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> Arch is great and probably very rarely breaks but if it does, there is very few ways to recover the situation other than instructing users to reinstall the OS
by nerdwaller 5y ago
> Arch is great and probably very rarely breaks but if it does, there is very few ways to recover the situation other than instructing users to reinstall the OS.
Is there any citation to support this? I’ve run arch for 11 years, never once on that same computer did I have to reinstall the OS. On the rest that have been running it for 2y and 5y they’ve never had that issue, nor instruction.
- ISO-morphism 5y agoI have the same experience with Arch. If anything has ever been borked a quick search and at worst Ctrl-Alt-F3 to get to a different TTY and running some commands has fixed whatever it was. I've never needed recovery or a separate boot device. Meanwhile, I've had a few fiascos with Ubuntu dist upgrades.
- SilverRed 5y ago>at worst Ctrl-Alt-F3 to get to a different TTY and running some commands has fixed whatever it was. For the average user of a hand held gaming console you may as well tell them to pop the back off and replace the chips on the PCB. At most you could tell them to hold a button combo to factory reset but ideally you would want some way to roll back the whole OS state to the previous working version. Silverblue allows this to happen in a fairly elegant way by making the OS an image file and mounting it as read only so a roll back is simply mounting an older image.
- SilverRed 5y agoSay valve pushes out a bad update that messes up the package manager list or puts it in a bad state, there is no recovery method. I guess one thing they could do is have some button combo you hold while booting which copies a fresh OS copy from a protected partition. I'm sure you could imagine countless ways that a update could possibly break things.
- akiselev 5y agoYes, me! Just a few weeks ago my Thinkpad ran out of battery mid upgrade (`pacman -Syu`) and got corrupted so bad it caused a kernel panic right after the LUKS prompt. Only took an hour to boot into the live USB, chroot into the disk installation (`arch-chroot`, but don't forget to mount `/boot` afterwards!!!), and reinstall the entire OS with `pacman -Qqn | pacman --overwrite "*" -S -` followed by `pacman -Syyu` (to update bootloader, just in case). Reinstalled the OS and didn't even have to restore a single dotfile. Edit: You may have to update your live USB packages first so run `mount -o remount,size=4G /run/archiso/cowspace && pacman -Syu` (cowspace is a ramdisk so make sure you've got the memory) Edit2: I really hoped "and didn't even have to restore a single dotfile" was enough of a clue that this was tongue-in-cheek. I migrated to Arch a few months ago after two decades of Windows so as far as OS reinstalls go, this was like Microsoft sending me a giant settlement check with triple damages.
- kyruzic 5y agoYou corrupted your kernel. Arch had nothing to do with that, and regardless of the os if you corrupt the kernel you need to reinstall.
- baq 5y agoWow. How’s that a reasonable answer? The OS did a very bad job at upgrading something that should be upgraded in an atomic fashion and blew up on both that and a failsafe boot to previous kernel. Neither should happen.