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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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I'm so frustrated rn. (lemmy.world)

submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I have been distro hopping for about 2 weeks now, there's always something that doesn't work. I thought I would stick with Debian and now I haven't been able to make my printer work in it, I think I tried in another distro and it just worked out of the box, but there's always something that's broken in every distro.

I'm sorry I'm just venting, do you people think Ubuntu will work for me? I think I will try it next.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Ah. K, I think the differrence is that I'm the outlier. Your system has far larger components, with more moving parts, which I think is more common:

On most of my systems, I'm not running any graphical system; they're all servers. That eliminates a huge amount of stack that can fail. On all but non-servers I run X, which is very stable (in that upgrades almost never impact it) on non-Nvidia GPUs. And of those, all but one run herbstluftwm - Gnome and KDE are both large systems with a lot of moving parts, any of which can break (or be broken) -- in your case, it was Plasma, a KDE component. And the last desktop is running Budgie which, while still Gnome, is a lighter one based on the older GTK3. All of these things tend to make for more stable systems.

But, most people are probably running fancier, full desktop software. Larger, more complex, more development, more frequent changes. And, consequently, more prone to cascading packaging breakages, like the Plasma one.

I think if I were using software like that, I'd consider either giving up Arch and using an immutable distro, or using something like snapper or timeshift that allows boot-time system roll-backs.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

Ah no no, maybe I was unclear, but the issue occurs during the initramfs stage, long before any of my KDE/Plasma nonsense had any chance to run! KMS has nothing to do with KDE. ^^

Edit: You still likely are an outlier though :)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Oh, that plasma. Yeah, that naming conflict is totally not confusing.

You could switch all your repos to the core Arch ones. I did that by accident once, and it was fine (although, I did switch them back eventually). Maybe it'd add release stability? I'm not really clear how the EOS repos vary off the baseline, except by adding some custom packages.

Inspired by our discussion, I installed snapper on two boxen. I included snap-pac and snapper-support to get system change and grub integration; there's probably also a utility out there that adds visudo-like snapshot-before-manual-edit of anything in /etc. If not, it'd be an easy script. snapper-gui and btrfs-assistant both look useful. While I'm comfortable with rescue SDs and restic backups, what I'm seeing with Arch's snapper package is pretty nice, and super easy.

I suppose anything that borks grub is going to be a PITA no matter how immutable your OS, or how fancy your rollback. Or - god forbid - fucks up your BIOS firmware. I have never had that last happen, yet (knock on wood).

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

You could switch all your repos to the core Arch ones. I did that by accident once, and it was fine (although, I did switch them back eventually). Maybe it’d add release stability? I’m not really clear how the EOS repos vary off the baseline, except by adding some custom packages.

They don't afaik. EOS uses Arch's repos directly, unlike Manjaro. Just adds its own on top for all the fancy EOS stuff. Which is why EOS was immediately affected by the grub meltdown and not Manjaro. (which kinda digs a few holes in the stability hypothesis, though Manjaro is another kettle of fish tbf)

Snapper sounds really interesting, and I didn't expect "super easy" to be the feedback there. Sounds a bit overkill for my use case at home but I might look into it for work. Thanks for the info!

Oh god a borked BIOS is my nightmare... I don't even know how you'd go about fixing that on a modern PC mobo... Let's not jinx it shall we?