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How are you managing to break apt not once, but "way too many times?" I haven't used Linux as a main driver in a decade but I do use it very frequently and I a

How are you managing to break apt not once, but "way too many times?" I haven't used Linux as a main driver in a decade but I do use it very frequently and I am intrigued by all the many ways people online seem to be able to break it. I have never once run into a problem with apt. It really makes me wonder how much time people who complain about Linux have really put into learning it. I'm not thinking you need to read a book on it, but after a few months of just using it I would think one would be reasonably proficient? I understand the claims of needing proprietary software. I, too, with that the Office suite was a first class citizen. That said, it absolutely baffles me the amount of weird ways people have issues.

eyerony 6y ago
> How are you managing to break apt not once, but "way too many times?" Raises hand my home server (running Debian) is currently in a weird state where a whole bunch of packages won't install or update because some library's stuck on a version they don't like. The version they want isn't available. I'm pretty sure I haven't even added any nonstandard repos to it (all it really runs is docker, so anything odd comes in as a docker container rather than a system package—this in part because I don't trust Linux package managers not to break my system when installing non-critical software due to long experience of same happening over and over, go figure). I'm not sure what I did to cause it and it's still running Docker fine so my incentive to spend an hour tracking down and fixing whatever-it-is has been zero—I'm just glad it's not a system I depend on for anything serious or need to really do anything with. I spent a few years running Gentoo as my main machine in the 00s. On a laptop. Got suspend-to-disk working, even. I had to manually install Grub on this same Debian home server when I built it last yer, in a chroot to my newly-installed system, because the installer kept failing to do it (my process to fix it was very ordinary and encountered no problems, AFAIK, so I still don't know why the Debian installer couldn't do it, I've never seen it fail quite that way before, but it did so repeatedly so I had to give up and open up the engine, as it were). So I'm not entirely clueless. Nonetheless I don't really feel confident using a Linux desktop I can't snapshot for emergency rollbacks or rebuild in a few minutes from a script, because damned if weird problems don't crop up when you upgrade. Or don't upgrade. Or reboot, forgetting you'd installed (through the blessed package manager!) a new kernel and now it can't read your encrypted root anymore so is unbootable and now you get to spend some time figuring that out. And so on. I feel no such anxiety on macOS. Not that that it never breaks, but it's rare enough I don't worry about it. FWIW I'm back on desktop Linux now due to Macs' insane prices, but I suspect I made a mistake and the time I've already lost would have made spending an extra $500 on a significantly worse-spec'd machine well worth it. It's a little here, a little there, but it adds up.
- brightball 6y ago
  Fwiw, I actually manage my linux laptop with Ansible.
metalforever 6y ago
I can't tell you about all of the times, but I will tell you about one time it broke and why. I did a debian clean install. Then I added the Spotify repository. Then I apt-get spotify. The script hung and then apt got into this weird loop. I had to add exit 0 to a script to fix it. This isn't what i want to do. I have over 10 years experience with Linux. I've even done Linux from scratch. I learned it already, this is not the problem. The problem is that Linux doesn't have stability currently that satisfies my needs and life goals.

eyerony 6y ago

> How are you managing to break apt not once, but "way too many times?" Raises hand my home server (running Debian) is currently in a weird state where a whole bunch of packages won't install or update because some library's stuck on a version they don't like. The version they want isn't available. I'm pretty sure I haven't even added any nonstandard repos to it (all it really runs is docker, so anything odd comes in as a docker container rather than a system package—this in part because I don't trust Linux package managers not to break my system when installing non-critical software due to long experience of same happening over and over, go figure). I'm not sure what I did to cause it and it's still running Docker fine so my incentive to spend an hour tracking down and fixing whatever-it-is has been zero—I'm just glad it's not a system I depend on for anything serious or need to really do anything with. I spent a few years running Gentoo as my main machine in the 00s. On a laptop. Got suspend-to-disk working, even. I had to manually install Grub on this same Debian home server when I built it last yer, in a chroot to my newly-installed system, because the installer kept failing to do it (my process to fix it was very ordinary and encountered no problems, AFAIK, so I still don't know why the Debian installer couldn't do it, I've never seen it fail quite that way before, but it did so repeatedly so I had to give up and open up the engine, as it were). So I'm not entirely clueless. Nonetheless I don't really feel confident using a Linux desktop I can't snapshot for emergency rollbacks or rebuild in a few minutes from a script, because damned if weird problems don't crop up when you upgrade. Or don't upgrade. Or reboot, forgetting you'd installed (through the blessed package manager!) a new kernel and now it can't read your encrypted root anymore so is unbootable and now you get to spend some time figuring that out. And so on. I feel no such anxiety on macOS. Not that that it never breaks, but it's rare enough I don't worry about it. FWIW I'm back on desktop Linux now due to Macs' insane prices, but I suspect I made a mistake and the time I've already lost would have made spending an extra $500 on a significantly worse-spec'd machine well worth it. It's a little here, a little there, but it adds up.

brightball 6y ago
Fwiw, I actually manage my linux laptop with Ansible.

metalforever 6y ago

I can't tell you about all of the times, but I will tell you about one time it broke and why. I did a debian clean install. Then I added the Spotify repository. Then I apt-get spotify. The script hung and then apt got into this weird loop. I had to add exit 0 to a script to fix it. This isn't what i want to do. I have over 10 years experience with Linux. I've even done Linux from scratch. I learned it already, this is not the problem. The problem is that Linux doesn't have stability currently that satisfies my needs and life goals.