• beleza pura@lemmy.eco.br
    0·
    23 days ago

    people laughed at me for choosing debian. they asked why i chose to have ancient runes running in my computer

    who’s laughing now?

  • AwkwardLookMonkeyPuppet@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    22 days ago

    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!

    • SunRed@discuss.tchncs.de
      0·
      22 days ago

      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 through pacdiff once in a while though.

      Edit: Typo

      • AwkwardLookMonkeyPuppet@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        22 days ago

        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.

      • asqapro@reddthat.com
        0·
        22 days ago

        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.

      • Fonzie!@ttrpg.network
        0·
        21 days ago

        I ran a base-Arch with i3 before, I got tired of restoring backups and fixing things and went back to Debian. It broke too quickly by its defaults in my experience.

  • Mwa@lemm.eeEnglish
    0·
    23 days ago

    This is why I Dont use rolling release Distros on Pcs i wont use often.

      • Mwa@lemm.eeEnglish
        0·
        23 days ago

        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.

        • thingsiplay@beehaw.org
          0·
          23 days ago

          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.

          • Mwa@lemm.eeEnglish
            0·
            23 days ago

            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 fair

            • thingsiplay@beehaw.org
              0·
              23 days ago

              Read 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.

    • GHiLA@sh.itjust.works
      0·
      23 days ago

      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.

      • Sentau@discuss.tchncs.de
        0·
        23 days ago

        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

        • BCsven@lemmy.ca
          0·
          23 days ago

          As an anecdote (and not statistics) I have distro upgraded OpenSUSE with 5000 packages to install (thanks TeXlive LaTeX). It was fine.

        • thingsiplay@beehaw.org
          0·
          23 days ago

          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.

          • Sentau@discuss.tchncs.de
            0·
            23 days ago

            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.

            • thingsiplay@beehaw.org
              0·
              23 days ago

              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 apt package manager in that case.

              • superkret@feddit.org
                0·
                22 days ago

                No, it’s just that Ubuntu never correctly upgrades between releases.
                I’ve tried so many times, and it basically always failed.

  • pr06lefs@lemmy.ml
    0·
    23 days ago

    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.

    • potentiallynotfelix@lemmy.fishOPEnglish
      0·
      22 days ago

      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.

    • dan@upvote.au
      0·
      23 days ago

      My personal prod systems never have many upgrades… But they’re running Debian stable and I have unattended-upgrades installed and configured.

  • mlg@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    23 days ago

    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.

    • Ephera@lemmy.mlEnglish
      0·
      23 days ago

      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-full package is always a fun one in that regard…

    • Tekhne@sh.itjust.works
      0·
      23 days ago

      I had that on a physical machine! It broke hardcore lol I had to reinstall the OS after trying to update

      • superkret@feddit.org
        0·
        23 days ago

        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

    • nous@programming.devEnglish
      0·
      23 days ago

      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.

      • kautau@lemmy.world
        0·
        23 days ago

        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

      • Atemu@lemmy.ml
        0·
        23 days ago

        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.

      • Fonzie!@ttrpg.network
        0·
        21 days ago

        It looks like it’s Debian’s logo in the bottom left and that that’s apt output.

        EDIT Nope, that’s pacman output, seems like they ssh’d into another arch-machine.