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Ask HN: Arch Users – What is your long-term system maintenance routine?

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Re: Ask HN: Arch Users – What is your long-term system maintenance routine?

#31

Post by nvy »

bediger4000 wrote: post #24
nvy wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Windows 95, 98 and XP were like that, no? I'm not sure that being on par with a 30-year old operating system is much of an accolade. Windows sucked back then, it's just that it sucked less than DOS.

I've used Arch since 2012 or 2013 and never done a reinstall. I'm just mentioning that amazingly popular Standard Business Operating Systems, that virtually everyone used, loved and defended, were like that. Arch, in my experience, is not like that.

> that virtually everyone used, loved and defended, were like that

Were you actually using Windows back in those days? Absolutely nobody loved or defended them. We used them because we had to, not because they were good.

Re: Ask HN: Arch Users – What is your long-term system maintenance routine?

#32

Post by cookiengineer »

freedomben wrote: post #5

It won't be a popular answer, but the truth is nuke and pave every so often. The problem isn't Arch itself, the problem is that I like to try new things pretty regularly, and occasionally install junk that I don't want long-term, but that I forget to clean up. Quite a few years back I just started a bash script that stays in my dot files repo, that has all the base packages and configuration in it that I need for a n…

For this very reason I wish there was a different flag for pacman, which would allow to effectively differ between packages installed for the base system itself, and for the local packages that can be installed and wiped without bricking the system afterwards. Similar to how a rootless system works on MacOS, where restoring the OEM state involves just wiping the folders (e.g. /usr/local) with the differences that override changes to the base system.

But for that to work, we desperately need a different POSIX incompatible filesystem structure, because /etc/ has to become /local/etc or something like that.

/usr/local is theoretically there but on most distributions /sbin and others are just symbolic links these days, so they are pretty much pointless.

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