Alt text: O’RLY? generated book cover with a donkey, navy blue accent, header: “It’s only free if you don’t value your time”, title: “Handling Arch Linux Failures”, subtitle: “Mom, please cancel my today’s agenda!”

  • partizan@lemm.ee
    241·
    5 months ago
    $ head -3 /var/log/pacman.log 
[2009-04-04 12:40] installed filesystem (2009.01-1)
[2009-04-04 12:40] installed expat (2.0.1-2)
[2009-04-04 12:40] installed dbus-core (1.2.4.4permissive-1)

    I installed my Arch on Desktop in 2009 and it was just cloned from one disk to another through multitude of PCs, and sure, there were occasional troubles, like upgrade from SysV init to systemd, when KDE plasma 4 released, or the time, when I had to run a custom kernel and mesa which supported the AMD Vega 56 card ~month after release.

    But nowadays, I didnt had a single breakage for several years, my RX6800 GPU was well supported 3 months after release, and most things just work… BTW I run arch also on my home server, in 6 years it had literally zero issues.

    • Andromxda 🇺🇦🇵🇸🇹🇼@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      7·
      5 months ago

      Ok wow! This is really impressive. I couldn’t even run Windows or Debian or something like that for 15 years, yet you managed to do it with Arch. May I ask what was the main reason behind trying to keep this Arch installation for so long? Were you just to lazy to reinstall or are there other factors?

          • KubeRoot@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
            3·
            5 months ago

            And reinstalling the packages, moving over all the configs, setting up the partitions and moving the data over? (Not in this order, of course)

            Cloning a drive would just require you to plug both the old and new to the same machine, boot up (probably from a live image to avoid issues), running a command and waiting until it finishes. Then maybe fixing up the fstab and reinstalling the bootloader, but those are things you need to do to install the system anyways.

            I think the reason you’d want to reinstall is to save time, or get a clean slate without any past config mistakes you’ve already forgotten about, which I’ve done for that very reason, especially since it was still my first, and less experienced, install.