Fuck it, we ball. 3 years no arch deaths. Windows is a fuck. 1,000,000 pacman warnings.
I don’t remove orphan packages, I don’t setuo snapshots, I don’t read arch news.
I
sudo pacman -Syu. And if I can’t boot I don’t do it
It’s been a while but for me personally, the number one thing that saves your ass in event of failure is installing both the up to date and the LTS kernel. If you fail to boot, it’s gonna have something to do with a kernel update 90% of the time, in which case you just boot with the LTS kernel. Just about anything else can be fixed either while you’re up and running, or with a live distro installed on a USB.
Hot take: I used arch for over a decade. It never broke unless I broke it.
By all means, back up your files but rolling release distros aren’t made of arsenic, you’ll be fine.
I think it’s very much dependent on your hardware.
I had some issues with my Nvidia drivers getting messed up when the card was relatively new. I haven’t had any issues in the past two years though.
I know people who’ve driven drunk for more than a decade, and only crashed when they were sober. Does that mean drinking and driving is safe?
I literally had one of my devices fail to boot after an update pretty much every month, and another a few times a year. Sure, I was able to fix it with only arch-chroot, but when I switched to btrfs I didn’t need to carry around a flash drive with me when updating the system…
The last few years I’m on nixos, and while it sometimes fails to update, it has not once failed to boot.
Thats’s a really bad analogy
One endangers others while the other makes a couple of files and photos go poof
The danger and the stakes are not what is being compared, though. It’s a perfectly good analogy.
I’m here for a good time, not a long time
Also, my last Arch death was due to accidentally ovverwritimg the whole drive, so no amount of split partitions is going to save me
They call it disk destroyer for a reason. You gotta alias that shit.
alias dd='echo Did you triple check which device you picked? Of course not, dipshit. Check again'Did you triple check which device you picked?
I checked five times, actually. And then I check some more.
They call it disk destroyer for a reason.
There’s nothing specially destructive about
dd. It’s just a program that opens a file, and if you tell it to open a device file and it’s got permission to write to it, it’ll write to it.You can just as easily overwrite a disk’s contents with anything else that will open a file and write to it.
# cp /dev/urandom /dev/sdawill wipe your drive with random data in the same way that
# dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sdawill.
You’re technically right, but the way most people use dd ensures its like handling a loaded gun. How often do you cp /dev/sdwhy?
mkfs.ntfs is the silent killer, other mkfs don’t allow writing over the root partition but summoning this kind of Windows magic will happily fuck up your shit.
Hahahahah I need to do that lmao!!!
Great advice. I rarely use dd, but when I do it always sends chills down my spine.
Surely double checked is enough
It’s not. Neither is triple checking. Notice how the alias doesn’t actually run
dd? That’s on purpose.I quadruple check and then I still don’t run it because I’m too nervous so I go and do something else instead and the item remains buried on my to-do list indefinitely.
My last Arch death was updating my 128GB laptop after a year and breaking it with partial updates. (I’m better at partial updates now) It also made me want to, move away from having separate /home partition. It was somewhat sad, since it was the Arch that I installed on the previous laptop and just moved the SSD when I got a new one
Where are those people whose arch installs break after every second update? I don’t think I had a single problem with arch that I wasn’t responsible for. Hell, I had more problems with mint on my girlfriends PC than the arch machines that I’m running.
If you don’t count my 6 years with Manjarno, I’ve used Arch for ~7 years and only 3 times I had to fix something, 2 times because of Nvidia, once my fault. I had way more problems with Ubuntu in the past than Arch by the way. :)
There’s the argument to be made that all three were your fault, since you decided to use nvidia on Linux.
Hyuk hyuk hyuk.
Well, I also used ATI in the past but it was way worse. :)
This is still true but I find you are using bcachefs where every update is a death threat.
Why would you want your entire home folder in syncthing?
I’m very attached to my
~/.cache!stresstest your io i guess
A live copy of my home folder and the few remaining secrets/configs i don’t care to put into home manager.
I try not to put dangerous data into HM or my Nix configs, I just let syncthing whisk it away to my homelab, it has versioning turned on.
also .stignore is your friend
also, machines wipe themselves at each boot! service state data is distributed via zfs send! zfs that actually works!
deleted by creator
Syncthing will also propagate removals or bad edits
also support versioning if you really wanted to keep them.
Pfft… it’s been fine for the last 10 years.
Seriously. I’ve spent more time maintaining my debian home server than I have my two arch installs combined.
These memes have always been propagated by people that decide that fucking with their OS is a good idea.
It is.
i mean, all the important stuff is saved to OneDrive, right?
Straight to jail.
You missed the space between one and drive… and you accidentally capitalized a couple letters.
Don’t correct me on this one. Please.
All my important stuff is saved to SomeDrive
Yes, but actually no.
I actually did this at one point, because OneDrive was the cheapest cloud service I had easy access to, back then. I did use only an encrypted vault, though.
OneDrive used to be pretty good on Windows before it started taking the documents folder hostage. Maybe needless to say I’ve never attempted to use it on any of my Linux installs
I tried once, could I get it work on Mint (I could not). Not that I wanted to use it at that point, I just got curious is it actually possible. Apparently yes, even though I did not succeed.
This is unfortunately me with google drive for a few things.
How do you mismanage your system so bad that you need these things?
I live like this, it has been 10 years, no problem
Same here, not sure what they on about.
I third this
I’m stupid and I didn’t know there was other ways of living
there are two types of computer users
- those who make backup
- those who never had a hard disk crash
- Everything is replaceable
Not me!
- average person
Or those who can fix it.
what are the cheap ways of setting up automatic backups?
Btrbk if you use the right filesystem.
Rsync and cron
i did rsync and cron for years. now I switched to rsync and systemd timers 🙂🙂
Systemdeez nuts
yes, but to what medium
Whatever’s around. Some writable filesystem.
This is my setup that I have been using for years. I have never had a serious Linux update issue that could not be fixed.
Well la dee da look at this guy who knows how to fix linux!
Yeehaw!
I, too, am familiar with the art of grub rescue env!
I have seen its darkest depths.
And oh how deep they doth go!
(I use arch btw)
I’m convinced that majority of people using timeshift couldn’t recover from their system failing to boot or a drive failure.
And if you could tell me how because I got no idea how to either.
You can just boot a Linux Mint live session and restore from there.
why mint in particular lol
Caus mint is the superior distro. I use mint btw
It has Timeshift preinstalled, because Timeshift is maintained by the Linux Mint team. You can use any live session and install Timeshift, though.
I remember daily driving Gentoo unstable in the early 2000’s on my rig in college. It was like trying to beat a Dark Souls boss every time I wanted to do an update.
In one of my university java courses, another student was frequently compiling Gentoo packages on his laptop during class.
Once I researched more about it I also installed Gentoo on my laptop and started building updates during class 😁
Rule of thumb I adopted: If you never update arch, it will never break.
Separate /home is such a scam. Never have I run out of home space, but boy is 27GB not enough for a root partition that runs any kind of service.
Use a modern filesystem like btrfs or even lvm with thin provisioning to solve that problem. Separate partitions for ease of backup, but they all pull from the same pool of storage.
On my PC and all my home servers I keep my root partition at 10GB and haven’t had any issues (although I keep everything that isn’t hardware related or a system utility in home).
On my PC I crammed arch, all of KDE (+extra KDE utilities), and some other system stuff like LACT and distrobox in the 10GB root partition and run almost everything else as a flatpak installed to home.
On my servers I do the same thing but all my services are in podman containers in /opt.
Having all the software needed to make the machine work be isolated from my custom home junk makes me feel better, and I like that I can mount root as read-only to make it immutable
/ size becomes an issue when you install games via pacman
symlink the directories to somewhere on another partition
I have / on SSD (less writes) and /var and /home on HDD
I think that there’s a reasonable argument for a separate home partition on a multiuser system. Means that users can’t fill up root.
But a lot of systems aren’t multiuser these days.
EDIT: Honestly, my biggest partitioning irritation these days is that the Debian installer makes it a pain in the rear to have a larger /boot if you’re also doing an LVM-based install; the default is unreasonably small these days.
Probably my installed games alone are larger than that
Yeah i never bothered with separate /home because it feels like such a balancing act to decide on size compared to root. Especially when you use nix/guix, it would be annoying to have a small root with the store filling up over time and having to do garbage collecting often. Also, i just back up whatever files i want to make sure i don’t lose, and when i do a clean install i actually want everything to be wiped anyway, including home.
It’s the opposite for me.