Using the same Arch Linux installation for a decade • Hacker News Board

Re: Using the same Arch Linux installation for a decade

#391

Post by evh » Wed, Aug 17, 2022, 12:14 PM UTC

malermeister wrote: post #254

evh wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

s/Arch/Gentoo/ I did run Arch for a while around 2010 but it didn't take. It's nice to find a permanent home - I've been on Gentoo since 2013 and an acquaintance has been on Slackware since the 90s. Those three seems to be where us tinkerers end up.

Those three do seem like the popular ones amongst the tinkerers. Could I ask what your favorite things about Gentoo are? For me, with Arch, it's how up-to-date the repos are and how it doesn't make me compile everything myself. Should something not be available in the repos, chances are I can still compile it myself and build a package using AUR. Another thing I like is the excellent wiki.

A large part of it is just that it's "home" after finding it at the right time in my skill curve - probably could've been Arch as well.

The Arch wiki might be a bit better and we all benefit from it to some extent, the Gentoo wiki is also good and honestly I don't use either that much anymore.

The great differentiator is portage. I never run into "maintainer built the package without xyz support" - sometimes I'll run into "stupid user disabled xyz support when installing" but that's just a config change and easier to accept since I'm the stupid user. In theory they might've missed adding a USE flag for that feature and I'd have to overlay my own ebuild or live without it. Custom source patching is built in and package versions can be (un)blocked via package.mask/.accept_keywords. Version 4.3 broke something? package.mask: =pkg-category/pkgname-4.3 to downgrade to 4.2 and still automatically get 4.4 when that shows up. Mask >=4.3 instead and nothing will change (but eventually dependencies might force you to fix it, of course).

Compilation is pretty fast on a modern computer. Significantly slower than binary packages sure but it's mostly with browsers and maybe qemu/compilers that you really feel it (and several of those do have binary packages, e.g. www-client/firefox-bin, dev-lang/rust-bin). On my old laptop this turned into an excuse to experiment with distcc and nfs for speedups (Core2Duo with 4GiB RAM is a bit weak for encrypted ZFS + compiling gcc, and also it's fun).

Compilation times is still the strongest con but having compilation as a first-class citizen is what enables most of it and the big stuff you just run in the background.

(For the unaware, do note that "compiling myself" means "emerge pkgname" or "emerge -auvDNU @world" and includes dependency tracking, not "./configure && make" and manually hunting things down.)

Re: Using the same Arch Linux installation for a decade

#392

Post by mehdix » Wed, Aug 17, 2022, 12:23 PM UTC

How would you folks make sure your system is not compromised? That's my No. 1 concern about my system. Like OP, I'm using my arch for many years now, however I cannot tell whether it's running vanilla arch or not. Unlike NixOS I cannot verify the changes to the state of my system over time and I haven't kept a log of any software installed or any config changes. That's why I plan to replace it and keep a log of future changes.

Re: Using the same Arch Linux installation for a decade

#393

Post by burntsushi » Wed, Aug 17, 2022, 12:27 PM UTC

duckmysick wrote: post #389

burntsushi wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, our fridge has a top loading freezer. I think that stuff spoiled once during a particularly long outage. We do also have an upright freezer. We purchased that after getting the generator, so the advantage of it keeping stuff frozen longer was less important to us than the convenience of easier access. (And we were okay to sacrifice a bit on capacity too.) We also have a hot tub and we're in New England. We were…

Any particular model of the generator you can recommend?

I have a Generac. I'm a happy customer.

I am not an expert on generators though. If you're not looking to maintain it yourself, I'd say the most important bit is going with people that have good customer service. Which depends on your area. Might be Generac, might be Kohler.

Re: Using the same Arch Linux installation for a decade

#394

Post by Abishek_Muthian » Wed, Aug 17, 2022, 12:30 PM UTC

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…

> 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.

Isn't this a huge problem? Distro-preference/upgrade patterns aside, What's latest in the detection of a root-kit in the Linux desktop of an unsuspecting home user before they realize that they've been pwned(i.e. data exfiltration, ransomware etc.)? Assuming they aren't running any real-time scanners(Even if they want, Is there any real choice apart from ClamAV?)

Re: Using the same Arch Linux installation for a decade

#395

Post by bavell » Wed, Aug 17, 2022, 1:24 PM UTC

Semaphor wrote: post #354

LukeShu wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For many users it was a non-event; but if you missed that news post, and didn't pass `--ignore glibc` to your `-Syu`, then your system broke. And a sizable minority of users missed the news post. (Shamefully, I was in that minority.)

I like my pacman helper, pikaur [0]. Not only does it allow me to edit/view changed AUR files, it also alerts me whenever there is archlinux.org news [0]: https://github.com/actionless/pikaur

Love pikaur, been happily using it for years.

Re: Using the same Arch Linux installation for a decade

#396

Post by eddieroger » Wed, Aug 17, 2022, 1:34 PM UTC

jillesvangurp wrote: post #368

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 tha…

> Recent installer improvements make things much easier and I might consider switching from Manjaro to Arch at some point

This post made me play around with Arch last night, and specifically the installer. Having spent most of my last dozen years in Debian and Ubuntu, it wasn't as flashy or glamorous, but it got me a running system really quickly. One thing I missed was the network setup - I skipped it, and was left with a VM that had no network access. But after playing with it some, I spun up two VMs - one profiled 'server' and the other 'desktop' - and have really enjoyed the limited time I've had with them. Way back in the day, I spent a lot of time with Gentoo, and while building from scratch wasn't my jam every time (like, when novice me installed `emacs` and not `emacs-nox` and lost two days of compute time), but this scratches the itch I had for lower level control of my system but also with a little bit of shiny knobs and levers.

Re: Using the same Arch Linux installation for a decade

#397

Post by oleg_antonyan » Wed, Aug 17, 2022, 1:57 PM UTC

luciusdomitius wrote: post #390

oleg_antonyan wrote: post #108

So basically you use Arch Linux? (: btw, I use openSUSE Tumbleweed - more stable rolling release and it's awesome. Never going back to regular release with painful major updates every few years

No offense, but how could possibly Debian Sid and the SUSE have more stable rolling release. For a rolling release you count on the default configuration working and both Debian and SUSE are a hell of customise scripts. I don't think it is technically possible for that to be working better.

They have https://openqa.opensuse.org/ for automated testing

Re: Using the same Arch Linux installation for a decade

#398

Post by cestith » Wed, Aug 17, 2022, 2:42 PM UTC

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 similar, but more serious, X breakage with Debian testing. I used the apt feature to clean up orphaned packages, but the dependencies weren't listed quite correctly in the packages. I ended up spending an hour or two chasing dependencies manually to reinstall the missing packages. So Arch is definitely not alone in things sometimes breaking.

Re: Using the same Arch Linux installation for a decade

#399

Post by cestith » Wed, Aug 17, 2022, 2:52 PM UTC

ensignavenger wrote: post #309

xvedejas wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Proton is a game-changer, but Nvidia drivers remain the most unstable thing on Arch. Find a version that works well with your card, and avoid upgrading it, if at all possible. It's performant, but I have games that crash once every few hours, but only specifically on certain machines.

Or get an AMD GPU, like what I did for my recent gaming PC.

I use NVidia on my single Windows gaming system, but every Linux desktop system around here has AMD. I actually end up playing just about any game that plays on Linux on one of my Linux machines, and only boot the Windows system when wanting to play an exclusive title or occasionally just to do OS updates to be ready to play later. I've been using almost exclusively ATI/AMD GPUs since the Mach32 days, but for Windows gaming systems sometimes NVidia has the performance crown for months or years at a time with reasonable stability.

My fastest laptop is an oddball. It uses an AMD mobile processor with integrated graphics and an NVidia discrete GPU. Windows 10 handles that fine. Several Linux distros didn't install correctly at the time I bought it, but Ubuntu did. I'd have been okay with it installing to only support the integrated GPU, but it supports both and has a menu option for every app to launch it on the dedicated GPU. So far the only problem I've had with that whole laptop is a Windows update breaking the bootloader and making Linux temporarily inaccessible.

Re: Using the same Arch Linux installation for a decade

#400

Post by cdelsolar » Wed, Aug 17, 2022, 5:29 PM UTC

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…

almost the exact same story here. I've been running versions of Ubuntu for years and every time there was an upgrade something would inevitably break. I've only had Arch for a few months now on a computer I built myself and it runs like a dream. I love KDE as well.