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Using the same Arch Linux installation for a decade

meribold.org

111–120 of 422 posts

Re: Using the same Arch Linux installation for a decade

#111

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".

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.

Re: Using the same Arch Linux installation for a decade

#112
post #86
post #62

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.

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.

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.

Re: Using the same Arch Linux installation for a decade

#114
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.

Re: Using the same Arch Linux installation for a decade

#115

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 any…

So to recall the above, had you blogged about this, wrote in your journal, or just queried your damn memory??

Re: Using the same Arch Linux installation for a decade

#116

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 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.

Re: Using the same Arch Linux installation for a decade

#117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

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).

Re: Using the same Arch Linux installation for a decade

#118

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…

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?

Re: Using the same Arch Linux installation for a decade

#119
post #99

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 t…

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.

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.

Re: Using the same Arch Linux installation for a decade

#120
post #74

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!

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.

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