it will have basically the
| same software as my modern Thinkpad. This just tickles my sense
| of "this is how the computer _should_ behave".
| Bolkan wrote:
| And all the data in your `~/.config`, `~/.cache` will still be
| in the old format. Linux programs are notoriously bad at
| handling that kind of things. There is no local data update api
| like the one provided by android sdk.
| dj_mc_merlin wrote:
| Yes, that sucks. I'm not aware of any *nix besides Android
| that handles that. Would love to be proved wrong.
| WfAjWDYpDHDYCN5 wrote:
| s/Linux //
|
| Windows isn't any better. I don't have enough Mac experience
| but I doubt it has some magic bullet.
| maxnoe wrote:
| I would be very surprised if pacman -Syu worked after three
| years of no upgrades.
|
| That's generally not supported and will require manual
| interactions.
| dj_mc_merlin wrote:
| If you boot from USB to use an external pacman to upgrade you
| can mitigate almost all of the common problems people have
| with this.
| jreese wrote:
| I literally let my server sit without upgrades for almost
| three years before realizing my autoupdater script had been
| failing me. The biggest issue was needing to manually
| download a statically linked version of pacman (found on the
| arch forums) to support the new mirror/signing features. Once
| the system pacman was upgraded, I just ran `pacman -Syu`, let
| it spin for a while, and rebooted, and it just worked.
| -\\_(tsu)_/-
| JeremyNT wrote:
| I routinely go over a year between updating some old crufty
| systems - usually it's all just fine, excepting a need to
| update the keyring first.
|
| Periodically, some upgrades of some packages do require
| manual interaction when configured in certain ways. However,
| this is usually a general issue with a change in packaging
| which isn't actually any more onerous for systems that hadn't
| been updated in a long time.
|
| Now, it's true that every once in a blue moon something
| really big does change. The big one I remember was updating a
| system that had been shut down for some years, and the
| compression used by pacman had changed in the meantime. That
| one did require some self-imposed manual intervention :)
| WfAjWDYpDHDYCN5 wrote:
| That's what I was thinking. Good luck getting all the random
| crap you have installed to update without choking on EOL'd
| packages, or various packages that have new config formats,
| or changes to the updater itself, or apps which only support
| version-at-a-time migrations (or otherwise don't include the
| full history needed to migrate)...
| jakswa wrote:
| Broke for me after a month or so on one laptop. Had to stop
| whatever I was doing and learn a bit how pacman and PGP keys
| interact or something.
| dj_mc_merlin wrote:
| That's expected, you'll have to pacman -Sy archlinux-
| keyring when a new developers key is added, which happens
| every couple months or so.
| idoubtit wrote:
| I'm a happy user of another rolling release distribution: Debian
| testing. It's on my desktop and a laptop for a decade (even more
| for the desktop since I transferred the OS from my previous
| desktop pc).
|
| I can't remember any problem during the upgrades of the recent
| years. I often apply partial updates through `aptitude` on a
| weekly basis, and full upgrades once in a while (maybe monthly).
| There were some rough times long ago, but I think it was related
| to the transition from initrc to systemd: for a major change like
| this, it's would be surprising if a _testing_ release was
| perfect.
|
| I don't think I ever had problems as acute as having no Xorg or
| alsa. If several occurrences of this kind had occurred, I would
| call my OS _unstable_.
| otsaloma wrote:
| Debian unstable running here since about 7 years. I tend to
| reinstall when getting a new computer. Once I had X break and I
| had to set "GDK_BACKEND=x11" and "XDG_SESSION_TYPE=x11" to fix
| it. Something related to Wayland I guess. But I use startx
| directly, no login manager, so probably not a common issue.
|
| Sometime more than five years ago, there was some trouble
| always when a new version of GNOME trickled to unstable one
| package at a time and having part of packages the old version
| and part new caused a lot of small issues, like thumbnails not
| working in Nautilus etc.
|
| I don't remember any other relevant issues. apt-listbugs helps
| avoid a lot of issues. I use aptitude as package manager
| (commands, not the menu UI) and often use "aptitude forbid-
| version" to skip a bad version, not sure if apt-get or apt
| these days provide something similar. apt-listchanges is nice
| too, although I rarely see something relevant to me
| specifically there.
| flobosg wrote:
| Another Debian testing user reporting in. I think I've
| reinstalled once or twice in a decade.
| nsomaru wrote:
| I've been running Debian stable for about 10 years and
| reinstalling every so often. How do you run a partial upgrade
| on testing? Is it usable as a daily driver?
| nortonham wrote:
| I use sid/unstable, and like you I use aptitude, partially out
| of habit. I used to use stable exclusively. About a year ago I
| decided to try using sid permanently. I only ever had one issue
| (couldn't login to a gui), but that was resolved during the
| next update. It feels almost as stable as Debian stable, and I
| see no reason to try out something like arch or manjaro.
| goodpoint wrote:
| Debian unstable is equally functional on desktops. 15 years
| without having to reinstall.
| vbernat wrote:
| It's even better (to use unstable) since you don't have
| disappearing packages, you have access to packages only in
| unstable (Firefox instead of Firefox ESR), and you get timely
| security update.
|
| 20 years ago, things may break a lot in unstable. But
| nowadays, you just have to be careful to only use "apt
| upgrade" and from time to time "apt full-upgrade" (and check
| what is removed as it could remove everything).
| vbernat wrote:
| Another Debian unstable user. It's hard to remember the exact
| installation date, but I have a `/var/log/firewalld.1` from Aug
| 25 2002. So, 20 years soon! And it has been migrated from
| 32-bit to 64-bit.
| wooptoo wrote:
| I've been using the same Archlinux install over the past 12 years
| or so. Initially installed in 2006 (version 0.7 or so), I only
| re-installed properly when I switched from 32-bit to 64-bit
| packages, and from ReiserFS to Ext4 in the same step. Since then
| I've been using the same install on my personal computer, and
| just rsync-ed the files between hdds, laptops, etc.
|
| It's been pretty stable, had some hiccups a dodgy kernel once I
| think. Can't remember what it was specifically.
|
| > zcat /var/log/pacman.log.1.gz-2018010214.backup | head -1
|
| > [2009-02-23 18:14] installed filesystem (2009.01-1)
| JLCarveth wrote:
| > A few months ago, I copied my complete installation to a
| ThinkPad X13 Gen 2 using rsync
|
| How would something like this work? Is the target laptop running
| any random linux distro, and rsync replaces all system files etc.
| effectively "swapping" operating systems? Can the laptop boot
| into the new system as if it was installed normally?
| pseudoramble wrote:
| Interesting question. Only other ideas I can think of is they
| pulled the drive out from the laptop to do the copy physically,
| or they booted the laptop from a live distro and did the copy.
| But those are simply guesses!
| trebbble wrote:
| Boot from external media (USB disk, cd or dvd if you're kicking
| it old school, maybe even network) with no persistent storage
| (ramdisk or whatever only). Mount the hard drive. Format. Rsync
| the files over.
|
| That's pretty similar to what installation media does anyway,
| really.
|
| [EDIT] Oh you might need to install the bootloader too. But you
| can sort-of (your running kernel will still be the installation
| media's) do that from the rsync'd system once it's copied over,
| with some creative chrooting and mounting. Which, again, is
| something that Linux installers kinda do anyway, in ordinary
| operation, but you'd likely want to do it manually in this
| case. It's exactly what you used to do (probably still do?)
| installing Gentoo, even for a "stage 3" (least-painful)
| installation.
| traverseda wrote:
| You boot into a live cd (probably the arch install disc) and
| rsync on to a mounted partition, then you chroot into that
| partition and re-install the bootloader.
|
| This is pretty much how you install archlinux normally, except
| instead of rsync-ing the initial filesystem you make a new
| initial filesystem based on the "filesystem" package.
|
| https://archlinux.org/packages/core/x86_64/filesystem/
| 5e92cb50239222b wrote:
| I do that routinely. Boot from a liveUSB, rsync data from the
| main system, fix the bootloader and a couple of configs like
| /etc/fstab. Works like a charm every time.
| foepys wrote:
| I did exactly this a few times, too.
|
| My Arch is from 2007 or so and had only a few hiccups. The
| last thing happened when MD5 was getting deprecated for
| /etc/passwd and the automatic migration to another hash
| algorithm was not working, which is obviously directly
| related to the age of the installation.
|
| It is running on its third mainboard/CPU/GPU combo with maybe
| the fifth HDD/SSD.
| gspr wrote:
| > I do that routinely. Boot from a liveUSB, rsync data from
| the main system, fix the bootloader and a couple of configs
| like /etc/fstab. Works like a charm every time.
|
| Just be careful if you intend to keep the old system running.
| You probably don't want to clone /etc/machine-id and similar
| (see: the problems that come with exactly cloning VMs). But
| of course, if the old system is being destroyed, then no
| worries.
| qbasic_forever wrote:
| Could be booted into a USB live CD and then manually mounted
| the internal harddrive to rsync the new root filesystem. They
| would need to make sure their boot partition is rebuilt/updated
| too with the kernel if necessary.
| csdvrx wrote:
| > How would something like this work?
|
| Very well and very easily. You can do that even with Windows,
| even with different CPUs: I've ported my master Windows install
| from a Xeon to a regular Intel CPU on a laptop.
|
| This laptop still feels like downloading Xeon-specific updates
| time to time, but every system peripheral is recognized in the
| device manager, and everything has been working great for over
| a year now.
|
| For my next laptop, I'll do just the same: use bitlocker
| unlock, clone this Windows install into a larger SSD using
| Linux NTFS tools, plug the new SSD into the new laptop.
| sgtnoodle wrote:
| There's really not very much magic involved. The root
| filesystem is just a collection of directories and files. The
| kernel is just a binary blob, usually stored in /boot. You
| perhaps need an initial ramdisk tailored to your configuration,
| but that's usually just running a script. The only really
| arcane bit is bootloading the kernel. With modern x86 systems
| EFI does it, and so you just need a correctly formatted fat32
| EFI partition.
| meribold wrote:
| I booted a live system from a USB thumb drive and then pulled
| down a backup using rsync. After that, I adjusted my
| `/etc/fstab`, `chroot`ed into the new (old) system, ran
| `mkinitcpio -P`, and generated a new GRUB configuration file.
| prettyWise wrote:
| I would boot from a live disk image, mount the built in hard
| disk, and then rsync the files to it from there and reboot I
| think.
| malermeister wrote:
| I'm gonna guess you rsync onto a separate partition and then
| get rid of the "host" partition once you're done instead of
| replacing stuff on the fly.
| wooque wrote:
| >my experience doesn't match the common notion that Arch Linux is
| unstable
|
| Arch is unstable, as in, package versions constantly change and
| can (will) introduce bugs and regressions. Debian is considered
| stable because apart from security updates package versions are
| set in stone til the next release, so there won't be any
| surprises.
|
| This is stable/unstable difference, that doesn't mean that you
| can't break your OS and have to reinstall in either Debian or
| Arch.
| jcelerier wrote:
| > Debian is considered stable because apart from security
| updates package versions are set in stone til the next release,
| so there won't be any surprises.
|
| which is not what the rest of the world means by "stable" when
| talking about software, so there is in practice a lot of
| surprise for users coming to Debian when they hear "stable"
| thinking that it means "no bugs" when it actually means "no
| changes"
| wooque wrote:
| stable, by dictionary definition, means "not changing or
| fluctuating", no bugs would be "bug free", there is no "bug
| free" distro.
| jcelerier wrote:
| it's a problem of scale: it can mean "changing or
| fluctuating" as in, the software itself won't change over,
| say, a time scale of months (what Debian means), OR
| "changing or fluctuating" in the sense that a stable chair
| does not fluctuates, breaks or tips over when you sit on
| it, e.g. at the time scale of an human interaction. I'd
| wager than people mean the latter in general with the word
| "stable".
| pessimizer wrote:
| But if they think that they can have the second definiton
| without the first, they're fooling themselves. The reason
| Debian Stable is both kinds of stable is because they
| test forever, eventually put the most finely tested
| software into a release, then keep working on fixing any
| bugs in that release until the next one.
|
| edit: your new, experimental chair just released
| yesterday may be stable enough to sit on, but it's
| nothing to bet on.
| jcelerier wrote:
| > The reason Debian Stable is both kinds of stable
|
| I stop you right there - I ran debian stable for years.
| Arch Linux has been so much more "stable" in terms of
| "less bugs and issues" for daily use it's not even funny
| gspr wrote:
| > which is not what the rest of the world means by "stable"
| when talking about software
|
| But it is what the rest of the world means by "stable" in
| lots of ways: a stable climate, a stable government, a stable
| relationship, a stable heading. I don't think it's far-
| fetched for Debian to use it in that meaning about software
| as well.
| singron wrote:
| I was wondering why their system didn't break with the migration
| to systemd, but it's possible that their system is new enough
| that it started on systemd. That one was huge pain if I remember
| correctly. I think I needed to rescue with a bootable usb.
| xbpx wrote:
| Hey cheers, I bet I'm around a decade on the same install of Arch
| too. That spans 3 machines. The trick for me is hot swap backups.
| I do an rsync backup of the drive to an identical disk (nowadays
| a 1TB 980 Evo) and then immediately swap the backup drive to the
| main drive. I have little helper scripts to format drives, do
| backups and automatically update fstab and the boot config. So
| new machine no problem, rsync the files into it and boot it up
| and I have everything exactly as it should be.
|
| Now and again I'll do some package spelunking (pacman makes this
| straightforward) and clean out cobwebs. Next on my list is my
| emacs config which is like 15 years old and a couple generations
| out of date. I wouldn't care but startup times are slowing down
| and there is a lot of great ideas and packages to solve this
| problem. Just need the time, it's a few hours here and there, but
| easily enough to keep Arch going forever!
| abalashov wrote:
| I used the same Arch Linux installation from early 2016 until
| summer 2021, and had a very similar experience to the author's.
|
| There was a significant initial setup investment, by modern
| standards, although not by historical ones; I had used Linux on
| the desktop continuously since I was a child, around 1997 (I
| think I started with RedHat 4.0 and kernel 2.0.29), so I remember
| all initial setup to be fairly burdensome in the late 1990s and
| early 2000s. Arch seemed a throwback to that. This is not a
| criticism, to be clear. I was very aware that this was part of
| the Arch philosophy, and I embraced that in my switch from
| Ubuntu.
|
| However, once that was done, very little of interest happened
| over the next half decade. It's not that nothing ever broke,
| ever, but the rate of breakage was impressively low, and much
| lower than I had the previous 7 years on Ubuntu, or desktop
| Debian beforehand. Arch Linux was eminently stable.
|
| In 2021, I switched to Mac/OSX -- the last of my social group of
| techies to do so, late to the party by a decade or so. While this
| has some advantages, my work kinetics will never come close to
| the raw efficiency and speed of my Arch Linux + i3wm setup.
| clircle wrote:
| Operating systems are not unstable. Users are unstable.
| encryptluks2 wrote:
| Windows had multiple issues. I recall multiple times having to
| basically do a reinstall after installing some update.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| Of course OSs are unstable, in two senses: First, some OSs,
| somewhat dependent on hardware and software in play, just tend
| to crash. Second, OSs can be unstable in the sense of changing
| things; users are, in this sense, actually supremely stable and
| tend to be quite unhappy when the system decides one day to
| move menus around, rename programs, change shortcuts, shift
| around config files, require manual intervention for updates to
| work, etc. It is this second sense in which Arch _tends_ to be
| less stable, and distros like Debian and RHEL are extremely
| stable.
| sophacles wrote:
| I see you never used windows 95.
| bengalister wrote:
| I ran Archlinux with LTS kernel on my home laptop for 1.5 years
| and I stopped because of instabilities. The last issue that I had
| was the update to pipewire, my bluetooth headset stopped working
| after suspend. I got fed up of tweaking configuration to make it
| work. I could have reverted to pulseaudio.
|
| But to be honest, the only major issue was an issue with pam
| login. I could not log in anymore after an update, had to search
| on the internet to find a workaround that consisted in updating a
| pamd.conf file in single user mode boot. Many breaking updates
| were Gnome related...
|
| Switched back to Windows 10 then 11 for a year, tried WSL2 and
| found it unstable (some random crashes and tmux freezes), and
| slow sometimes.
|
| Now on Fedora for a few months since I am a Gnome user, I am
| surprised there are quite frequent kernel updates also. I am
| little bit less worried that an update will break something, but
| i'll slowly move away from the bleeding edge.
| twblalock wrote:
| Now try to replicate that Arch setup on another PC. Even if you
| started from the exact same install, would it turn out the same?
|
| I'd really like to see something like a rolling release take on
| Fedora Silverblue. Rolling release with versioning/immutability
| and easy rollbacks.
| atleta wrote:
| I've had that with a Debian desktop (for over a decade). My
| current OS on my laptop is Ubuntu, which I also installed a
| decade ago. Though something went really wrong with an upgrade
| about 5 years ago, so I had to reinstall. (Keeping all the data,
| of course.)
|
| The only problem (with both debian and ubuntu) is that these old
| installs tend to drift from what a fresh install would be. And
| that the GNOME guys keep removing features I use with every
| release and then it takes a few months (sometimes a year) until
| someone adds it back as an extension (which will be broken with
| the next release, for sure).
| krzyk wrote:
| I have it with Debian testing/unstable on my laptop, I think it
| has about 15 years now. Most stable system. I have also Ubuntu
| laptop from work, freezes constantly.
|
| I switched laptops 3 or 4 times and HDD to ssd and another
| bigger sad with copying while system and just enlarging
| partitions.
|
| The only issue I have right now is lack of legacy boot on newer
| laptops, not sure how to UEFI my disk.
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