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Using the same Arch Linux installation for a decade

meribold.org

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Re: Using the same Arch Linux installation for a decade

#71

Post by meribold »

JLCarveth wrote: post #8

> 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?

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.

Re: Using the same Arch Linux installation for a decade

#72

Post by drbawb »

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.

Re: Using the same Arch Linux installation for a decade

#73

Post by wing-_-nuts »

5e92cb50239222b wrote: post #49
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 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.

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.

Re: Using the same Arch Linux installation for a decade

#75

Post by flaviut »

encryptluks2 wrote: post #52
craggyjaggy wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: Using the same Arch Linux installation for a decade

#76

Post by wing-_-nuts »

pxeboot wrote: post #37
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 actually is an optional installer included with the official installation media now [1]. [1] https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/archinstall

This must be new, but it's definitely a step in the right direction.

Re: Using the same Arch Linux installation for a decade

#77

Post by loudmax »

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 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.

Re: Using the same Arch Linux installation for a decade

#78

Post by aidenn0 »

herpderperator wrote: post #4

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.

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.

Re: Using the same Arch Linux installation for a decade

#79

Post by giantrobot »

Skunkleton wrote: post #55
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 exa…

> 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.

Re: Using the same Arch Linux installation for a decade

#80

Post by foepys »

5e92cb50239222b wrote: post #18
JLCarveth wrote: post #8

> 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?

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.

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.

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