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

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 34 posts

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

#21

Post by nvy »

bediger4000 wrote: post #15
nvy wrote: post #6

>been a happy Arch Linux user for many years >how long have you managed to keep your system running smoothly without needing to reinstall? I'm baffled as to how someone could be a happy user of a system that requires regular reinstalls to be usable/stable. Is it that installing Arch is itself a hobby for some people?

I've used Arch for about 10 years now, and I haven't done a reinstall ever. I've moved to new hardware (laptops and servers) several times over the years, so I've done fresh installs on the new hardware. Does that count? > a system that requires regular reinstalls to be usable/stable. Windows 95, 98 and XP were like that, no? Those have been the standard business operating system over the years.

>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.

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

#22

Post by friend_and_foe »

i keep a list of installed packages and the package manager I used to install them. I don't track dependencies that I didn't manually install. This is manual, every time I type "pacman" or "yay" or even "pip" I write it down in a text file.

Other than that pacman -Syu every couple of weeks.

I'm probably going to start using paccache.

I've never had an arch system explode on me. I've had Debian systems do that. Using arch has been smooth sailing for me for the most part.

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

#23

Post by sam_lowry_ »

sshine wrote: post #13

pacman -Syu That’s it. :)

Indeed. I did just that on a regular basis for well over a decade.

Once in a year or two the update breaks and I have to read up the news section of archlinux.org, but it's usually not a big deal, fixable within minutes.

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

#24

Post by bediger4000 »

nvy wrote: post #21
bediger4000 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've used Arch for about 10 years now, and I haven't done a reinstall ever. I've moved to new hardware (laptops and servers) several times over the years, so I've done fresh installs on the new hardware. Does that count? > a system that requires regular reinstalls to be usable/stable. Windows 95, 98 and XP were like that, no? Those have been the standard business operating system over the years.

>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.

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

#25

Post by denysvitali »

cranberryturkey wrote: post #17
basemi wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From [0]: > To list all packages no longer required as dependencies (orphans): $ pacman -Qdt [0] https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Pacman

That just lists them, how do you remove them?

`sudo pacman -R $(pacman -Qtd | awk '{print $1}')` ?

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

#27

Post by shrimp_emoji »

wasted_intel wrote: post #8
oDot wrote: post #3

Your question is partly why I moved to Nix after many years with Arch -- a perpetually clean install

Yep, same. Thoroughly enjoyed Arch, but slowly accruing implicit config state means you'll eventually have to re-install and configure everything again. You can mitigate some of that with dotfiles and some hand-rolled scripts, but NixOS is effectively that "done right".

I haven't had problems in years on the same install. I don't understand.

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

#29

Post by Am4TIfIsER0ppos »

denysvitali wrote: post #25
cranberryturkey wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That just lists them, how do you remove them?

`sudo pacman -R $(pacman -Qtd | awk '{print $1}')` ?

`pacman -Qtdq` will list the package names

`pacman -R -` will read names from stdin

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

#30

Post by wasted_intel »

shrimp_emoji wrote: post #27
wasted_intel wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, same. Thoroughly enjoyed Arch, but slowly accruing implicit config state means you'll eventually have to re-install and configure everything again. You can mitigate some of that with dotfiles and some hand-rolled scripts, but NixOS is effectively that "done right".

I haven't had problems in years on the same install. I don't understand.

Oh, Arch was rock solid and I was also able to keep my install going for years. However, in the few instances where I would get a new laptop or experience a drive failure, it was non-trivial to get it going again. If you're using a stock install + Gnome, it's not bad, but I had lots of things set up (e.g. Secure Boot, udev rules, usbguard, tiling WM, etc.) and those are all things you can declare in a NixOS + Home Manager config, have versioned, and re-establish in ~30 minutes instead of days.
Post reply on HN