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Using the same Arch Linux installation for a decade

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Re: Using the same Arch Linux installation for a decade

#161

Post by adastra22 »

TacticalCoder wrote: post #134

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 a…

Hate to hear your Hubble, but there are systems with decades of uptime. Great accomplishment though!

Re: Using the same Arch Linux installation for a decade

#162

Post by bombcar »

5e92cb50239222b wrote: post #32
edoceo wrote: post #24

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…

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.

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.

Re: Using the same Arch Linux installation for a decade

#163

Post by evh »

wing-_-nuts wrote: post #73
5e92cb50239222b wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

Re: Using the same Arch Linux installation for a decade

#164

Post by gspr »

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 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.

Re: Using the same Arch Linux installation for a decade

#165

Post by superduperuser »

giantrobot wrote: post #79
Skunkleton wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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_centrality

[1] https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Arch_Linux#Versatility

Re: Using the same Arch Linux installation for a decade

#166

Post by boomboomsubban »

wing-_-nuts wrote: post #73
5e92cb50239222b wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: Using the same Arch Linux installation for a decade

#167

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

cycomanic wrote: post #98
yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #89

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 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.

Re: Using the same Arch Linux installation for a decade

#168

Post by xbpx »

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!

Re: Using the same Arch Linux installation for a decade

#169

Post by adastra22 »

adamdusty wrote: post #155
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…

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 sta…

You should try Linux from Scratch.

Re: Using the same Arch Linux installation for a decade

#170

Post by twblalock »

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.

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