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One lesson I learned from this latest upgrade: DON'T SKIP READING THE DOCUMENTATION BEFORE UPGRADING. I rebooted after upgrade and found myself dropped in a co

by klez 1y ago

One lesson I learned from this latest upgrade: DON'T SKIP READING THE DOCUMENTATION BEFORE UPGRADING. I rebooted after upgrade and found myself dropped in a console-only environment. Turns out the (proprietary) drivers for my video card are not supported anymore. Now I'm on nouveau and it sucks. My fault for having an Nvidia card, I guess, but an AMD equivalent is on its way.

mikae1 1y ago
Reading this I feel blessed having found https://universal-blue.org https://universal-blue.org
- eklavya 1y ago
  Don't understand the downvotes. Ublue family of atomic os, provides snapshot restore which helps exactly in these scenarios.
- enronmusk 1y ago
  You don't need a special OS to have backups or even just btrfs/lvm snapshots.
misterdata 1y ago
Similarly, Trixie contains an updated version of Dovecot that (even though the version number seems to indicate otherwise) has a new configuration format that is not backwards compatible. This is clearly stated in the release notes but may be surprising nevertheless.
stavros 1y ago
Can't you install the drivers from nVidia directly?
- klez 1y ago
  I tried, but it fails at compile time and I can't be bothered to try and understand why it doesn't find a stdargs.h that is _clearly_ there. I attempted various solutions I found online for half a day, then just threw the towel and ordered a 25€ replacement from AMD which I'm told has better support than nvidia on linux anyway.
  - stavros 1y ago
    Ah, yeah, that tracks. I've heard the same, though I haven't replaced my nVidia yet.
jeroenhd 1y ago
For this exact reason I enable Timeshift on every computer I run. If an upgrade fails spectacularly like that, recovering and reverting to the old edition is as simple as picking a pre-upgrade snapshot from the boot menu. If you're not on btrfs, I'm sure there are similar tools for your favorite file system. For me, it's been a life saver.
- thrown-0825 1y ago
  how much space does that take up for you?
  - ffsm8 1y ago
    At least for btrfs, very little. It's also almost instantaneous. You can think about it like this: the snapshot creates a bunch of hard links to the existing files. So every file basically has 2 pointers to it. The upgrade now updates the files in the non- snapshot paths, creating new files/keeping the snapshots on the original file. (That's afaik why it's called a CoW filesystem - copy on write) Now, every changed file will be stored "twice", but all unchanged files are still only on the disk once. As most upgrades still keep the majority of all files unchanged, there is effectively little space used for the snapshot
    - thrown-0825 1y ago
      definitely going to check that out, thanks
- lupusreal 1y ago
  OpenSUSE has this sort of thing configured by default using BTRFS and snapper. Automatically creates copy-on-write snapshots before and after every time you use the package manager. I think this should be the default on most end-user oriented distros.
  - jauntywundrkind 1y ago
    Fwiw there's a really nice write-up on how Steam Deck does A/B updates, using rayc and casync/desync. https://github.com/randombk/steamos-teardown/blob/master/docs/system-updates.md https://github.com/randombk/steamos-teardown/blob/master/doc... Also Collabora had a nice update on tuning work they did. https://www.collabora.com/news-and-blog/news-and-events/steamos-3-6-how-the-steam-deck-atomic-updates-are-improving.html https://www.collabora.com/news-and-blog/news-and-events/stea... I'm a little surprised they use casync and multiple partitions, given that root is on btrfs. As they have it is more reliable if anything does go bad, so makes sense, but: given that steam decks are on a given snapshot of the btrfs system, it seems like they could just send an incremental update to the next release and try to boot that. Oh ah, that breaks down if, like me, you disable the readonly root.
zozbot234 1y ago
If your card is that old, shouldn't the nouveau drivers be quite full-featured anyway? Regardless, you may also want to run a Bookworm kernel with a full Trixie userspace. It should install cleanly once you add the Bookworm repos, and you'd be fully supported for quite some time thanks to LTS. It would technically be a FrankenDebian, but one that might be quite acceptable nonetheless.
- klez 1y ago
  > If your card is that old, shouldn't the nouveau drivers be quite full-featured anyway? Normally they would probably be, but it looks like my ultra-wide screen is too much to handle for those drivers. > you may also want to run a Bookworm kernel with a full Trixie userspace. Good idea indeed. But at this point I'm afraid of borking everything again. I'll just wait for the replacement card I ordered and hope it doesn't make things worse.
- kasabali 1y ago
  > If your card is that old, shouldn't the nouveau drivers be quite full-featured anyway Unfortunately, nouveau is very limited and barely works (when it works).
  - ahartmetz 1y ago
    Especially on older cards actually! The new hardware, since the 3000 generation or so, moved some "secret sauce" (probably bullshit) into the firmware so that everything that the drivers need to do is something that Nvidia is willing to disclose, so there can be open source drivers that can get the hardware out of low power mode. That lack of "reclocking" crippled performance with nouveau. Eh, I'd still buy AMD if possible.
4gotunameagain 1y ago
I have too developed PTSD from nvidia + debian (even worse, nvidia optimus on a laptop). To the point where I would not upgrade my system for months at a time, when I was in the midst of important work, because I didn't want to spend a day on tty trying to make the DE work again. In the words of Linus: FUCK NVIDIA
peterbecich 1y ago
See https://wiki.debian.org/NvidiaGraphicsDrivers#Debian_13_.22Trixie.22 https://wiki.debian.org/NvidiaGraphicsDrivers#Debian_13_.22T... for proprietary Nvidia drivers on Trixie

by klez 1y ago

mikae1 1y ago

Reading this I feel blessed having found https://universal-blue.org https://universal-blue.org

eklavya 1y ago
Don't understand the downvotes. Ublue family of atomic os, provides snapshot restore which helps exactly in these scenarios.
enronmusk 1y ago
You don't need a special OS to have backups or even just btrfs/lvm snapshots.

misterdata 1y ago

Similarly, Trixie contains an updated version of Dovecot that (even though the version number seems to indicate otherwise) has a new configuration format that is not backwards compatible. This is clearly stated in the release notes but may be surprising nevertheless.

stavros 1y ago

Can't you install the drivers from nVidia directly?

klez 1y ago
I tried, but it fails at compile time and I can't be bothered to try and understand why it doesn't find a stdargs.h that is _clearly_ there. I attempted various solutions I found online for half a day, then just threw the towel and ordered a 25€ replacement from AMD which I'm told has better support than nvidia on linux anyway.
- stavros 1y ago
  Ah, yeah, that tracks. I've heard the same, though I haven't replaced my nVidia yet.

jeroenhd 1y ago

For this exact reason I enable Timeshift on every computer I run. If an upgrade fails spectacularly like that, recovering and reverting to the old edition is as simple as picking a pre-upgrade snapshot from the boot menu. If you're not on btrfs, I'm sure there are similar tools for your favorite file system. For me, it's been a life saver.

thrown-0825 1y ago
how much space does that take up for you?
- ffsm8 1y ago
  At least for btrfs, very little. It's also almost instantaneous. You can think about it like this: the snapshot creates a bunch of hard links to the existing files. So every file basically has 2 pointers to it. The upgrade now updates the files in the non- snapshot paths, creating new files/keeping the snapshots on the original file. (That's afaik why it's called a CoW filesystem - copy on write) Now, every changed file will be stored "twice", but all unchanged files are still only on the disk once. As most upgrades still keep the majority of all files unchanged, there is effectively little space used for the snapshot
  - thrown-0825 1y ago
    definitely going to check that out, thanks
lupusreal 1y ago
OpenSUSE has this sort of thing configured by default using BTRFS and snapper. Automatically creates copy-on-write snapshots before and after every time you use the package manager. I think this should be the default on most end-user oriented distros.
- jauntywundrkind 1y ago
  Fwiw there's a really nice write-up on how Steam Deck does A/B updates, using rayc and casync/desync. https://github.com/randombk/steamos-teardown/blob/master/docs/system-updates.md https://github.com/randombk/steamos-teardown/blob/master/doc... Also Collabora had a nice update on tuning work they did. https://www.collabora.com/news-and-blog/news-and-events/steamos-3-6-how-the-steam-deck-atomic-updates-are-improving.html https://www.collabora.com/news-and-blog/news-and-events/stea... I'm a little surprised they use casync and multiple partitions, given that root is on btrfs. As they have it is more reliable if anything does go bad, so makes sense, but: given that steam decks are on a given snapshot of the btrfs system, it seems like they could just send an incremental update to the next release and try to boot that. Oh ah, that breaks down if, like me, you disable the readonly root.

zozbot234 1y ago

If your card is that old, shouldn't the nouveau drivers be quite full-featured anyway? Regardless, you may also want to run a Bookworm kernel with a full Trixie userspace. It should install cleanly once you add the Bookworm repos, and you'd be fully supported for quite some time thanks to LTS. It would technically be a FrankenDebian, but one that might be quite acceptable nonetheless.

klez 1y ago
> If your card is that old, shouldn't the nouveau drivers be quite full-featured anyway? Normally they would probably be, but it looks like my ultra-wide screen is too much to handle for those drivers. > you may also want to run a Bookworm kernel with a full Trixie userspace. Good idea indeed. But at this point I'm afraid of borking everything again. I'll just wait for the replacement card I ordered and hope it doesn't make things worse.
kasabali 1y ago
> If your card is that old, shouldn't the nouveau drivers be quite full-featured anyway Unfortunately, nouveau is very limited and barely works (when it works).
- ahartmetz 1y ago
  Especially on older cards actually! The new hardware, since the 3000 generation or so, moved some "secret sauce" (probably bullshit) into the firmware so that everything that the drivers need to do is something that Nvidia is willing to disclose, so there can be open source drivers that can get the hardware out of low power mode. That lack of "reclocking" crippled performance with nouveau. Eh, I'd still buy AMD if possible.

4gotunameagain 1y ago

I have too developed PTSD from nvidia + debian (even worse, nvidia optimus on a laptop). To the point where I would not upgrade my system for months at a time, when I was in the midst of important work, because I didn't want to spend a day on tty trying to make the DE work again. In the words of Linus: FUCK NVIDIA

peterbecich 1y ago

See https://wiki.debian.org/NvidiaGraphicsDrivers#Debian_13_.22Trixie.22 https://wiki.debian.org/NvidiaGraphicsDrivers#Debian_13_.22T... for proprietary Nvidia drivers on Trixie