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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

#401

Post by rodolphoarruda »

genewitch wrote: post #337
rodolphoarruda wrote: post #57

> "With Ubuntu, I would’ve had to upgrade (...) five times to end up with the latest LTS release.* And these release upgrades don’t always go smoothly either." I read this in the exact moment I was upgrading to 22.04.1 end it stopped due to lack of space in /boot. A rare case of synchronicity in my life.

you have to run apt --autoremove or something. If you don't, debian/ubuntu updates will get slower and slower as it has to rebuild some index for every kernel available on the system. Removing all of the kernels you're no longer using fixes the storage space issue, but i am unsure if apt will freak out if it can't find a kernel it thinks is installed. apt --autoremove will uninstall and de-index all of the old kernel…

Yes, I even added --purge to gain an extra notch in the process, but it all fell 37MB short in space. The next alternative is to shrink /home and expand /boot, but (2) I would have to do it via an USB booted Ubuntu, but (3) my SSD has LUKS, so I don't know how gparted would deal with it. I feel the risk of losing some data... I do have backups, but (4) not the time nor the patience to go through all this.

Re: Using the same Arch Linux installation for a decade

#402

Post by hotcoffeebear »

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.

Ubuntu LTS updates worked incredibly smooth, for last 3 release. I am surprised somehow.

Re: Using the same Arch Linux installation for a decade

#403

Post by scarygliders »

genewitch wrote: post #332
scarygliders wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a libvirt VM running Windows with GPU passthrough to the GTX1070 (the main GPU is the RTX 2070 Super) and use looking-glass-client and scream to pass the audio to Linux, which I use for gaming. No need to even multi boot, though I do still have the Windows boot available if I need it, which is rarely.

how is the latency on audio with that setup? I use qemu with GPU passthrough, 1060 on linux and 1070 on windows for a few years now, and i had to buy a laptop to do music production because of the latency. The only other solution was to passthrough a USB soundcard, but about 15 years ago i discovered i can't actually play live notes on a MIDI device with the latency on the USB subsystem. I've heard of looking glass,…

I don't /perceive/ any audio latency, the game sound seems fine to me. Talking about Elite: Dangerous specifically - I use the VM to develop my E:D 3rd party application.

Re: Using the same Arch Linux installation for a decade

#404

Post by rocqua »

lillecarl wrote: post #319
rocqua wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I yearn for my arch days where 'ls /etc' only yielded things I knew about. These days I am stuck with WSL, and that sadly does not work with Arch. As far as I can tell the Arch community does not want to support WSL because of philosophical disagreement.

WSL2 should have no problems running arch at all. https://github.com/yuk7/ArchWSL

That is not the kind of packaging that inspires confidence. And the effort it takes to verify it isn't backdoored is too much. Definitely, my IT department is not going to appreciate me installing this. In this case, I actually think our IT department would be right.

Re: Using the same Arch Linux installation for a decade

#405

Post by rejectfinite »

fonkyyack wrote: post #146
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 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!

Depends on what games you play. Games with anti-cheat seems to be broken right now.

Re: Using the same Arch Linux installation for a decade

#406

Post by pimeys »

daxvena wrote: post #242
malermeister wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah Arch is basically the final destination all that distro hopping gets you to. No reason to hop once you've arrived.

I thought the exact same thing until I switched to NixOS. I love Arch, but I'd never go back.

Same story. I love Arch, but having more than one computer with constantly changing custom wm/shell/compiler setup makes it complex to replicate the same changes in all the machines. NixOS makes this just one git push/pull and switch away.

Re: Using the same Arch Linux installation for a decade

#407

Post by pabs3 »

arein3 wrote: post #384
pabs3 wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Me too! I do unattended-upgrades 4 times daily. I also auto-upgrade packages to unstable when there are security updates that didn't reach testing yet. https://wiki.debian.org/DebianTesting#Best_practices_for_Tes...

I do it 5 times daily

The Debian archive is only updated 4 times daily, so one of those 5 times will do nothing.

Re: Using the same Arch Linux installation for a decade

#408

Post by pabs3 »

vbernat wrote: post #379
pabs3 wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Maybe the filesystem or LVM/RAID creation date would give a better birthday. Also, these days one can cross-grade between architectures without using debootstrap, just apt.

https://wiki.debian.org/CrossGrading

Re: Using the same Arch Linux installation for a decade

#409

Post by pabs3 »

vbernat wrote: post #380
pabs3 wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I am using primarily testing, but some packages from unstable due to security updates or where the package got autoremoved from unstable due to release-critical bugs, which happens quite often. It feels a little more comfortable using testing, knowing that I don't hit any bugs piuparts/etc blocks from entering testing. I think I initially downgraded to testing to avoid dealing with unfinished transitions, which make upgrades a bit more annoying.

Re: Using the same Arch Linux installation for a decade

#410

Post by kkkrist »

I run Arch™ on all of my production servers since 2016 and never had any real problems or the need to reinstall either. The newer ones use docker with Alpine images, but the hosts still run Arch. Packages are updated every few days or weeks. On most servers I use the LTS kernel, pin it and only update it every couple of months to keep downtime low. That's it. The first ever server still runs fine with all its legacy apps thanks to a couple of custom packages.

One of the things I like about arch is that it keeps app config as upstream as possible. Debian's custom app config with all its magic scripts used to cause so much trouble. Yes, I only have <10 servers and the way I maintain them does not scale up too well. But that's something we have the "cloud" for these days anyway.

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