Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Using the same Arch Linux installation for a decade

meribold.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 422 posts

Re: Using the same Arch Linux installation for a decade

#51

Post by nfhshy68 »

luciusdomitius wrote: post #5

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…

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.

Re: Using the same Arch Linux installation for a decade

#52

Post by encryptluks2 »

craggyjaggy wrote: post #23
valbaca wrote: post #3

Exhibiting the self discipline to not distro-hop in 10 years is more commendable...but I guess that's Arch Linux for you.

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.

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.

Re: Using the same Arch Linux installation for a decade

#53

Post by dima55 »

thesuitonym wrote: post #31

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 featu…

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.

Re: Using the same Arch Linux installation for a decade

#55

Post by Skunkleton »

wing-_-nuts wrote: post #34

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…

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?

Re: Using the same Arch Linux installation for a decade

#56

Post by wing-_-nuts »

xxpor wrote: post #48
wing-_-nuts wrote: post #34

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…

There're some Arch-derived distros that are basically just Arch + some choices made for you + an installer, like https://endeavouros.com/

This is exactly what I'm running :^)

Re: Using the same Arch Linux installation for a decade

#57

Post by rodolphoarruda »

> "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.

Re: Using the same Arch Linux installation for a decade

#58

Post by sophacles »

wing-_-nuts wrote: post #34

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…

> 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

Re: Using the same Arch Linux installation for a decade

#60

Post by orangepurple »

loudmax wrote: post #46

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 enviro…

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.
Post reply on HN