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 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 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 think that sort of issues will no longer be relevant, considering that there are official semi-opensource nvidia-open drivers and that even wayland supports nvidia gpus just fine nowadays.
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?
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!!!
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.
Great advice. I rarely use dd, but when I do it always sends chills down my spine.
Did you triple check which device you picked?
I checked five times, actually. And then I check some more.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I only do it on my ancient laptop because for some reason, it makes things a little faster. I don’t know why.
Probably my installed games alone are larger than that
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.
It’s time saved rebuilding all of it
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
Whatever’s around. Some writable filesystem.
Btrbk if you use the right filesystem.
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.
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.
Manjaro isn’t Arch. Doesn’t use the same repos.
You’re still using manjaro after all their drama? I jumped ship.
It still gets updates and still works so why jump ship.
What happened?
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.
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).
Fuckin around :)
Finding out :(
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
*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?
When the moon is in the Seventh House and Jupiter aligns with Mars,
then peace will guide the planets, and love will steer the stars.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, just know that if you suddenly get out of space errors on BTRFS but you’re not actually out of space that’s probably the issue
Me with arch: what is timeshift? Time to updstr without backup, lol!
I always back up anything that I feel is actually important, do people actually rely on the stability of their OS?
Not that Arch has caused me any issues whatsoever so far, going on 2 years now while very much a Linux noob.
Just get your snapper to run before/after any update and if you bork something, roll back. Easy peasy
to be honest that setup is faster to arch-chroot if things go wrong.
meh, just backup home.
what’s a snapshot, new kernel? lets roll!! almost 2k packages in
never really broke my arch tbh, its been serving flawlessly for 7 years now. its a decently recent thinkpad tho so stuff tends to just work and i have no gpu to bother about
