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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

#371

Post by jillesvangurp »

sophacles wrote: post #58
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…

> Arch doesn't have an installer, and seems almost militantly against providing one, or a lot of other little utilities that could improve the user experience This just changed! The archinstall package is included on install media now and is not considered experimental (according to the wiki page history, that happened on 2022-07-08). https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/archinstall

Yes, it does a quite decent job of getting you up and running with a bootloader and disk encryption all configured. From there, you can just bootstrap the rest. But that was the main reason for me to pick Manjaro half a year ago.

Re: Using the same Arch Linux installation for a decade

#372

Post by seabrookmx »

bombcar wrote: post #162
5e92cb50239222b wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It was only worth it if you had to deploy a custom image to a whole fleet of machines.

IIRC there was a tool called "sysprep" you could run to reset the drivers, hostname etc. so they would reconfigure themselves on first boot.

Re: Using the same Arch Linux installation for a decade

#373

Post by mrtweetyhack »

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…

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Re: Using the same Arch Linux installation for a decade

#376

Post by rolisz »

Lapsa wrote: post #375

running Arch for about 5 years. then again - dual booting Win10 and it's also chugging along just fine

Similar for me: I got a new desktop in January 2015 and I've been dual booting ArchLinux and Windows 10 ever since. Everything is super stable and it has even survived several hard drive upgrades where I cloned the old drive onto a bigger one.

Soon I'll have to buy a new motherboard, because of Windows 11. I'm curious if I can still keep the same OS without reinstalling.

Re: Using the same Arch Linux installation for a decade

#377

Post by rockyj »

capableweb wrote: post #280
rockyj wrote: post #131

This is so good, but Arch only annoys me in 1 way - that every week I need to download 500MB of updates. If I go away for a couple of weeks, my computer will most likely have 2 GB of updates pending.

How many packages (via pacman I assume?) do you have installed in total?

Not many. Standard dev tools like latest versions of VSCode, Chrome, JDK, Node, Ruby and some utils like Git, Gimp, Inkscape, etc. On Linux Mint I just have to do (maybe) an update of 100MB a week.

Re: Using the same Arch Linux installation for a decade

#378

Post by jcelerier »

seba_dos1 wrote: post #342
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"

> which is not what the rest of the world means by "stable" when talking about software [citation needed] That's exactly what a lot of software projects mean when they make stable release branches, stable interfaces, stable protocols...

I'm not taking about the world of software developers, but the world of humans. Go ask your non-tech family members what "is your computer stable?" means to them

Re: Using the same Arch Linux installation for a decade

#379

Post by vbernat »

pabs3 wrote: post #350
vbernat wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another Debian unstable user. It's hard to remember the exact installation date, but I have a `/var/log/firewalld.1` from Aug 25 2002. So, 20 years soon! And it has been migrated from 32-bit to 64-bit.

If you used d-i to install, it would have left logs in /var/log/installer/ Also, the installation-birthday package can figure out your installation's birthday.

No /var/log/installer (maybe it was not the case for Woody?) and installation-birthday says 2006 but this is the date of the cross-upgrade to amd64 (using debootstrap).

Re: Using the same Arch Linux installation for a decade

#380

Post by vbernat »

pabs3 wrote: post #351
vbernat wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's even better (to use unstable) since you don't have disappearing packages, you have access to packages only in unstable (Firefox instead of Firefox ESR), and you get timely security update. 20 years ago, things may break a lot in unstable. But nowadays, you just have to be careful to only use "apt upgrade" and from time to time "apt full-upgrade" (and check what is removed as it could remove everything).

You can also pin most packages to testing, but allow packages from unstable/experimental to be installed but pinned at lower priority and also pin security updates from unstable at a higher priority. I think this approach is the best of both worlds.

This seems overly complicated. Nowadays, unstable almost never break (with the exception of files migrating from one package to another without the proper metadata) and I am updating daily. I am curious, are you using testing or unstable?
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