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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

#191

Post by burntsushi »

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…

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.

Re: Using the same Arch Linux installation for a decade

#192

Post by coldpie »

adastra22 wrote: post #169
adamdusty wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Seconded. It's a terrible end-user experience, but a fascinating and extremely educational project for a developer/sysadmin.

Re: Using the same Arch Linux installation for a decade

#195

Post by waynesonfire »

zh3 wrote: post #173

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 nee…

xfce is great

Re: Using the same Arch Linux installation for a decade

#196

Post by WfAjWDYpDHDYCN5 »

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…

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.

Re: Using the same Arch Linux installation for a decade

#197

Post by WfAjWDYpDHDYCN5 »

superduperuser wrote: post #165
giantrobot wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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?

Re: Using the same Arch Linux installation for a decade

#198

Post by laumars »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #89
meribold wrote: post #35

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…

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.

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).

Re: Using the same Arch Linux installation for a decade

#199

Post by cevn »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #103
cevn wrote: post #42

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.

> 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.

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.

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