301–310 of 422 posts
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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.
Is that plugged to a UPS or is your power just that stable?
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.
Periodically, some upgrades of some packages do require manual interaction when configured in certain ways. However, this is usually a general issue with a change in packaging which isn't actually any more onerous for systems that hadn't been updated in a long time.
Now, it's true that every once in a blue moon something really big does change. The big one I remember was updating a system that had been shut down for some years, and the compression used by pacman had changed in the meantime. That one did require some self-imposed manual intervention :)
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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.
Don't you need to reboot after kernel updates?
I very rarely use the mac mini. Basically just for testing. So at some point, it got to a crazy uptime and now I'm purposely trying to see how long I can go haha.
In theory the battery in UPS will eventually need to be replaced. Otherwise I don't see it ever losing power given that I have a generator
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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.
Coming from the author of ripgrep, which is a tool I use daily, I've got to say it's an honor to see you answering my silly comment! Office at home certainly beats datacenter hosted but by 5x? Not sure... ; )
(I got the generator not just for uptimes haha. Got it because we get a lot of outages and we were losing a lot of spoiled goods from our fridge. About half our neighborhood has generators of some kind.)
I run several Arch boxes, a couple I believe is on 15+ years. One such installation has even been mirrored from one disk to multiple other disks and put into other machines, just because it was already set up as needed. Only once did a package I ran require manual intervention during upgrade, but as always, that was clearly described on the Arch website.
This also goes for Debian, FreeBSD and OpenBSD.
Packages randomly break and require hours of work to fix. Non-rolling distribution will usually only break when there is major upgrade which can be scheduled for when you have the time to deal with it.
Pacman only works in interactive mode so using it on a headless means at least weekly session. Randomly that will use up an hour or two when something breaks, and it will. Ubuntu based LTS distribution will last a couple of years without needing manual intervention after initial installation, and much longer if you don't upgrade to next LTS until the EOL.
Finally, if you need old software to build old version of something, Arch based distribution is useless. On Ubuntu I can download and install version 14.04 without much hassle (and even older with a bit of work) and build that old Android or sdk for device that is no longer supported but with Arch...don't waste your time, its not happening.
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 -…
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I had the exact same problems you mentioned! Also, Nvidia gpu drivers are the worst (I was on Manjaro back then) to seeif I could get rid of Windows for gaming purposes. I used Linux for games for about 6 months and had to quit and get back to Windows. I should retry now with all the steam deck fuss!
Proton is a game-changer, but Nvidia drivers remain the most unstable thing on Arch. Find a version that works well with your card, and avoid upgrading it, if at all possible. It's performant, but I have games that crash once every few hours, but only specifically on certain machines.
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…