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Using the same Arch Linux installation for a decade

• seletskiy 4y ago
  As another Arch Linux user, I can attest that it is the rock-solid foundation for your computer. I use double boot to host both Linux and Windows; when I need to use Windows, I just put Linux into hibernation. This greatly extends the amount of time it can go without being rebooted. Driver and X problems still cropped up occasionally, but things seem much more reliable now than they did a while back. This is a also the distro I'm familiar with from my time working on servers, where I've used it with ZFS with great success.
  • Jnr 4y ago
    When I don't need Windows for gaming, I just boot the physical windows partition from Linux using Virtualbox. This way I don't even have to hibernate and interrupt any work.
    • seletskiy 4y ago
      Yes, I do it too, but getting it to work is a bit tricky with UEFI.
    • janci 4y ago
      Isn't windows "Installing new hardware" every time you boot? And the license is still active? I was always affraid it will break the system after few switches between virtual and bare-metal boot.
      • franga2000 4y ago
        I've been running this setup since 2017 and while there were occasional graphical and sound glitches, usually after a Windows update, over all it works great. It did the "installing new hardware" thing only after updates as well, so I didn't run into it too often. It does like to deactivate itself after a few reboots, but that's nothing a bit of mild piracy can't fix. I have at least two spare windows licenses in a drawer so I don't feel the least bit bad about it. I also have a big ugly powershell script that runs during startup and does some things differently depending on where it's running. Things like not launching all my background stuff in the VM, remapping drive letters between physical disks and VM folder shares... Another thing to look into is RemoteApp. I did some experiments with it in a VM and the performance was way better than "seamless mode" (which doesn't exist anymore anyways), but getting it to work on non-Server editions is a pain.
        • pjvsvsrtrxc 4y ago
          Seamless mode still exists in Virtualbox 6.1 which is the latest version. (Windows did just crash when I was testing it but, as it also crashed twice before I got that far, I don't think it's related)
          • janci 4y ago
            Did Windows 10 start to crash in VBox for you too? I had to move to libvirt/qemu as I was not able to resolve. Downgrading nor upgrading VirtualBox did not help. Removing last windows update helped a little, then it started crashing again.
      • WfAjWDYpDHDYCN5 4y ago
        Nah, when Windows installs new hardware it doesn't uninstall the old hardware. Good luck on the license front though, since Microsoft has decided you can't move around the item you purchased from them...
      • Jnr 4y ago
        Installing new hardware doesn't happen often and it shows the unlicensed watermark when booted from Virtualbox, but booting natively restores the activation status.
    • scarygliders 4y ago
      I have a libvirt VM running Windows with GPU passthrough to the GTX1070 (the main GPU is the RTX 2070 Super) and use looking-glass-client and scream to pass the audio to Linux, which I use for gaming. No need to even multi boot, though I do still have the Windows boot available if I need it, which is rarely.
      • genewitch 4y ago
        how is the latency on audio with that setup? I use qemu with GPU passthrough, 1060 on linux and 1070 on windows for a few years now, and i had to buy a laptop to do music production because of the latency. The only other solution was to passthrough a USB soundcard, but about 15 years ago i discovered i can't actually play live notes on a MIDI device with the latency on the USB subsystem. I've heard of looking glass, but not scream. Will check out, regardless of reply, so thanks!
        • scarygliders 4y ago
          I don't /perceive/ any audio latency, the game sound seems fine to me. Talking about Elite: Dangerous specifically - I use the VM to develop my E:D 3rd party application.
• valbaca 4y ago
  Exhibiting the self discipline to not distro-hop in 10 years is more commendable...but I guess that's Arch Linux for you.
  • tedajax 4y ago
    When I was first getting into Linux ~2006-2007 I distro hopped constantly until a friend told me about Arch and then there was no more reason to distro hop :)
  • Enginerrrd 4y ago
    I distrohopped a lot for my desktops and then stopped when I got to arch. For servers, I've used CentOS, Ubuntu, and debian. I never did get too into the the CentOS redhat side of things. I'm not sure why that is except that I just was used to the debian way of doing things... In general, my go to is debian or Ubuntu. Ubuntu is the only distro where every damn time I've managed to break it in ways I can't figure out how to fix. Arch and debian are the only distro s where I've been able to fix something screwed up without a full nuke and reinstall. And I HAVE screwed some things up pretty bad. Arch though is just so good. I just don't quite trust it to handle updates unattended so I don't use it on servers.
  • malermeister 4y ago
    Yeah Arch is basically the final destination all that distro hopping gets you to. No reason to hop once you've arrived.
    • dhruvmittal 4y ago
      That said, I strongly recommend letting the distro hopping take you on a journey before you land on Arch-- don't skip to the end. It's nice to see how things are done elsewhere (defaults, etc.) so that you've got some opinions by the time you get to Arch and configure your own take on things.
    • bstamour 4y ago
      I used arch around 2008 or so, then distro-hopped to Slackware, when I remain to this day. Some of us escape.
• herpderperator 4y ago
  I'm the same but with Gentoo, which is another rolling distribution. I've had it installed for over 12 years on multiple servers without any issues.
  • entropie 4y ago
    Same here. My gentoo installation on my previous machine was setup as I bought the PC, somewhere around 2008. I tried arch but it does not feel like home.
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  • cb321 4y ago
    Hrm... $ qlop -tvm|head -n1 2007-01-18T19:50:33 >>> x11-base/xorg-server-1.1.1-r4: 9′23″
  • aidenn0 4y ago
    My preferred distro journey went: Mandrake -> Gentoo -> Debian -> Gentoo -> NixOS I rage-quit Gentoo the first time (2002ish?) for Debian when stable portage got a broken version of gcc, making it very hard to recover. The second Gentoo was by far the longest, maybe 2003 through 2018? I'm 4 years into NixOS now and very happy with it. I actually run into issues with switching to new release channels almost as often as I did the few times I experimented with Ubuntu, but it's just so much easier to work around these issues by mixing-and-matching packages from different channels[1] that it just doesn't bother me. It also got me to love systemd. Configuring systemd units (especially timers!) with nix is so much more ergonomic than the bare files that I pity anyone who has to do it by hand. 1: 95% of the time it's already fixed in unstable, the other 5% of the time I pull in the version from the previous release channel.
    • silasdavis 4y ago
      Windows -> Solaris -> Windows -> Gentoo -> Arch -> NixOS I feel much more satisfaction pouring hours into NixOS over doing the same on Gentoo and Arch. The hours on nix are in a source file I can carry around. The hours on Gentoo and Arch I'm doomed to forget and have to repeat. I do miss the AUR though. I haven't been able to package a rust program that has a build with a transitive dependency that expects internet access (https://github.com/foundry-rs/foundry https://github.com/foundry-rs/foundry). Something something sandbox, crate2nix. But a frivolous install of a little binary that isn't packaged is not necessarily an easy endeavour. Overall I'm very happy. Nix unstable feels equivalent to Arch more or less. You can pull in master with flakes easily enough too.
• luciusdomitius 4y ago
  Mine is around 6-7 years old. Started off as an Antergos on T450s, then moved to T480 and later on I replaced the extra repos and the startup logo with EndeavourOS after the Antergos ones went dark. However, I can see a noticable slowdown and some services occasionally acting weird - once every few months i need to switch to a terminal and use loginctl to unlock my session. I am seriously considering a reinstall, no matter how humiliating that sounds.
  • nfhshy68 4y ago
    I tried to do a reinstall a while back. Gave up around 4 hours in. Installing arch was easy, getting it how I liked it on the other hand. That was gonna take another couple weekends of figuring out what I did 5 years ago to make X work just right.
    • luciusdomitius 4y ago
      I expect the same, but on the other hand many things related to X configuration have improved since then (dpi, multi-screen, etc), so I was hoping the result would be better. I need only xfce, appmenu and plank anyway.
    • journey_16162 4y ago
      I did a re-install last year to get rid of the clutter. I created a document that describes every step. Whenever I install a new package, that is going to be useful, I add it to pacman -S command in the document.
• clircle 4y ago
  Operating systems are not unstable. Users are unstable.
  • sophacles 4y ago
    I see you never used windows 95.
  • encryptluks2 4y ago
    Windows had multiple issues. I recall multiple times having to basically do a reinstall after installing some update.
  • yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
    Of course OSs are unstable, in two senses: First, some OSs, somewhat dependent on hardware and software in play, just tend to crash. Second, OSs can be unstable in the sense of changing things; users are, in this sense, actually supremely stable and tend to be quite unhappy when the system decides one day to move menus around, rename programs, change shortcuts, shift around config files, require manual intervention for updates to work, etc. It is this second sense in which Arch tends to be less stable, and distros like Debian and RHEL are extremely stable.
• JLCarveth 4y ago
  > A few months ago, I copied my complete installation to a ThinkPad X13 Gen 2 using rsync How would something like this work? Is the target laptop running any random linux distro, and rsync replaces all system files etc. effectively "swapping" operating systems? Can the laptop boot into the new system as if it was installed normally?
  • prettyWise 4y ago
    I would boot from a live disk image, mount the built in hard disk, and then rsync the files to it from there and reboot I think.
  • malermeister 4y ago
    I'm gonna guess you rsync onto a separate partition and then get rid of the "host" partition once you're done instead of replacing stuff on the fly.
  • pseudoramble 4y ago
    Interesting question. Only other ideas I can think of is they pulled the drive out from the laptop to do the copy physically, or they booted the laptop from a live distro and did the copy. But those are simply guesses!
  • trebbble 4y ago
    Boot from external media (USB disk, cd or dvd if you're kicking it old school, maybe even network) with no persistent storage (ramdisk or whatever only). Mount the hard drive. Format. Rsync the files over. That's pretty similar to what installation media does anyway, really. [EDIT] Oh you might need to install the bootloader too. But you can sort-of (your running kernel will still be the installation media's) do that from the rsync'd system once it's copied over, with some creative chrooting and mounting. Which, again, is something that Linux installers kinda do anyway, in ordinary operation, but you'd likely want to do it manually in this case. It's exactly what you used to do (probably still do?) installing Gentoo, even for a "stage 3" (least-painful) installation.
  • traverseda 4y ago
    You boot into a live cd (probably the arch install disc) and rsync on to a mounted partition, then you chroot into that partition and re-install the bootloader. This is pretty much how you install archlinux normally, except instead of rsync-ing the initial filesystem you make a new initial filesystem based on the "filesystem" package. https://archlinux.org/packages/core/x86_64/filesystem/ https://archlinux.org/packages/core/x86_64/filesystem/
• kache_ 4y ago
  I love arch linux. It just works. Even with video games. Steam deck is based on it. Linux really did win desktops. Running on arch for 3 years now.
  • qbasic_forever 4y ago
    Arch wiki is a real treasure too. I don't even run arch but use their wiki info all the time.
    • nfhshy68 4y ago
      I switched off Ubuntu to arch because I got sick of inconsistencies between Ubuntus hacks and developer defaults talked about in archwiki.
    • kache_ 4y ago
      Precisely. The best part about it (linux distros) is that you can actually fix your issues, while with windows/apple you have to suffer until you get a bug fix, since you don't control the software that runs on your computer
    • sophacles 4y ago
      Arch wiki is what made me switch to arch - I was tired of translating from arch-wiki -> whatever debian flavor I was using.
• Legion 4y ago
  I wonder how many, if any, original install components are still present in that Ship of Theseus.
• renewiltord 4y ago
  I left my computer in storage for a year while I lived elsewhere and I couldn't upgrade through pacman. There was no simple viable upgrade. The constraints just couldn't be met. Fortunately, all I had to do was reformat / and go again since I keep most user config in /home Really enjoyed it otherwise
  • traverseda 4y ago
    Weird AUR packages?
    • renewiltord 4y ago
      I just had the one nvidia dkms one. But that one actually worked fine.
  • ablob 4y ago
    You probably cant test it anymore, but I think it might have had something to do with the keys. I had a similar problem with failing upgrades once, until I updated the keyring.
    • vladvasiliu 4y ago
      This. The easy way, usually, is installing the previous keyring packages from the archive. And maybe peruse the "news" page for any manual intervention required. There aren't many, so for a year of missed updates it should be quick enough.
    • renewiltord 4y ago
      Ah. Good tip. Thank you. I'll keep that in mind for next time.
  • janci 4y ago
    This. When I took my old Arch laptop from drawer after few months it was impossible to upgrade without removing half of the system.
• edoceo 4y ago
  I've been using the same base-install of Gentoo since like 2010. Switched from Gnome to Xfce some time ago; new machines just `rsync` the stuff over. But when the root partition when from /dev/sda3 to /dev/nvme0p3 there was some switching. Back in my Windows days (1990-2001) I was NEVER able to do anything like that; copying that damned registry. Had to make special files; apps would never work. It was a game changer to find a system that was as simple as copy the files to the new hardware.
  • 5e92cb50239222b 4y ago
    I haven't tried this in a while, but Windows 10 can too be rsynced between different systems. Fixing the bootloader is a major PITA though, and I had to relearn doing that every time. Of course, it then spends half an hour installing new drivers for everything, but it is expected in that world.
    • bombcar 4y ago
      In the Windows 2k era I would do it, but it involved somehow tricking the system to think it was doing "first boot after install" and using default drivers for everything (especially the chipset). With some trickery you could get it to work (sometimes you had to preinstall the new chipset driver where it could find it. Wasn't worth it usually.
      • seabrookmx 4y ago
        It was only worth it if you had to deploy a custom image to a whole fleet of machines. IIRC there was a tool called "sysprep" you could run to reset the drivers, hostname etc. so they would reconfigure themselves on first boot.
• number6 4y ago
  ITT: people telling each other that they use archlinux. BTW I also use archlinux
  • encryptluks2 4y ago
    Because it is awesome!
    • Skunkleton 4y ago
      It's certainly my favorite. Pragmatic, simple, and complete. What's not to love?
    • Sebb767 4y ago
      I actually switched to i3/sway on my Arch install ;-)
  • odiroot 4y ago
    Well, I use Manjaro. Does it count as insufferable too?
    • number6 4y ago
      No Tux is insufferable
      • bombcar 4y ago
        Gentoo user here.
        • number6 4y ago
          Your distro is literally named after a penguin, so what's your point? :D
          • bombcar 4y ago
• thesuitonym 4y ago
  When I say Arch is not stable, I don't mean that you can't leave it running for a long period of time. I mean that it changes. Debian is not stable because you can run it for a long time without crashing (You sure can, but you can also run Debian with daily crashes, depending on what you're running). Debian is stable because it doesn't change. You get security updates, but you don't get feature updates, because feature updates introduce change, and the way you thought something was done is not the way to do it anymore. Flags change, output changes, inputs change. None of this is bad, but with Debian you know it won't happen until you're ready to move on to the next version. "Unstable" distros can introduce these changes at any time, making it harder to review what will change.
  • dima55 4y ago
    Debian releases do what you say. But you can also run Debian/unstable, which is the bleeding edge rolling "release". It works quite well, and many people run that on their machines.
  • vladvasiliu 4y ago
    While I agree with your definition of "stable", in my case its effects are reversed: I much prefer having to deal with one change from time to time, than having to apply a big update where possibly "everything changes" all of a sudden. Although, granted, this is much more likely to avoid "yoyo changes", where a rollback is necessary because the new shiny is actually broken. I didn't take notes and don't remember the specifics, but I have a small VM running on some cloud that only hosts LXC containers, so not much is installed on it. I did an update from Ubuntu 20.04 to 22.04: multiple dozens of packages were removed, and multiple new ones added.
• wing-_-nuts 4y ago
  I recently switched to an arch flavor because the AUR had a lot of little small utilities that make life better on wayland. Also, it's quite easy to install the latest version of golang and rust, etc. Pros: Documentation is excellent. Better than even Gentoo or Ubuntu's docs. Cons: Arch doesn't have an installer, and seems almost militantly against providing one, or a lot of other little utilities that could improve the user experience. I get the same sort of 'I suffered, therefore you must suffer, learn to RTFM noob' elitism that I saw with slackware 20 years ago. I'm a grizzled vet, I can figure this stuff out, but it doesn't help your average technically literate joe. Updates seem to break for odd reasons. I had to uninstall nodejs to be able to do a system update. Why? There should be some sort of automated way to address this.
  • pxeboot 4y ago
    There actually is an optional installer included with the official installation media now [1]. [1] https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/archinstall https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/archinstall
    • wing-_-nuts 4y ago
      This must be new, but it's definitely a step in the right direction.
      • Macha 4y ago
        The previous installer was deprecated in 2012, so a 10 year period of no installer.
    • benbristow 4y ago
      Quite a good video about it - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OtWWLN3wGNE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OtWWLN3wGNE Used it to create a dual boot on my main machine and works a charm.
      • lostmsu 4y ago
• meribold 4y ago
  I can provide some details regarding the times things did break that I mentioned in the article. * In September 2014, X broke, and I created an `/etc/X11/Xwrapper.config` file with the lines `allowed_users = anybody` and `needs_root_rights = yes` to get it to work again. I don't remember and don't have notes on why that helped. It sure does sound like a pretty terrible hack. I don't have that Xwrapper.config file anymore, and I also don't know when I deleted it. * In June 2017, audio stopped working, but all I had to do was add my user to the `audio` group. * In May 2018, X broke a second time. This time I downgraded the `xorg-server-common` and `xorg-server` packages. A few weeks later, I ran another system upgrade, and this one went fine. These weren't the only problems, but they were the most disruptive. Generally, things like TrackPoint driver updates changing how the cursor responds or Firefox changing its UI have been far more annoying than Arch Linux issues :)
  • yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
    You didn't get bitten by a painful glibc upgrade? It's been long enough that I don't recall details, but I thought that was a big one.
    • cycomanic 4y ago
      The glibc upgrade which was painful (and essentially required recompiling everything) was much further back than 10 years. I think I was running LFS at the time, but recall it was painful for all distros. I don't think there was a glibc upgrade that was disruptive since then. There was the introduction of multi arch on Debian some years back which caused a bit of disruption (I was running Debian unstable at the time IIRC), but pretty much everything else has been very minor since then. I've been running arch for 2 years or so now, before I was running tumbleweed. I have to say that rolling releases have been much less eventful in general than release based distros (I administer my partners Ubuntu laptop and lts upgrades are a bit more disruptive).
      • entropicdrifter 4y ago
        The current glibc version broke Easy AntiCheat support for Proton games, but that's the only break of note in recent memory, and it only affects people playing multiplayer games on Linux, which is a minority (multiplayer gamers) of a minority (Linux gamers) of a minority (Linux users).
• dj_mc_merlin 4y ago
  The best thing about the rolling releases is that the OS feels ageless. If I leave a Thinkpad sitting in a corner for 3 years and boot it up again to pacman -Syu, it will have basically the same software as my modern Thinkpad. This just tickles my sense of "this is how the computer _should_ behave".
  • maxnoe 4y ago
    I would be very surprised if pacman -Syu worked after three years of no upgrades. That's generally not supported and will require manual interactions.
    • dj_mc_merlin 4y ago
      If you boot from USB to use an external pacman to upgrade you can mitigate almost all of the common problems people have with this.
    • WfAjWDYpDHDYCN5 4y ago
      That's what I was thinking. Good luck getting all the random crap you have installed to update without choking on EOL'd packages, or various packages that have new config formats, or changes to the updater itself, or apps which only support version-at-a-time migrations (or otherwise don't include the full history needed to migrate)...
    • jakswa 4y ago
      Broke for me after a month or so on one laptop. Had to stop whatever I was doing and learn a bit how pacman and PGP keys interact or something.
      • dj_mc_merlin 4y ago
        That's expected, you'll have to pacman -Sy archlinux-keyring when a new developers key is added, which happens every couple months or so.
    • jreese 4y ago
• throwaway1777 4y ago
  Having to debug X or audio breaking several times even over 10 years is a non-starter. Had these issues 0 times over 10 years on mac, albeit on several machines, but I think it’s extremely rare for someone to reinstall Mac OS ever. Only time I did it was when I tried to setup a hackintosh and that really broke some things.
  • zdragnar 4y ago
    I get that some people don't like tinkering. They want something that will always Just Work. Some of my friends who were long time linux uses switched to macs and stayed there. MacOS wasn't that for me- brew was the cause of no shortage of pain, but even that could have been lived with. It's also not exactly stable- one company I worked for (about 7 years total) had a blanket request that people not update OSX to new versions for a few weeks or months while it was tested to make sure that the bugs had been ironed out- anyone who upgraded before then was on their own if they ran into issues. Even that, I could (and did, when I had to) tolerate. I hate the UI. It doesn't jive with how I want to operate. Settings exist for some things, but not others. It's just not my cup of tea, and I'm happier tinkering a bit to get exactly what I want.
    • axby 4y ago
      I recently got a macbook for work and I can't believe how many minor things just can't be changed. I don't think you can change the date format in the top right. It seems like you can't get rid of that damn dock entirely without killing important processes and breaking things. (I'm able to hide it and put it in the left, so it's mostly out of the way, but it seems so anti-user to force this interface on everyone). I haven't yet looked for a "how to effectively use mac keyboard shortcuts" comprehensive guide, instead I've looked for things as I need them. I can see the benefits for introducing "cmd" where "Ctrl" is usually used on other operating systems. But I'm very disappointed by cmd tab and cmd backtick. Often I want to press a single keyboard shortcut to switch between three windows or so: usually a few browser windows, a terminal, and an IDE. cmd backtick switches between windows of the same program, cmd tab switches between programs. Can any more experienced mac user tell me the way to do this properly? How to switch between a few separate windows, like alt tab, without having to think about what program they are?
• cevn 4y ago
  I tried to use Centos long term, that was a disaster. Ubuntu and Fedora both broke a few times but I was able to recover them. However, Manjaro / Arch feels the most stable in my experience.
  • yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
    > I tried to use Centos long term, that was a disaster. What was a disaster about it? I would expect pain crossing major versions, but you could plausibly have installed CentOS on a machine and just stayed there for 5-10 years with nothing more than the odd `yum update && reboot` and I would have thought it would be fine.
    • cevn 4y ago
      After a while I believe there were no more updates for Centos 7. What is impressive about this story is that I was able to drag it into the modern era with rocky linux 9 but it was a ... rocky transition. My biggest pain point was when the networking stack was broken and Yum refuses to do ANYTHING without loading sources from the network. I couldn't get around it without flash driving RPMs to the server.. The uptime of the machine was great on Centos, but it came to a point I was afraid to reboot because of the package changes that could apply. edit: I think some software I was using was EOL'd just for Centos maybe also prompting the switch.
      • yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
        CentOS 7 "active support" ended in 2020 (which I'm guessing is what you mean?) but it's supposed to keep getting security support until 2024 (thus hilariously outliving both CentOS 8 and CentOS Stream 8) - https://endoflife.date/centos https://endoflife.date/centos Although certainly I can sympathize with the software eventually getting very long in the tooth, and jumping EL 7 to 9 could definitely be quite a change.
    • jandrese 4y ago
      Usually the pain comes when you find you need to use a feature in some software and the feature wasn't introduced until after the version that Centos ships. This happens more often than you might expect. Even fairly "modern" versions of Centos come with some really old and crusty packages.
• loudmax 4y ago
  The Arch Linux install on my ThinkPad X230 is about twelve years old now. For most of the time it was my primary laptop, until a couple of years ago when I turned it into a sort of home server with built-in KVM and battery backup. In contrast to my experience running Gentoo or Fedora, I never experienced significant breakage when doing a system update. Having said that, I've always run a fairly minimal desktop environment and I've been conservative with wifi and audio software. So maybe I wasn't pushing it very hard, but still full credit to Arch for having a rock solid foundation.
  • orangepurple 4y ago
    I push my Arch installs hard. I install a large number of applications. I even have Arch Linux running in a proot on my Android phone. I have had occasional breakage every 6 to 12 months. It is usually a vendored binary that depends on an older version of some library. And that library changed its ABI upon a minor version upgrade. Arch has packages for old major versions of libraries. For example Telegram Desktop and Ungoogled Chromium can break, but rarely. Breakage is resolved within days on stable.
• mastermedo 4y ago
  I’m in the same boat. Never saw a need to reinstall, there’s been hiccups where after an untimely upgrade the system won’t boot. But it’s a 30min fix every 3-4years.
• rodolphoarruda 4y ago
  > "With Ubuntu, I would’ve had to upgrade (...) five times to end up with the latest LTS release.* And these release upgrades don’t always go smoothly either." I read this in the exact moment I was upgrading to 22.04.1 end it stopped due to lack of space in /boot. A rare case of synchronicity in my life.
  • genewitch 4y ago
    you have to run apt --autoremove or something. If you don't, debian/ubuntu updates will get slower and slower as it has to rebuild some index for every kernel available on the system. Removing all of the kernels you're no longer using fixes the storage space issue, but i am unsure if apt will freak out if it can't find a kernel it thinks is installed. apt --autoremove will uninstall and de-index all of the old kernels for sure, though.
    • rodolphoarruda 4y ago
      Yes, I even added --purge to gain an extra notch in the process, but it all fell 37MB short in space. The next alternative is to shrink /home and expand /boot, but (2) I would have to do it via an USB booted Ubuntu, but (3) my SSD has LUKS, so I don't know how gparted would deal with it. I feel the risk of losing some data... I do have backups, but (4) not the time nor the patience to go through all this.
  • lostmsu 4y ago
    Ah, lack of space in /boot, the "bye-bye regular user" issue that was finally solved for apt upgrade some time in 201x, but apparently nobody bothered to ensure it does not happen in dist-upgrade. The year of Linux Desktop is just one decade away now.
• hs86 4y ago
  My last clean Windows installation was in 2007 with Vista, and since then, I ran in-place upgrades to get to the next immediate version. It survived multiple mainboard changes and moved from MBR IDE HDDs to GPT SATA SSDs. (With the help of Acronis/Macrium images) The next big move would be to change to a Mainboard+CPU with Windows 11 support and an NVMe disk. I wonder how feasible this will be.
  • ht85 4y ago
    In my experience fresh no-bloat windows installs boot in seconds, which gets slower and slower every major soft or hardware upgrade. Is your boot still fast? Nice username btw.
    • hs86 4y ago
      No, it is not booting up very fast, but it is still ok as I usually don't reboot that often. I remember one severe increase in the user login duration, and this was caused by the high number of files in a temp folder which Disk Cleanup somehow did not delete. Manually deleting those solved this issue, and over the years, I have only used the standard tools included in Windows to maintain the system. No tuning or cleaning tools that defrag the registry, download some RAM or do some other magic.
• aidenn0 4y ago
  I don't think I've ever done an Ubuntu release upgrade without having at least one thing break. Admittedly, my sample size is rather small because I stopped using Ubuntu for that very reason.
  • jandrese 4y ago
    Funnily enough my main box is an Ubuntu 22 machine that started life as an Ubuntu 16 machine. The only problem I have at the moment is the root filesystem is on an early 64GB SSD and it's getting a bit cramped. Well, that and Ubuntu 22 really took a big steaming dump on Firefox. :( It has to run out of a container that cripples it. I only update on even years though, so only 3 major updates. Not really all that exciting. I also have a FreeBSD box that started out as FreeBSD 8 something and is currently FreeBSD 13-RELEASE. This had some issues because the software RAID I was using became deprecated and I had to move all of the data off to a backup drive and rebuild the data drive at one point.
• drbawb 4y ago
  I have a similar experience, though only now am I faced with the existential crisis that "2013" is going to be "a decade ago" in a few months. My Arch Linux install started life as a VMWare Workstation image. It made it through two major init systems (sysvinit -> systemd), different audio subsystems (alsa -> pulseaudio -> pipewire), different WMs (gnome2 -> kde4 -> i3 -> sway), three filesystems (ext3 -> ext4, ext4 -> brtfs -> ext4, then ext4 -> zfs), several different versions of VMWare Workstation (7 through 14 I believe), different storage substrates, etc. It's also lived on three different uArchs (AMD Bulldozer c. 2012, Intel Skylake c. 2016, and Ryzen c. 2020) but VMWare abstracted most of that away, of course. Eventually I got fed up with Windows and decided to `zfs send` the install to a real disk and booted it on bare metal. It has been my daily driver since then for the last 2 years or so. (I did drop into the Arch installer a last year to unfuck my bootloader while trying to get rEFInd & ZFS Boot Menu to work, but that was just building a new initramfs; I haven't run "pacstrap" since I built the image c. 2013.) The flexibility this operating system has provided me with is nothing short of amazing. I do have to say though: since switching to Wayland + the in-kernel AMDGPU driver, I can't remember the last time my system was rendered unbootable. (Excepting the one time I tried to change my bootloader, but that's user error.) In hindsight I feel like the vast majority of Arch's reputation for breaking systems is overblown, and the blame rests mostly on DKMS + NVidia's proprietary drivers.
  • alufers 4y ago
    May I ask: What prompted you to change the file systems? I recently reluctantly switched over to btrfs and I see no meaningful difference between ext4, so I am curious.
• l72 4y ago
  I am currently running Fedora 35. I haven't reinstalled since at least Fedora 21 (maybe older, I can't quite remember)! Every 6 months, I do the standard fedora upgrade and keep on going! This reminds me, it is time to update to Fedora 36!
  • isodev 4y ago
    I use Fedora as a VM for development on other systems. I just love the stable and smooth experience.
  • antongribok 4y ago
    I'm on Fedora 36 laptop that started from Fedora 25, and at some point in the middle I moved from Dell XPS to LG Gram. To migrate machines I didn't use rsync, used dd instead. Zero upgrade issues, however I generally wait 2-3 months after release before upgrading.
  • spear 4y ago
    I avoid reinstalls as well and one of my systems hasn't had a reinstall since Fedora Core 4. This system actually started on Red Hat Linux 8 (the precursor to Fedora, not RHEL). It was upgraded to RH9, then FC1, etc., but I had to reinstall once (I think disk failed during upgrade). I have been able to rescue other upgrades that failed. I have upgraded literally every component multiple times so it's a Ship of Theseus.
  • sph 4y ago
    I get the best of both world. I run Fedora Silverblue, and develop inside an Arch Linux container toolbox. I get the stability and user friendliness of Fedora, an immutable system w/ Silverblue and AUR and all the Arch goodies to develop with. This is the best workstation setup I've ever had, there's no comparison.
• idoubtit 4y ago
  I'm a happy user of another rolling release distribution: Debian testing. It's on my desktop and a laptop for a decade (even more for the desktop since I transferred the OS from my previous desktop pc). I can't remember any problem during the upgrades of the recent years. I often apply partial updates through `aptitude` on a weekly basis, and full upgrades once in a while (maybe monthly). There were some rough times long ago, but I think it was related to the transition from initrc to systemd: for a major change like this, it's would be surprising if a testing release was perfect. I don't think I ever had problems as acute as having no Xorg or alsa. If several occurrences of this kind had occurred, I would call my OS unstable.
  • flobosg 4y ago
    Another Debian testing user reporting in. I think I’ve reinstalled once or twice in a decade.
  • nsomaru 4y ago
    I’ve been running Debian stable for about 10 years and reinstalling every so often. How do you run a partial upgrade on testing? Is it usable as a daily driver?
  • goodpoint 4y ago
    Debian unstable is equally functional on desktops. 15 years without having to reinstall.
    • vbernat 4y ago
      It's even better (to use unstable) since you don't have disappearing packages, you have access to packages only in unstable (Firefox instead of Firefox ESR), and you get timely security update. 20 years ago, things may break a lot in unstable. But nowadays, you just have to be careful to only use "apt upgrade" and from time to time "apt full-upgrade" (and check what is removed as it could remove everything).
      • pabs3 4y ago
• wooque 4y ago
  >my experience doesn’t match the common notion that Arch Linux is unstable Arch is unstable, as in, package versions constantly change and can (will) introduce bugs and regressions. Debian is considered stable because apart from security updates package versions are set in stone til the next release, so there won't be any surprises. This is stable/unstable difference, that doesn't mean that you can't break your OS and have to reinstall in either Debian or Arch.
  • jcelerier 4y ago
    > Debian is considered stable because apart from security updates package versions are set in stone til the next release, so there won't be any surprises. which is not what the rest of the world means by "stable" when talking about software, so there is in practice a lot of surprise for users coming to Debian when they hear "stable" thinking that it means "no bugs" when it actually means "no changes"
    • gspr 4y ago
      > which is not what the rest of the world means by "stable" when talking about software But it is what the rest of the world means by "stable" in lots of ways: a stable climate, a stable government, a stable relationship, a stable heading. I don't think it's far-fetched for Debian to use it in that meaning about software as well.
    • wooque 4y ago
      stable, by dictionary definition, means "not changing or fluctuating", no bugs would be "bug free", there is no "bug free" distro.
      • jcelerier 4y ago
        it's a problem of scale: it can mean "changing or fluctuating" as in, the software itself won't change over, say, a time scale of months (what Debian means), OR "changing or fluctuating" in the sense that a stable chair does not fluctuates, breaks or tips over when you sit on it, e.g. at the time scale of an human interaction. I'd wager than people mean the latter in general with the word "stable".
• sam_lowry_ 4y ago
  So what, I likely had my Arch Linux for a decade as well. Just copying it to the new SSD every time I had a new device. I even have 2 bootloader entries: for intel and for amd devices so I do not need to reconfigure anything. ARM devices such as PineBook or Olimex are a PITA, though. Never had patience with them.
• B-Con 4y ago
  I reinstalled Arch once since 2009, and it was to resolve a long-standing bug that I could not fix for the life of me. FWIW, it worked. (This was probably 6-ish years ago, I don't remember what the bug was.)
• IceDane 4y ago
  I never quite made it to a decade, but I think I definitely hit 5 years. Yes, there have been breakages, but none very bad and thus not very memorable. Interestingly, some breakages were due to windows update doing something bad since I was dual booting. Before switching to arch, I used ubuntu for years, and that was not nearly as pleasant an experience. Upgrading ubuntu versions always failed in some horrible way for me and I had to just reinstall the new version instead, and the way ubuntu is put together made it a horrible experience if you ever needed to install software that didn't jive with it(like something that required an updated version of some gnome dependency).
• ElDji 4y ago
  $ head -1 /var/log/pacman.log [2014-03-24 23:03] [PACMAN] Running 'pacman -S yaourt' Eight years so far ...
• oleg_antonyan 4y ago
  So basically you use Arch Linux? (: btw, I use openSUSE Tumbleweed - more stable rolling release and it's awesome. Never going back to regular release with painful major updates every few years
  • kakwa_ 4y ago
    Personally, I am using Debian Sid. The only somewhat painful part are the proprietary Nvidia drivers when a significant kernel upgrade occurs, but it's usually just a matter of selecting an older kernel in grub for a few days. Other than that, it's really up to date, and with an extensive choice of packages.
  • luciusdomitius 4y ago
    No offense, but how could possibly Debian Sid and the SUSE have more stable rolling release. For a rolling release you count on the default configuration working and both Debian and SUSE are a hell of customise scripts. I don't think it is technically possible for that to be working better.
    • oleg_antonyan 4y ago
      They have https://openqa.opensuse.org/ https://openqa.opensuse.org/ for automated testing
• Rackedup 4y ago
  How often did the upgrade process broke? I've been using it for a few years and it broke a few times... but overall very happy.
  • delusional 4y ago
    My install has been alive since 2014. I've never had the upgrade process outright break. One in a while it requires some manual intervention like holding something back, or ignoring some package while upgrading. The only really "big" problem was when i switched from Nvidia to AMD and had to boot from a usb to restore the video drivers after failing to completely configure them. This install has moved 4 disks in this time. Never a reinstall, just an rsync a a new fstab.
    • Rackedup 4y ago
      > Once in a while it requires some manual intervention that's what I meant by breaking
• powersnail 4y ago
  Also a rolling release, I've used the same openSUSE Tumbleweed install for 4 years. The benefit is that if something breaks, I just reboot and rollback, and wait for a few days until they fix it. I've never had to worry about tinkering with failure due to update.
• BirAdam 4y ago
  he uses arch, btw
• kelp 4y ago
  I always love hearing these stories, especially because I'm too fickle to stick with something that long. I've mostly been a Mac user since maybe Puma or Jaguar, but I disto hop every few years. Spent a good while on Debian, Ubuntu, Arch, FreeBSD and OpenBSD. Still have an OpenBSD Thinkpad x1 Gen 6 around somewhere. That OpenBSD install could age like this, but I fat fingered a dd command and nuked the system disk in mid 2020, so it got a fresh install then. Had various Arch installs on desktop and Thinkpad that I used as my day to day for while, but I always just ended up back on my Mac. And I get a new Mac every few years. Any Linux I've had always ends up getting torn down at some point. I get a new computer and do a fresh install.
• rockyj 4y ago
  This is so good, but Arch only annoys me in 1 way - that every week I need to download 500MB of updates. If I go away for a couple of weeks, my computer will most likely have 2 GB of updates pending.
  • capableweb 4y ago
    How many packages (via pacman I assume?) do you have installed in total?
    • rockyj 4y ago
      Not many. Standard dev tools like latest versions of VSCode, Chrome, JDK, Node, Ruby and some utils like Git, Gimp, Inkscape, etc. On Linux Mint I just have to do (maybe) an update of 100MB a week.
• TacticalCoder 4y ago
  I always reinstall from scratch although I could just Debian "dist upgrade". My thinking is this: if, ten years ago, I somehow missed a security patch or some 0-day owned my machine before it was patched, then I'd potentially have been copying / dd'ing / rsync'ing a rootkit for ten years. By installing from scratch at every new stable (or unstable) release, I get rid of a lot of potential security issues. Now as an anecdote: ten years with the same install is nice but... I've got a dedicated server at OVH with 3400 days of uptime. You read that correctly. Nearly ten years of uptime. Once in a while I give temporary ssh access to people here and there just so they can type "uptime" and see. Kids: don't try this at home. Yes, it's insecure (although there's a firewall and only the SSH port open). No, it doesn't do much nor is it very useful. But it's fun to think I own one of the computer in the world with the biggest uptime. I plan to kill it once it reaches ten years \o/
  • adastra22 4y ago
    Hate to hear your Hubble, but there are systems with decades of uptime. Great accomplishment though!
    • adastra22 4y ago
      Burst your bubble
      • mrtweetyhack 4y ago
  • dralley 4y ago
    > But it's fun to think I own one of the computer in the world with the biggest uptime. The top 500 entries on that list are almost guaranteed to be mainframes.
    • aarchi 4y ago
      According to Guinness, the top is Voyager 2: > The computer system that has been in continual operation for the longest period is the Computer Command System (CCS) onboard NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft. This pair of interlinked computers have been in operation since the spacecraft's launch on 20 August 1977. As of 29 October 2020, the CCS has been running for 43 years 70 days. https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/635980-longest-period-of-continual-operation-for-a-computer https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/635980-lo...
• easytiger 4y ago
  Circa 2003 i used the same Debian install for 4 years without a reboot. Fine
• numlock86 4y ago
  I am running Arch on my server (VPS) for over a decade and therefore haven't even noticed the X and audio issues. The only time something broke was when the Ethernet interface suddenly was named eth0 instead of the vendor specific (?) enXsX or whatever it was. And I had configured systemd-networkd to use the absolute and exact names and not some wildcard like e*. Error was located fixed within five minutes.
• xbpx 4y ago
  Hey cheers, I bet I'm around a decade on the same install of Arch too. That spans 3 machines. The trick for me is hot swap backups. I do an rsync backup of the drive to an identical disk (nowadays a 1TB 980 Evo) and then immediately swap the backup drive to the main drive. I have little helper scripts to format drives, do backups and automatically update fstab and the boot config. So new machine no problem, rsync the files into it and boot it up and I have everything exactly as it should be. Now and again I'll do some package spelunking (pacman makes this straightforward) and clean out cobwebs. Next on my list is my emacs config which is like 15 years old and a couple generations out of date. I wouldn't care but startup times are slowing down and there is a lot of great ideas and packages to solve this problem. Just need the time, it's a few hours here and there, but easily enough to keep Arch going forever!
• twblalock 4y ago
  Now try to replicate that Arch setup on another PC. Even if you started from the exact same install, would it turn out the same? I'd really like to see something like a rolling release take on Fedora Silverblue. Rolling release with versioning/immutability and easy rollbacks.
• zh3 4y ago
  The software install on my daily driver dates from 1999 (though the oldest file in /etc is dated 1994) and was originally an old Red Hat release. It runs XFree86-4.x (last rebuilt 2004) which works fine with nvidia-390.132 (no more than a few years old) on a GTX780Ti and an i7-3770K (maybe a decade old itself now?). Desktop is currently Xfce-4.something (was FVWM for many years); applications only get upgraded as needed (autoconf and make FTW). It's been triplehead pretty much forever (easier now only one graphics card is needed, current running 3x27" Dell something or others). I don't normally explain why it's so fast, just smile quietly when people comment on how instant the response is.
  • waynesonfire 4y ago
    xfce is great
• nyadesu 4y ago
  This matches my experience as well, been using it since 6 or 7 years ago, and it feels nice to know I can rely on my OS install. If something breaks I have to learn how to fix it and that knowledge builds up over time. Way better than other operating systems where I'm totally screwed if something breaks up and the only thing I can do is run in circles. I also use i3wm btw
• jarbus 4y ago
  Out of all the distributions I've tested, pure arch has been the most stable, most documented, most fixable distro yet I've dealt with yet
• Linda703 4y ago
  [dead]
• WfAjWDYpDHDYCN5 4y ago
  That's great! But what it doesn't say is what's actually relevant: how much time you spent maintaining it in that period. Stuff being obviously/"disruptively" broken usually has an undue amount of weight given to it, even though it generally (a) occurs at a time the administrator has chosen and should be planned to minimize the effects of any disruption (i.e. when you're doing updates or potentially problematic config changes), and (b) usually takes significantly less time to deal with, overall, than regular maintenance (upgrades, config changes caused by them, etc).
• Animats 4y ago
  One of my systems, a public-facing server: Server status at 2022-08-16 11:39:24 System status: Database up for 1644.44 days.
• oedo 4y ago
  Yeah, this is a thing. To enjoy years of stability on Arch[0]: - occasionally upgrade your system - before upgrading, glance at https://archlinux.org/news/ to see if anything requires manual intervention [0] I use Arch btw
  • capableweb 4y ago
    > - before upgrading, glance at https://archlinux.org/news/ https://archlinux.org/news/ to see if anything requires manual intervention I simply have https://archlinux.org/ https://archlinux.org/ as my homepage when I open my browser on the desktop computer. Shows the same news in a slightly better format (personally), and also shows latest package updates on the right side, in case some favorite software of mine has been recently updated.
    • thekoma 4y ago
      I've been using informant (https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/informant https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/informant).
• gjs278 4y ago
• jklinger410 4y ago
  The issue isn't so much whether a person can keep an arch install stable, it's whether arch is stable for most people, most of the time. As modern hardware and DE choices change and conflict, arch has to be manually tweaked to stay working. Those tweaks (aka config choices) are essentially the entire purpose of a normal distro. Arch isn't designed to do the tweaks. It's just that simple. Saying you kept arch running is either a brag about how well you manage it, how minimalist your environment is, or how simple your hardware is. Not to mention whether your needs drive you to try any of the edgier stuff. Congrats to this guy though.
  • vladev 4y ago
    I would say that Arch's philosophy is about Exposed simplicity vs Hidden complexity. The wiki is extensive and covers a lot of cases one might stumble upon. Sometimes it feels like Arch's goal is to teach you how it works end-to-end. As a byproduct you get a working OS.
• atleta 4y ago
  I've had that with a Debian desktop (for over a decade). My current OS on my laptop is Ubuntu, which I also installed a decade ago. Though something went really wrong with an upgrade about 5 years ago, so I had to reinstall. (Keeping all the data, of course.) The only problem (with both debian and ubuntu) is that these old installs tend to drift from what a fresh install would be. And that the GNOME guys keep removing features I use with every release and then it takes a few months (sometimes a year) until someone adds it back as an extension (which will be broken with the next release, for sure).
  • krzyk 4y ago
    I have it with Debian testing/unstable on my laptop, I think it has about 15 years now. Most stable system. I have also Ubuntu laptop from work, freezes constantly. I switched laptops 3 or 4 times and HDD to ssd and another bigger sad with copying while system and just enlarging partitions. The only issue I have right now is lack of legacy boot on newer laptops, not sure how to UEFI my disk.
• buttersbrian 4y ago
  have an Arch install that's been running for ~8 years. It's solid. Went through the same growing pains as others. Most recently the pipewire change. Love Arch.
• Max-q 4y ago
  What is the advantage of keeping the installation instead of starting from scratch when buying a new computer?
  • ReactiveJelly 4y ago
    No idea. I think of /home as the important part. Everything else is disposable. If I could painlessly flip the FHS, I'd have something like /system, /data, and /config. /system would be "Files you can download from your package manager verbatim". This is what apt and pacman create and update. If I lose it, who cares, just re-install the OS. /data would be human-made and only human-made. Not even program preferences. This is the only thing I really care about backing up. /config would be all the dumb little dotfiles that won't put themselves properly in $HOME/.config. This is stuff that might be important, but since I didn't choose the names of the files or for them to exist, I don't want them cluttering up /data, and I don't want a program complaining if I delete a file in _my_ /home that the _program_ thought belonged to it. I think Android does something kinda like this. Android is right twice a day.
• sleek 4y ago
  I a million percent agree with this. I've NEVER had major issues with Arch. It's my forever linux.
• cosmiccatnap 4y ago
  I had a laptop in storage and went on a trip. I didn't want to bring an expensive MacBook but I did want something that could take a note or two and check my email so I took a very old Dell latitude with me running arch on an intel 2xxx something (ancient) When I booted it up I realized to my surprise I had been running arch not windows...so I checked my email and then decided on the hotel wifi to try and update it. I will admit after about 6 years there was quite a bit of fumbling with pacman sources and keyrings and the delta to upgrade on a laptop that old and hotel wifi wasn't great but after I left it for an hour it finished. I rebooted it and there I was in i3 without a thing wrong. Wild Maybe if I used gnome it would have been a different story but I think the point of the article holds that arch is much more stable than people give it credit for if you are willing to learn a bit about how it works.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• fareesh 4y ago
  I stuck with Ubuntu (eventually Kubuntu) for many years because I thought it was the best for a no-fuss distro for folks who wanted things to just work (TM). I was afraid of things randomly breaking and interrupting my daily work. One day I eventually bit the bullet and installed Arch instead. The experience has been phenomenal, and if anything it feels more stable than Ubuntu. I was underestimating my own Linux knowledge, and it really isn't difficult to setup/configure at all if you have a reasonable understanding of how Linux works. The initial installation can be done by just following one of the many YouTube videos that break down the process step by step - you may even learn something if you don't already know it. I can't ever see myself going back.
  • mikewhy 4y ago
    Nowadays arch install ISOs have an `archinstall` script that can get you going for basic setups.
  • capableweb 4y ago
    > The initial installation can be done by just following one of the many YouTube videos Even easier, the ArchWiki has detailed steps you can follow along at your own speed, together with links to each topic for a deep dive (which isn't required, but nice to have when you do need it). Reading through and following the "Installation Guide" + "General Recommendations" pages would take you 2-3 hours at most, and you'll end up with a fully installed and ready system :)
  • okamiueru 4y ago
    I was in the same situation. My fresh install adjustments to Ubuntu consisted of a long list of apt packages, removing snap, dep packages, ppa's and some make builds. I finally tried arch, and my long list of custom manual shenanigans was reduced to packman + aur. I'm seriously impressed, and it gave me a renewed hope for OSS. I've used Linux, Windows and MacOS. For what an operating system does, the only flaw Linux has is due to lack of software and driver availability, neither of which has anything to do with the operating system itself. Because for what it is, and what it does, Linux and gnome is imo, absolutely excellent.
  • minimilian 4y ago
• danjoredd 4y ago
  What a chad. I wish I was that consistent. I distro-hop about once every other week
• codeflo 4y ago
  The keyring issue that other commenters mention has to be the dumbest misfeature ever, because upgrading is guaranteed to fail, yet nobody fixes it. To make things worse, one of the top Google suggestions is a pacman command that can cause libc to be upgraded without a full system upgrade, which will make your system unusable immediately. No process will launch after that. I had to do very desperate recovery steps when that happened to me. To be honest, I'm still not entirely sure how to safely fix the keyring issue when it happens. Other than that, and this may sound very strange given the last paragraph, Arch is fantastic. It's the most usable and useful system for general software development I've ever owned. Basically, you follow the wiki, and everything just works, sound, graphics, wifi. I never had that with Linux, not with Ubuntu, not with SuSE.
  • demux 4y ago
    Booting with a live USB, mounting the root dir and doing a manual downgrade of libc could work
    • codeflo 4y ago
      Yeah, something like that. I don't remember the full steps I took, but it involved pacman-static from the AUR, which is a pacman build that works without a working libc. I think I used the USB boot method you mention, but with pacman-static, I was able to go forward and do a full system upgrade.
• ISL 4y ago
  I'm fairly certain that my current Debian installation dates from ~2006, whenever I tired of running Gentoo for its amd64 support and returned to Debian, which I had used from 2001-2004. It is wonderful that these distributions maintain an ongoing upgrade path that lets us move smoothly through our computing lives limited disruption. Support your local distros and package maintainers! (Typing this comment reminded me that I hadn't donated to Debian in ages. Just did.)
• stop50 4y ago
  I switched between arch and debian and the only real unstable thing i encountered is KDE. even before i changed something my whole desktop crashed. I had to login as root and kill my usersession (as root so that every process that belongs to my user is stopped).
• prima-facie 4y ago
  I've been using the same Archlinux install over the past 12 years or so. Initially installed in 2006 (version 0.7 or so), I only re-installed properly when I switched from 32-bit to 64-bit packages, and from ReiserFS to Ext4 in the same step. Since then I've been using the same install on my personal computer, and just rsync-ed the files between hdds, laptops, etc. It's been pretty stable, had some hiccups a dodgy kernel once I think. Can't remember what it was specifically. > zcat /var/log/pacman.log.1.gz-2018010214.backup | head -1 > [2009-02-23 18:14] installed filesystem (2009.01-1)
• singron 4y ago
  I was wondering why their system didn't break with the migration to systemd, but it's possible that their system is new enough that it started on systemd. That one was huge pain if I remember correctly. I think I needed to rescue with a bootable usb.
• vkoskiv 4y ago
  I have a similar experience. I have a 2005 Fujitsu LifeBook S2110 I keep for sentimental purposes. I installed Arch on it in ~2015, and I've been upgrading it ever since. I've had 2-3 breakages over the years, but every time I've just googled the issue and found an obvious solution to resolve the issue. I've been so happy with the Arch rolling release that I now use it on my main daily driver desktop. I switched over full time from macOS last year.
• ddggdd 4y ago
  I bought a samsung np900x3g about 5 years ago for the reason it's too cheap and put archlinux on it. then I used it as my main computer, bought 2 ryzen rtx gaming laptop since then, but only use them to play some games. it's a 8 years old computer and I suspect with arch I can use it for at least several years more, and I doubt any people here is still rocking a i5-4200u , but it work perfectly for me.
• bengalister 4y ago
  I ran Archlinux with LTS kernel on my home laptop for 1.5 years and I stopped because of instabilities. The last issue that I had was the update to pipewire, my bluetooth headset stopped working after suspend. I got fed up of tweaking configuration to make it work. I could have reverted to pulseaudio. But to be honest, the only major issue was an issue with pam login. I could not log in anymore after an update, had to search on the internet to find a workaround that consisted in updating a pamd.conf file in single user mode boot. Many breaking updates were Gnome related... Switched back to Windows 10 then 11 for a year, tried WSL2 and found it unstable (some random crashes and tmux freezes), and slow sometimes. Now on Fedora for a few months since I am a Gnome user, I am surprised there are quite frequent kernel updates also. I am little bit less worried that an update will break something, but i'll slowly move away from the bleeding edge.
• endorphine 4y ago
  Kinda off-topic: how does Arch compare to Debian, in terms of UX and stability? (I'm a programmer and I use i3)
• unixsheikh 4y ago
  I don't get what the fuss is about. I run several Arch boxes, a couple I believe is on 15+ years. One such installation has even been mirrored from one disk to multiple other disks and put into other machines, just because it was already set up as needed. Only once did a package I ran require manual intervention during upgrade, but as always, that was clearly described on the Arch website. This also goes for Debian, FreeBSD and OpenBSD.
• dmz73 4y ago
  I tried using arch based distributions but the need for constant manual babysitting has turned me off them. Packages randomly break and require hours of work to fix. Non-rolling distribution will usually only break when there is major upgrade which can be scheduled for when you have the time to deal with it. Pacman only works in interactive mode so using it on a headless means at least weekly session. Randomly that will use up an hour or two when something breaks, and it will. Ubuntu based LTS distribution will last a couple of years without needing manual intervention after initial installation, and much longer if you don't upgrade to next LTS until the EOL. Finally, if you need old software to build old version of something, Arch based distribution is useless. On Ubuntu I can download and install version 14.04 without much hassle (and even older with a bit of work) and build that old Android or sdk for device that is no longer supported but with Arch...don't waste your time, its not happening.
  • Retr0id 4y ago
    > Pacman only works in interactive mode so using it on a headless means at least weekly session. What do you mean by this?
• david_draco 4y ago
  Did this with Gentoo for a decade, even across two computer changes. boot into a rescue disk, set up grub, then for each partition do ssh oldcomputer "gzip</dev/sda5"|zcat>/dev/sda5, then resize the fs.
• abalashov 4y ago
  I used the same Arch Linux installation from early 2016 until summer 2021, and had a very similar experience to the author's. There was a significant initial setup investment, by modern standards, although not by historical ones; I had used Linux on the desktop continuously since I was a child, around 1997 (I think I started with RedHat 4.0 and kernel 2.0.29), so I remember all initial setup to be fairly burdensome in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Arch seemed a throwback to that. This is not a criticism, to be clear. I was very aware that this was part of the Arch philosophy, and I embraced that in my switch from Ubuntu. However, once that was done, very little of interest happened over the next half decade. It's not that nothing ever broke, ever, but the rate of breakage was impressively low, and much lower than I had the previous 7 years on Ubuntu, or desktop Debian beforehand. Arch Linux was eminently stable. In 2021, I switched to Mac/OSX -- the last of my social group of techies to do so, late to the party by a decade or so. While this has some advantages, my work kinetics will never come close to the raw efficiency and speed of my Arch Linux + i3wm setup.
• uptheroots 4y ago
  I've had the same Arch installation running since Spring 2020 on a desktop from 2012 or so. It's not my daily driver, but still works just fine. Even with some long periods between updates, I don't recall any serious stability issues.
• discreditable 4y ago
  I've had the same install going since January 2012: > head -1 /var/log/pacman.log [2012-01-22 14:55] installed filesystem (2011.12-2) In that time I've converted the install in-place from x86 to x64, migrated from legacy boot to uefi, replaced the entire RAID set twice, motherboards, CPUs, etc. It's my own ship of theseus. Many of these tasks people would say to do a reinstall, but I've always been able to find a guide on the arch wiki to do it in-place without losing anything.
• radium3d 4y ago
  I've had good luck once I get a system going with arch. Only rarely are there manual interventions required for updates, I just run pacman -Syyu every few days. I just try to install very few packages, only what I need for the server.
• jesse__ 4y ago
  I had one of the worst debugging experiences of my life installing Arch (before I knew anything about linux, or programming), followed by probably the most delightful computing experience of my life using that installation for the next several years. I don't use Arch anymore, but I think about going back to it all the time. Hopefully one of these days I actually pull up my socks and install it again.
• nathias 4y ago
  I've been using Arch for 7 years, I only destroyed it once with python packaging ... and it took 5min to repair it, its the most stable OS I've ever used
• marcodiego 4y ago
  You probably can't update as much as you can with Arch, but any reasonable modern linux distro these days allows the user to have a very stable core and very up to date user space with snaps, flatpaks and AppImages. I was jealous of windows because of exactly this. No longer now. It could still be better, e.g.: .AppImages could automatically be opened by something that mimics an installation wizard with checks for signatures, permissions, installations, periodic updates... it would be much more user-friendly than expecting the user to give "executable rights/flags" to a file that was just downloaded. Nevertheless, it broke the "good enough" barrier for me. Coming from a time that "just released" software required compilation from source and sometimes, compilation of its dependencies which sometimes could simply break the system or worse: add lots of repos that could suddenly disappear or break your package manager in a way that it was simpler to just reinstall your system from scratch than trying to fix it; current situation is much much better. It is good to have a mature and stable distro that one can expect will be maintained for years with software that was released just yesterday.
• MikePlacid 4y ago
  I am using the “same” MacOS installation since the first Intel Mac Mini (2006?). It has branched out to a dozen or so boxes (3 kids, a wife and a TV set etc). I had to make a clean install on one “leaf” only - a former main computer relegated to video watching (a lot of different video players, torrent clients and such) began crashing once in 2 days. Clean install helped. But to be fair upgrading a Mac computer consists now of adding your old stuff on top of a new operating system, not adding a new operating system on top of your old stuff. But well… I had a problem with USB daemon crashing sometimes (probably related to a famous rewrite of the daemon in C++). And most recently - the most shameful M1 related problem with unkillable screen saver wrongfully started when Remote Desktop is in use. (The bug is shameful cause an unkillable screen saver means that design review, code review, QA processes are all broken, and the fact that it was not fixed in a year(!) - means that tech support process is broken too. Looks scary for things to come. M1 is a great processor though).
• synergy20 4y ago
  I use ubuntu LTS to ease software build with android, yocto, some vendor's SDK,etc as they're all tested on ubuntu LTS, so do many other projects from github etc. Every few years I do a full re-installation (instead of dist-upgrade as I have quite some local installations that made things complex). How Arch cope with that? I like the live-update-never-need-full-reinstall side, meanwhile I don't want to spend time to fix those tested-on-ubuntu-lts-ready-to-go third party software package when Arch is used.
• tawaydoo 4y ago
  Wow so arch works on thinkpads
• esjeon 4y ago
  The whole discussion over "rolling release is stable" never gets concluded because people are not agreeing upon what they talk about. Here are the basic facts that the discussion should be based on: * "Stable" is not a binary property - it's a scalar. The exact level of stability assumed by the word can be different depending on the context. * By design, rolling releases are less stable than regular releases. You simply can't beat the stability of something that doesn't change. * People have different stability requirements. You don't expect something works on your own laptop to work in every occasion.
• 4m1rk 4y ago
  I stopped using Arch when I went to a meeting after upgrading the night before and realizing my audio is not working during the call. You don't have time to RTFM then.
• cookiengineer 4y ago
  For me, it was pretty similar...but I was more affected by everything related to mesa and their decision to drop old Intel core generations (basically everything up to Haswell is broken with Vulkan). The worst upgrade bug was around 2016 when mesa had a buffer overflow bug, and I had to apply the patch manually...and well, recompile mesa every time an X update came out or anything related. On top of that the almost monthly archlinux keyring messups that need a repopulate, a different keyserver, or a deletion on the filesystem for whatever reason...oh man, I just hate gpg so much. I wish this piece of crap software would be more reliable. It would make my life so much easier. I always have issues with gpg and pacman complaining about outdated or wrong keys, and then shit happens even when you tell pacman to not delete the package download (and when you start the init, repopulate, and sync of archlinux-keyring again). It messed up my system so often with remnants of packages, where I debugged X for days just to realize that a file was missing and the package got uninstalled automatically.
• Lapsa 4y ago
  running Arch for about 5 years. then again - dual booting Win10 and it's also chugging along just fine
  • rolisz 4y ago
    Similar for me: I got a new desktop in January 2015 and I've been dual booting ArchLinux and Windows 10 ever since. Everything is super stable and it has even survived several hard drive upgrades where I cloned the old drive onto a bigger one. Soon I'll have to buy a new motherboard, because of Windows 11. I'm curious if I can still keep the same OS without reinstalling.
• bugBunny 4y ago
  totally of topic... as a previous Arch user, I switched to POP-OS with my new laptop, simply because it worked out of box with everything, and I struggled to even make a proper SMB connection to windows network with ARch... not to mention automatical USB stick mounting etc... However, as someone who would like to get back to Arch because gnome uses so much power, and I am missing the simplicity of Arch, is there some good tutorial to make it a decent distro right after installation including the sound, nvidia graphic, network settings, display (with external usbc connected display) etc...
• eternityforest 4y ago
  All the issues mentioned in these comments would be way too much for me. Sure I could fix them and move on... unless they happened on a very busy day. Then they could tank a schedule. And busy days can show up suddenly. What if I get a super last minute job right after I decided to update my packages and break something? It seems like using Arch or any tech that involves any tinkering requires accepting that the system isn't a total point of trust for your whole life. You have to have an attitude of "I'll make it work" rather than "I know my gear is dependable".
  • jason0597 4y ago
    Same stuff can happen with Windows too with unexpected updates. Not sure about Mac though, I've never used one.
    • eternityforest 4y ago
      That seems to be one of the big reasons people move to Linux. It's definitely part of why I stay. Debian based stuff is very good at not breaking.
• spixy 4y ago
  Ok? I am using same Win10 installation since ~2016. It survived migration to another SSD, upgrade from Intel to Amd CPU, motherboard and RAMs, migration from MBR to GPT... Only time when it crashed was when I OCed CPU too much and when using insider builds.
• WhyNotHugo 4y ago
  I have the same experience here. I installed Arch on 2011. I've switched laptops multiple times. Once I copied the entire disk as-is into the new one and grew the partition. Another time I rsync'd the entire disk. Things broke probably one or two times throughout this time. I broke things more times while tinkering with internals or startup sequence myself. I've learnt an immense amount doing this too. Arch requires a bit of effort getting into, but honestly, the KISS philosophy really pays off.
• mehdix 4y ago
  How would you folks make sure your system is not compromised? That's my No. 1 concern about my system. Like OP, I'm using my arch for many years now, however I cannot tell whether it's running vanilla arch or not. Unlike NixOS I cannot verify the changes to the state of my system over time and I haven't kept a log of any software installed or any config changes. That's why I plan to replace it and keep a log of future changes.
• kkkrist 4y ago
  I run Arch™ on all of my production servers since 2016 and never had any real problems or the need to reinstall either. The newer ones use docker with Alpine images, but the hosts still run Arch. Packages are updated every few days or weeks. On most servers I use the LTS kernel, pin it and only update it every couple of months to keep downtime low. That's it. The first ever server still runs fine with all its legacy apps thanks to a couple of custom packages. One of the things I like about arch is that it keeps app config as upstream as possible. Debian's custom app config with all its magic scripts used to cause so much trouble. Yes, I only have <10 servers and the way I maintain them does not scale up too well. But that's something we have the "cloud" for these days anyway.
• neop1x 4y ago
  I had a similarly great experience with Arch but sometimes the system upgrade would mess up libraries required for the screen locker and I had to use loginctl unlock. I also didn't like that every system upgrade would make a lot of AUR packages broken, waiting to be recompiled. I solved both problems by moving to NixOS and I have been very happy since then. I haven't had any issues with it so far. I've also created a couple of Nix expressions for packages I was missing, but I found most of the software I use in Nixpkgs or NUR already.
• wvh 4y ago
  My home laptop Arch installation is about 8 years old. The only major breakage I've experienced with Arch and Debian in the last 10 years or so has been the switch to systemd, which is understandable. I don't necessarily recommend for everybody to run Linux/Unix on desktop – especially if you need specific hardware or software support – but it's definitely not less stable than Windows or OSX from what I gather observing those around me running other operating systems. To me, the fact that I can likely fix things myself is worth any extra trouble of choosing the less beaten path.