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Having recently broken my Arch Linux unbootable (needed USB stick rescue to fix) by not upgrading quite everything (needed some libs for new packages), I think

by exDM69 10y ago

Having recently broken my Arch Linux unbootable (needed USB stick rescue to fix) by not upgrading quite everything (needed some libs for new packages), I think it's a bit fragile. I would recommend having root FS on ZFS or other filesystem with snapshots. Take a snapshot before or after running a full system update with pacman. Another aspect I dislike about Arch is that package binaries get removed very soon - it's not an option to not keep it constantly up to date. That said, it's still my favorite distro.

btschaegg 10y ago
I don't know if it's just me, but I had this situation with pretty much any distro I've ever encountered (it also happened on Arch, of course): I'd try to update/install/configure something and after the next reboot I'm on the TTY or I need to fetch a USB stick with a live system. From that perspective, what works in Arch's favor is that fixing it is usually more straightforward than other distros. I remember spending a saturday afternoon trying to uninstall the proprietary ATI graphics driver from an Ubuntu machine - only to find out (after much googling) that you need to set a very obscure, barely documented environment variable before the attempt. With Arch, the benefit of installing it manually is that fixing the system works pretty much the same - you just skip a couple of steps (partitioning etc). Also, I found the Arch and Gentoo Wikis to be very useful for those attempts, regardless of the distro I actually tried to repair. On a related note: On Arch, I stopped breaking things through updates after I subscribed to their main news feed (https://www.archlinux.org/feeds/news/ https://www.archlinux.org/feeds/news/) - pretty much every breaking change is announced and explained properly there.
- exDM69 10y ago
  My last time was an issue (or oversight) with pacman, which allowed me to update libicu-x.y without updating all its reverse dependencies. Some important part of the system depended on libicu-x.z (earlier version) which was no longer present so I had to get to the rescue console. So this was an Arch-specific issue that could have been mitigated with ZFS snapshots. E.g. Gentoo does consistency checks of dynamic libs, and other systems don't allow you to make such upgrades. I had something critical happen to me twice in one year and both times it would have been avoidable with an earlier snapshot of the rootfs. I will definitely do that next time I re-format a disk.

by exDM69 10y ago

btschaegg 10y ago

I don't know if it's just me, but I had this situation with pretty much any distro I've ever encountered (it also happened on Arch, of course): I'd try to update/install/configure something and after the next reboot I'm on the TTY or I need to fetch a USB stick with a live system. From that perspective, what works in Arch's favor is that fixing it is usually more straightforward than other distros. I remember spending a saturday afternoon trying to uninstall the proprietary ATI graphics driver from an Ubuntu machine - only to find out (after much googling) that you need to set a very obscure, barely documented environment variable before the attempt. With Arch, the benefit of installing it manually is that fixing the system works pretty much the same - you just skip a couple of steps (partitioning etc). Also, I found the Arch and Gentoo Wikis to be very useful for those attempts, regardless of the distro I actually tried to repair. On a related note: On Arch, I stopped breaking things through updates after I subscribed to their main news feed (https://www.archlinux.org/feeds/news/ https://www.archlinux.org/feeds/news/) - pretty much every breaking change is announced and explained properly there.

exDM69 10y ago
My last time was an issue (or oversight) with pacman, which allowed me to update libicu-x.y without updating all its reverse dependencies. Some important part of the system depended on libicu-x.z (earlier version) which was no longer present so I had to get to the rescue console. So this was an Arch-specific issue that could have been mitigated with ZFS snapshots. E.g. Gentoo does consistency checks of dynamic libs, and other systems don't allow you to make such upgrades. I had something critical happen to me twice in one year and both times it would have been avoidable with an earlier snapshot of the rootfs. I will definitely do that next time I re-format a disk.