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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

#211

Post by vladev »

jklinger410 wrote: post #204

The issue isn't so much whether a person can keep an arch install stable, it's whether arch is stable for most people, most of the time. As modern hardware and DE choices change and conflict, arch has to be manually tweaked to stay working. Those tweaks (aka config choices) are essentially the entire purpose of a normal distro. Arch isn't designed to do the tweaks. It's just that simple. Saying you kept arch running…

I would say that Arch's philosophy is about Exposed simplicity vs Hidden complexity. The wiki is extensive and covers a lot of cases one might stumble upon. Sometimes it feels like Arch's goal is to teach you how it works end-to-end. As a byproduct you get a working OS.

Re: Using the same Arch Linux installation for a decade

#212

Post by otsaloma »

idoubtit wrote: post #88

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…

Debian unstable running here since about 7 years. I tend to reinstall when getting a new computer. Once I had X break and I had to set "GDK_BACKEND=x11" and "XDG_SESSION_TYPE=x11" to fix it. Something related to Wayland I guess. But I use startx directly, no login manager, so probably not a common issue.

Sometime more than five years ago, there was some trouble always when a new version of GNOME trickled to unstable one package at a time and having part of packages the old version and part new caused a lot of small issues, like thumbnails not working in Nautilus etc.

I don't remember any other relevant issues. apt-listbugs helps avoid a lot of issues. I use aptitude as package manager (commands, not the menu UI) and often use "aptitude forbid-version" to skip a bad version, not sure if apt-get or apt these days provide something similar. apt-listchanges is nice too, although I rarely see something relevant to me specifically there.

Re: Using the same Arch Linux installation for a decade

#213

Post by jandrese »

aidenn0 wrote: post #66

I don't think I've ever done an Ubuntu release upgrade without having at least one thing break. Admittedly, my sample size is rather small because I stopped using Ubuntu for that very reason.

Funnily enough my main box is an Ubuntu 22 machine that started life as an Ubuntu 16 machine.

The only problem I have at the moment is the root filesystem is on an early 64GB SSD and it's getting a bit cramped. Well, that and Ubuntu 22 really took a big steaming dump on Firefox. :( It has to run out of a container that cripples it.

I only update on even years though, so only 3 major updates. Not really all that exciting. I also have a FreeBSD box that started out as FreeBSD 8 something and is currently FreeBSD 13-RELEASE. This had some issues because the software RAID I was using became deprecated and I had to move all of the data off to a backup drive and rebuild the data drive at one point.

Re: Using the same Arch Linux installation for a decade

#214

Post by jcelerier »

wooque wrote: post #179
jcelerier wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Debian is considered stable because apart from security updates package versions are set in stone til the next release, so there won't be any surprises. which is not what the rest of the world means by "stable" when talking about software, so there is in practice a lot of surprise for users coming to Debian when they hear "stable" thinking that it means "no bugs" when it actually means "no changes"

stable, by dictionary definition, means "not changing or fluctuating", no bugs would be "bug free", there is no "bug free" distro.

it's a problem of scale: it can mean "changing or fluctuating" as in, the software itself won't change over, say, a time scale of months (what Debian means), OR "changing or fluctuating" in the sense that a stable chair does not fluctuates, breaks or tips over when you sit on it, e.g. at the time scale of an human interaction. I'd wager than people mean the latter in general with the word "stable".

Re: Using the same Arch Linux installation for a decade

#215

Post by jandrese »

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.

Usually the pain comes when you find you need to use a feature in some software and the feature wasn't introduced until after the version that Centos ships. This happens more often than you might expect. Even fairly "modern" versions of Centos come with some really old and crusty packages.

Re: Using the same Arch Linux installation for a decade

#216

Post by throwaway1777 »

zdragnar wrote: post #69
throwaway1777 wrote: post #40

Having to debug X or audio breaking several times even over 10 years is a non-starter. Had these issues 0 times over 10 years on mac, albeit on several machines, but I think it’s extremely rare for someone to reinstall Mac OS ever. Only time I did it was when I tried to setup a hackintosh and that really broke some things.

I get that some people don't like tinkering. They want something that will always Just Work. Some of my friends who were long time linux uses switched to macs and stayed there. MacOS wasn't that for me- brew was the cause of no shortage of pain, but even that could have been lived with. It's also not exactly stable- one company I worked for (about 7 years total) had a blanket request that people not update OSX to new…

Your points are all valid, but I will point out homebrew not working isn’t really an apple issue. Also this isn’t quite same level as X or drivers not working. It seems intuitive that less configurability in is in fact a reason why macOS is more stable

Re: Using the same Arch Linux installation for a decade

#218

Post by pjvsvsrtrxc »

franga2000 wrote: post #152
janci wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've been running this setup since 2017 and while there were occasional graphical and sound glitches, usually after a Windows update, over all it works great. It did the "installing new hardware" thing only after updates as well, so I didn't run into it too often. It does like to deactivate itself after a few reboots, but that's nothing a bit of mild piracy can't fix. I have at least two spare windows licenses in a d…

Seamless mode still exists in Virtualbox 6.1 which is the latest version.

(Windows did just crash when I was testing it but, as it also crashed twice before I got that far, I don't think it's related)

Re: Using the same Arch Linux installation for a decade

#219

Post by krzyk »

atleta wrote: post #207

I've had that with a Debian desktop (for over a decade). My current OS on my laptop is Ubuntu, which I also installed a decade ago. Though something went really wrong with an upgrade about 5 years ago, so I had to reinstall. (Keeping all the data, of course.) The only problem (with both debian and ubuntu) is that these old installs tend to drift from what a fresh install would be. And that the GNOME guys keep removin…

I have it with Debian testing/unstable on my laptop, I think it has about 15 years now. Most stable system. I have also Ubuntu laptop from work, freezes constantly.

I switched laptops 3 or 4 times and HDD to ssd and another bigger sad with copying while system and just enlarging partitions.

The only issue I have right now is lack of legacy boot on newer laptops, not sure how to UEFI my disk.

Re: Using the same Arch Linux installation for a decade

#220

Post by agumonkey »

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…

I had a similar life with arch. A handful of boot blocking issues, let's say 5. 4 out of them were solved after joining #arch on now-dead freenode and realizing this was explained on arch main page. 1 of them was a deeper borkage that arch team didn't catch early and required a bit of surgery. The problem was gone in 5 minutes.
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