Haskell packages every other day…
I have an Arch laptop that I didn’t update for 3.5 years. The system update took a while when I finally went through with it. Amazingly it didn’t break anything!
Yes, I am amazed that quite a few people in this thread are saying they ‘had to completely reinstall the os’ and that it broke everything after not much time. As long as one doesn’t rely on the AUR for system critical packages or much in generel, it is incredibly hard to break an Arch system (Manjaro and other Arch-based distros don’t count). This is due in part to Arch being quite reproducible but it also having very good maintainership.
It doesn’t hurt to apply new package configs by going throughpacdiffonce in a while though.Edit: Typo
I switched from Windows to EndeavourOS a few months ago and haven’t had any issues on my personal computer, it’s amazing.
I also have EndeavourOS as a VM on my work laptop and I somehow managed to break systemd-boot when trying to do a system update though. The system update died halfway through and I defaulted to the classic solution of rebooting, which definitely made things worse because my boot partition in the VM broke. The great thing about Linux, and especially Arch, is the tools and knowledge readily available to fix things and everything was working again (with no data loss) in under 15 minutes. I’ve dealt with similar problems on Windows and either had to accept data loss or deal with significant headaches trying to resolve what should be a simple issue because the operating system refuses to provide basic information.
Manjaro and other Arch-based distros don’t count
I think this has a lot to do with it. I have seen people say they use Arch before and then find out they’re using a derivative.
people laughed at me for choosing debian. they asked why i chose to have ancient runes running in my computer
who’s laughing now?
We are still laughing, no worries.
p.s. Debian is great, I am just a “kind of new” void converted.
went looking for it. “stable rolling release” sounds really interesting, but i’m scared of installing it and being mistaken for a systemd hater
Yeah, systemd hater or not, runit is quite fabulous Imo.
Some software with a hard requirement on systemd will not work, of course. I believe it is possible to run void using systemd, I’ve never tried though.
I really like runit, but once it’s configured, like systemd, I mostly just don’t see it anymore - you know what I mean…
Give it a shot, for me it’s the packaging system, take a look at it and at the github “void-repository”.
I really like how it’s working, the simplicity of it, create your own package, your own repository, etc.
The killer features, for me, isn’t really runit, but the stability of a rolling distro with the xbps package system.
Still we, dinosaur.🦖
👑
welp, looks like you don’t use python virtualenvs… well i guess jokes on you all your shit is probably broken now (and as a bonus, that’s probably a big part of the donwload size as well) :p
Probably should, but this machine is already cluttered terribly. A good bit of the download size is likely Pytorch files.
Looks like a !!FUN!! time in Dwarf Fortress.
You see, this is why atomic desktops aren’t a bad idea.
This has nothing to do with immutable desktops.
Well in an immutable distro, there is little to no chance for the system to end up in an unusable state (I guess it is the same for distros which apply the updates atomically). Traditional distros are far more likely to bork when so much shit is updated at once
I don’t think this is true. The package manager is there for a reason to prevent that. If you have more updates to install at a time, then the chances are the same as if you would have installed the problematic update one at a time. Just read the manual intervention information from Arch and see if there is something to do, then it won’t bork. If people don’t know what they are doing and do not read the additional information (that is required to do so on Arch), well yes, then you could end up borking your machine. But not because so many updates are installed at a time. The package manager and operating system and their maintainer designed it in a way that you can install ton of updates at a time without borking. This is fine.
Between this comment about arch and the other comment about opensuse, it must only be apt which has issues with large updates with complicated dependency chains. I remember 5-6 years ago Ubuntu borking itself when I tried to update after a decent gap and had 100+ packages to update. There is also the fact that people used to advice me to make a clean install in lieu of updating whenever a new version of Ubuntu dropped.
Before my switch, i used Ubuntu exclusively for 13 years in row. I always heard of problems (and not at least because of the PPA repositories) when upgrading from one major version to the next, be it a LTS or not. I never did that and always installed fresh because of these stories. Mostly 4 years in between, or sometimes 2.
Its entirely possible that most problems happened because of packages from PPA that the user did not change for the new upgrade. Because PPA repositories were often designed for a specific version of Ubuntu. So its not entirely the fault of the
aptpackage manager in that case.No, it’s just that Ubuntu never correctly upgrades between releases.
I’ve tried so many times, and it basically always failed.
It’s arch. There’ll be no issue here.
As an anecdote (and not statistics) I have distro upgraded OpenSUSE with 5000 packages to install (thanks TeXlive LaTeX). It was fine.
6.5 gigs. “Proceed with installation? y/n”
Yeah, I guess. Fark getting any work done today.
To be fair, arch could look like that after a few days.
NixOS is like that every day for no reason
staging rebuild cycles only happen every two weeks or so.
The reason is always that something changed and causes all dependent packages to change, requiring a rebuild of those too.
Oh, you updated one byte in your config? Better download the entire ducking Internet and rebuild everything!
It is arch
I did this regularly on arch. And it didn’t end very well.
So you neglected the operating systems maintained regularly, despite it being a rolling release? I assume you didn’t read the manual intervention instructions that are posted regularly too. I don’t understand people using a rolling release and then not caring about the maintenance. Off course it won’t end very well.
Well, my life turned to chaos at some point and I had to neglect some things for a while.
I’m using arch on my desktop for >5 years. Never read those instructions. Sometimes my update looks like OPs. Just hit Y. All fine.
Then you were “lucky” (given you neglected this part for more than 5 years). Depending on what packages and configuration you have, you MUST do manual intervention to have a working and optimal system. While you were lucky, I wouldn’t recommend anyone to ignore the posts on https://archlinux.org/news/ , there are only couple of short posts per year, so not really a time waste.
Read the Arch news before clicking “yes”.
I have Informant installed for this. Saved my hide a few times.
I used to be an adventurer like you, but then I took an error to
gpg.
Recently updated a nixos machine that was on the shelf for five years or so. A few options and packages had been renamed, fixed those, upgrade completed with zero problems.
Only issue with this update was a maintainer’s keyring had expired and been replaced, so his packages didn’t pass the signing check. After re-installing the keyring, the whole think works fine.
This is why I Dont use rolling release Distros on Pcs i wont use often.
I’d guess the updates would be about the same on a stable distro, this was a very cluttered install.
I used to care but with recovery tools being what they are and most apps being containers… my base systems tend to be a little more disposable.
That said, I haven’t had problems, even if I am at risk for more of them. I have my snapshots and my backups.
Because you get updates and have an up to date system?
Because you get a update once a update for a package comes out, If you dont update for a very long time you need to download a very large update.
Sure, and that’s exactly what you want if you are on a rolling release, isn’t it? If you neglect the rolling release for a month, what did you expect would happen? Also if you have more apps and packages, the more updates will come out. Rolling releases are for people who maintain the system and care about the updates.
What if my pc breaks down or I cannot use it for a month or smth.
On servers and pcs I don’t use often yeah its fairRead the manual intervention notes from Arch that could be important. And do the update. That’s normal and nothing to worrry about, if you know what you are doing.
LOL, That’s just a normal Monday
Remembers Tumbleweed fondly
Would you recomend it for daily usage?
I used Tumbleweed for eight years with no problems. I only moved to EndeavourOS because Suse bared their corporate teeth and I got fed up being a couple of generations behind on the Nvidia drivers. EndeavourOS is also good.
My problem with EndeavourOS is that it is terminal centered. I prefer GUI. Don’t think it has a package manager gui.
Isn’t it running plain KDE? If so, Discover is included.
Discover is not working properly on Arch based distros because there’s no packagekit backend for them.
That’s disappointing, Discover is pretty neat.
Well Arch and the like tend to managed from the terminal so I guess no one cared enough to write one.
You can install Octopi or Pamac which both handle the standard repositories and the aur. I don’t know if they handle flatpak or snap though.
I believe I tried Pamac in a VM and it didn’t work properly. Or it didn’t exist in the repôs. I might check it out again if I have time.
It’s in the aur, so use yay or another aur helper to install it
Used tumbleweed for ages. No issues. Switched to slowroll again with no issues. Now trying fedora. All with Kde plasma.
Sometimes I wish someone would make a an Arch box and come back to it years later to see the updates it has missed.
But that’s assuming an Arch box would be reliable enough to stay alive that long lol.
Always heard of 20+ year old bsd and debian machines chugging along with no issue.
I have updated arch systems that had not been powered on for years before. It was fine. No issues what so ever. Arch is not some flaky distro that breaks if you look away for a minute. My main system has had had the same install for over 5 years now and I regularly forget to update it for months at a time. Again, no issues.
Yeah really the biggest issue I could see is pacman’s keyring being so out of date that it has to be manually refreshed with a new one
It won’t rise much beyond that, since you only get one update per package. Whether it’s upgrading Firefox from version 120 to 121 or to version 130, it doesn’t change much in terms of download size, nor the number of updates.
At least, I assume, Arch doesn’t do differential updates. On some of the slower-moving distributions, they only make you download the actual changes to the files within the packages. In that case, jumping to 121 vs. 130 would make more of a difference.
If you do want lots of package updates, you need lots of packages. The
texlive-fullpackage is always a fun one in that regard…My arch install has been going strong for about 5 years now
I had that on a physical machine! It broke hardcore lol I had to reinstall the OS after trying to update
Pretty sure you can’t leave Arch lying around for even two months.
Yes, you can. You can even update Arch after a year. But you’ll have to do a few more steps than just pacman -Syu
