Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Using the same Arch Linux installation for a decade

meribold.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

361–370 of 422 posts

Re: Using the same Arch Linux installation for a decade

#361

Post by chrismorgan »

maxnoe wrote: post #111
dj_mc_merlin wrote: post #36

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.

The main problem you’ll have is that you’ll want to upgrade archlinux-keyring first. Beyond that, it wouldn’t surprise me at all, though it also wouldn’t surprise me if you did have problems. Early last year I updated a machine I hadn’t booted for 2½ years, and I messed up the procedure a bit and ended up rendering it unbootable (the way I did it, upgrades in the pacman hooks system meant they didn’t run properly, so mkinitcpio didn’t happen, so I couldn’t boot past grub), but when I came back to that machine almost a year later and fixed it up by booting from USB, chrooting into the local installation and I think just reinstalling the linux package as a convenient way to trigger the mkinitcpio hooks, then it was fine, and after just a manual archlinux-keyring update the year’s worth of updates were uneventful. (I think if I’d tried to do the whole three years’ worth in one go it might have failed, though, vague recollections of the .tar.xz transition or something.)

Re: Using the same Arch Linux installation for a decade

#363

Post by vonunov »

agumonkey wrote: post #220
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.

The worst incident I can remember from several years of running an Arch VPS is when they had relocated some /lib or /usr/lib files and it required intervention, and I did a pacman -Syu and rebooted without reading the news. Just a mild PITA in OOB console.

Re: Using the same Arch Linux installation for a decade

#364

Post by cookiengineer »

For me, it was pretty similar...but I was more affected by everything related to mesa and their decision to drop old Intel core generations (basically everything up to Haswell is broken with Vulkan).

The worst upgrade bug was around 2016 when mesa had a buffer overflow bug, and I had to apply the patch manually...and well, recompile mesa every time an X update came out or anything related.

On top of that the almost monthly archlinux keyring messups that need a repopulate, a different keyserver, or a deletion on the filesystem for whatever reason...oh man, I just hate gpg so much. I wish this piece of crap software would be more reliable. It would make my life so much easier.

I always have issues with gpg and pacman complaining about outdated or wrong keys, and then shit happens even when you tell pacman to not delete the package download (and when you start the init, repopulate, and sync of archlinux-keyring again). It messed up my system so often with remnants of packages, where I debugged X for days just to realize that a file was missing and the package got uninstalled automatically.

Re: Using the same Arch Linux installation for a decade

#365

Post by pkulak »

romeoblade wrote: post #182
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…

I reinstall once a year. Nowadays, with PXE booting, preseed files, and automation like Ansible, everything is pretty much automated for me. This goes for both my personal and work laptops. Both have been running some version of Debian for the last ten years. For the previous four/five years, I've been on Debian Sid, and I may run into an issue about every other year that requires me to use timeshift to go back to ye…

Sometimes I write a setup script or some other automation… but then the next re-install I do everything differently.

Re: Using the same Arch Linux installation for a decade

#366

Post by adastra22 »

adastra22 wrote: post #161
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!

Burst your bubble

Re: Using the same Arch Linux installation for a decade

#367

Post by bugBunny »

fareesh wrote: post #255

I stuck with Ubuntu (eventually Kubuntu) for many years because I thought it was the best for a no-fuss distro for folks who wanted things to just work (TM). I was afraid of things randomly breaking and interrupting my daily work. One day I eventually bit the bullet and installed Arch instead. The experience has been phenomenal, and if anything it feels more stable than Ubuntu. I was underestimating my own Linux know…

which wm are you using?

Re: Using the same Arch Linux installation for a decade

#368

Post by jillesvangurp »

fareesh wrote: post #255

I stuck with Ubuntu (eventually Kubuntu) for many years because I thought it was the best for a no-fuss distro for folks who wanted things to just work (TM). I was afraid of things randomly breaking and interrupting my daily work. One day I eventually bit the bullet and installed Arch instead. The experience has been phenomenal, and if anything it feels more stable than Ubuntu. I was underestimating my own Linux know…

I ended up using Manjaro mainly because the arch installer was just a bit too much to figure out for me. Recent installer improvements make things much easier and I might consider switching from Manjaro to Arch at some point. But Manjaro got me up and running quickly.

Things I like about arch: it's stable and up to date. It's stable because fixes by upstream developers are not being blocked by package maintainers that second guess what they are doing. I never understood this being a thing. Mostly all the experts for any software are exactly those people involved with producing the upstream source code. If they say something is stable and ready for use, it generally is. Arch mostly just ships software as is. Nothing more nothing less. Unless the upstream developers release broken and untested software, it generally is the best version of that software available. Basically, Arch does most of the due diligence on ensuring things at least compile, install, and run fine. So generally, it's fine. And if it's not, you just wait and it will be fixed. You always have the option to downgrade. I've never had to do that actually.

Arch is mainstream enough that all the mainstream stuff just works. Docker, snap, steam, etc. Between those, I can run just about anything I need to and get the best experience possible.

Hardware support is constantly improving and with Arch you have early access to kernel releases. I generally am within a few patch releases of the latest stable linux kernel. So, I get the most out of my GPU, CPU, wifi, and other stuff I have. Mostly chances of hardware working decrease with the age of the kernel. Best case, stuff works but with more stability issues and less performance on an older kernel. Worst case, you have stuff that doesn't work at all that you can't get working until your distribution finally updates the kernel. I've updated the kernel mostly without issues. On 1 occasion I went back to the previous version for a week while they sorted out some issues with touchpad support. Not a big deal.

Re: Using the same Arch Linux installation for a decade

#369

Post by pkulak »

vlunkr wrote: post #322
fareesh wrote: post #255

I stuck with Ubuntu (eventually Kubuntu) for many years because I thought it was the best for a no-fuss distro for folks who wanted things to just work (TM). I was afraid of things randomly breaking and interrupting my daily work. One day I eventually bit the bullet and installed Arch instead. The experience has been phenomenal, and if anything it feels more stable than Ubuntu. I was underestimating my own Linux know…

For me the big difference with Arch is that you choose all the different pieces (networking, disk setup, desktop environment, login manager, etc.), so when something goes wrong, you know exactly where to look. If something goes wrong in Ubuntu, especially as a beginner all you can do is google "Ubuntu wifi disconnecting" or whatever. It's definitely more work to get installed, but you come away with something very pe…

Yeah, but then you’re on the hook for maintenance too. Maybe you installed a while ago with Pulse and WPA supplicant, but now you need to know they are replaced with Pipewire and IWD. And you have to swap them out manually yourself.

Installing Arch is the easy part. The maintenance is what gets ya.

Re: Using the same Arch Linux installation for a decade

#370

Post by pkulak »

yoyohello13 wrote: post #327
fareesh wrote: post #255

I stuck with Ubuntu (eventually Kubuntu) for many years because I thought it was the best for a no-fuss distro for folks who wanted things to just work (TM). I was afraid of things randomly breaking and interrupting my daily work. One day I eventually bit the bullet and installed Arch instead. The experience has been phenomenal, and if anything it feels more stable than Ubuntu. I was underestimating my own Linux know…

I think the old narrative that Ubuntu is the best “just works” distro is just plain wrong (and harmful). I’ve tried a huge variety of distros over the years and ironically I’ve always had the most problems with Ubuntu based distros. Fedora, and Arch have given me the least problems. Fedora in particular has been rock solid for me.

I’m gonna try moving from Arch to Silverblue this weekend. From what I’ve seen in a VM, it’s very impressive.
Post reply on HN