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 itIt’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.
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'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?
Hahahahah I need to do that lmao!!!
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.
Lol, as someone who tried a bunch of different distros, I used the dd command a lot without ever realizing what could go wrong with it. I must have used up all my luck with that though, because somehow I ended up on manjaro of all things.
Did you triple check which device you picked?
I checked five times, actually. And then I check some more.
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.
Why would you want your entire home folder in syncthing?
I’m very attached to my
~/.cache!stresstest your io i guess
also, machines wipe themselves at each boot! service state data is distributed via zfs send! zfs that actually works!
Syncthing will also propagate removals or bad edits
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.
Pfft… it’s been fine for the last 10 years.
These memes have always been propagated by people that decide that fucking with their OS is a good idea.
It is.
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.
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.
This is still true but I find you are using bcachefs where every update is a death threat.
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
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.
I have / on SSD (less writes) and /var and /home on HDD
It’s the opposite for me.
there are two types of computer users
- those who make backup
- those who never had a hard disk crash
- Everything is replaceable
- Assuming you do have a backup
I honestly can’t think of a thing I’d want to backup. Game saves, resumes, media. Its all replaceable and not worth backing up. I dont think I have a single “important” document or picture or anything.
Not me!
- average person
Or those who can fix it.
what are the cheap ways of setting up automatic backups?
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
Btrbk if you use the right filesystem.
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
my manjaro has been running the same install for 6 years on ext4 no separate home partition…
what are yall doing to brick your machines?
Right? The OP describes me (except I like to think I’m not that sweaty) and I don’t remember ever having reinstalled because things were broken.
You’re still using manjaro after all their drama? I jumped ship.
What happened?
zloubida explained it with the link well enough. More importantly for me, the package repository seemed to stop being maintained, because many of my packages had no updates for a significant amount of time (and they had been updated elsewhere when I checked).
Conflicts between the project leadership and the developers. I stayed on Manjaro though, this kind of things is in fact good news: it means that people in charge care, and I think things will be better thanks to that. I’ll just follow the devs if things don’t go better.
I remember using manjaro vanilla and breaking it in a single month of use.
No aur enabled, no nothing - it just broke, it wasn’t even funny
Wherever people say “Manjaro just broke” it’s good odds they tried to use it like an Arch install. Installing drivers “the Arch way”, pointing the repos at Arch, using bleeding edge kernel versions etc.
It may be Arch but it’s been set up in a certain way and if you mess with it it won’t work. Not messing with it is the whole point of the distro.
It does have a wiki and forums etc. so I feel that if people read a bit before doing stuff we wouldn’t be having this conversation.
The funny thing is that i did none of that, the hardware i was using didn’t need additional drivers and i didn’t add any extra repos.
Perhaps i did something wrong, or autoupdates were interrupted but i don’t remember doing anything extraordinary with the install.
Fuckin around :)
Finding out :(
*BTRFS users when you don’t rebalance soon enough and run out of inodes so you can’t boot your computer
How often do you need to rebalance?
my current openSUSE install with btrfs has lived for about 6 years now and I haven’t done any manual maintenance on btrfs
I think some distros have a systemd service that does it weekly or monthly which is usually enough but in rare cases it’s not
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.
meh, just backup home.
