How do you mismanage your system so bad that you need these things?
I’m convinced that majority of people using timeshift couldn’t recover from their system failing to boot or a drive failure.
And if you could tell me how because I got no idea how to either.
You can just boot a Linux Mint live session and restore from there.
why mint in particular lol
It has Timeshift preinstalled, because Timeshift is maintained by the Linux Mint team. You can use any live session and install Timeshift, though.
Fuck it, we ball. 3 years no arch deaths. Windows is a fuck. 1,000,000 pacman warnings.
I don’t remove orphan packages, I don’t setuo snapshots, I don’t read arch news.
I
sudo pacman -Syu. And if I can’t boot I don’t do it
It’s been a while but for me personally, the number one thing that saves your ass in event of failure is installing both the up to date and the LTS kernel. If you fail to boot, it’s gonna have something to do with a kernel update 90% of the time, in which case you just boot with the LTS kernel. Just about anything else can be fixed either while you’re up and running, or with a live distro installed on a USB.
Hot take: I used arch for over a decade. It never broke unless I broke it.
By all means, back up your files but rolling release distros aren’t made of arsenic, you’ll be fine.
I think it’s very much dependent on your hardware.
I had some issues with my Nvidia drivers getting messed up when the card was relatively new. I haven’t had any issues in the past two years though.
i think that sort of issues will no longer be relevant, considering that there are official semi-opensource nvidia-open drivers and that even wayland supports nvidia gpus just fine nowadays.
I know people who’ve driven drunk for more than a decade, and only crashed when they were sober. Does that mean drinking and driving is safe?
I literally had one of my devices fail to boot after an update pretty much every month, and another a few times a year. Sure, I was able to fix it with only arch-chroot, but when I switched to btrfs I didn’t need to carry around a flash drive with me when updating the system…
The last few years I’m on nixos, and while it sometimes fails to update, it has not once failed to boot.
Where are those people whose arch installs break after every second update? I don’t think I had a single problem with arch that I wasn’t responsible for. Hell, I had more problems with mint on my girlfriends PC than the arch machines that I’m running.
If you don’t count my 6 years with Manjarno, I’ve used Arch for ~7 years and only 3 times I had to fix something, 2 times because of Nvidia, once my fault. I had way more problems with Ubuntu in the past than Arch by the way. :)
There’s the argument to be made that all three were your fault, since you decided to use nvidia on Linux.
Hyuk hyuk hyuk.
Well, I also used ATI in the past but it was way worse. :)
This is still true but I find you are using bcachefs where every update is a death threat.
Mint users with no zfs, no per block checksumming, no syncoid, no ability to boot into prior version or revert right in the boot loader…
I’m here for a good time, not a long time
Also, my last Arch death was due to accidentally ovverwritimg the whole drive, so no amount of split partitions is going to save me
They call it disk destroyer for a reason. You gotta alias that shit.
alias dd='echo Did you triple check which device you picked? Of course not, dipshit. Check again'Did you triple check which device you picked?
I checked five times, actually. And then I check some more.
They call it disk destroyer for a reason.
There’s nothing specially destructive about
dd. It’s just a program that opens a file, and if you tell it to open a device file and it’s got permission to write to it, it’ll write to it.You can just as easily overwrite a disk’s contents with anything else that will open a file and write to it.
# cp /dev/urandom /dev/sdawill wipe your drive with random data in the same way that
# dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sdawill.
You’re technically right, but the way most people use dd ensures its like handling a loaded gun. How often do you cp /dev/sdwhy?
mkfs.ntfs is the silent killer, other mkfs don’t allow writing over the root partition but summoning this kind of Windows magic will happily fuck up your shit.
Great advice. I rarely use dd, but when I do it always sends chills down my spine.
Hahahahah I need to do that lmao!!!
Surely double checked is enough
It’s not. Neither is triple checking. Notice how the alias doesn’t actually run
dd? That’s on purpose.I quadruple check and then I still don’t run it because I’m too nervous so I go and do something else instead and the item remains buried on my to-do list indefinitely.
Lol, as someone who tried a bunch of different distros, I used the dd command a lot without ever realizing what could go wrong with it. I must have used up all my luck with that though, because somehow I ended up on manjaro of all things.
My last Arch death was updating my 128GB laptop after a year and breaking it with partial updates. (I’m better at partial updates now) It also made me want to, move away from having separate /home partition. It was somewhat sad, since it was the Arch that I installed on the previous laptop and just moved the SSD when I got a new one
This is my setup that I have been using for years. I have never had a serious Linux update issue that could not be fixed.
Well la dee da look at this guy who knows how to fix linux!
Yeehaw!
I, too, am familiar with the art of grub rescue env!
I have seen its darkest depths.
And oh how deep they doth go!
(I use arch btw)
Why would you want your entire home folder in syncthing?
I’m very attached to my
~/.cache!stresstest your io i guess
A live copy of my home folder and the few remaining secrets/configs i don’t care to put into home manager.
I try not to put dangerous data into HM or my Nix configs, I just let syncthing whisk it away to my homelab, it has versioning turned on.
also .stignore is your friend
Syncthing will also propagate removals or bad edits
also support versioning if you really wanted to keep them.
also, machines wipe themselves at each boot! service state data is distributed via zfs send! zfs that actually works!
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Arch noobs after destroying their system every month be like:
I live like this, it has been 10 years, no problem
Same here, not sure what they on about.
I third this
I’m stupid and I didn’t know there was other ways of living
Wait. Are you saying you can choose not to rawdog your os ?
i mean, all the important stuff is saved to OneDrive, right?
Straight to jail.
You missed the space between one and drive… and you accidentally capitalized a couple letters.
Don’t correct me on this one. Please.
All my important stuff is saved to SomeDrive
Yes, but actually no.
This is unfortunately me with google drive for a few things.
I actually did this at one point, because OneDrive was the cheapest cloud service I had easy access to, back then. I did use only an encrypted vault, though.
OneDrive used to be pretty good on Windows before it started taking the documents folder hostage. Maybe needless to say I’ve never attempted to use it on any of my Linux installs
I tried once, could I get it work on Mint (I could not). Not that I wanted to use it at that point, I just got curious is it actually possible. Apparently yes, even though I did not succeed.
Pfft… it’s been fine for the last 10 years.
Seriously. I’ve spent more time maintaining my debian home server than I have my two arch installs combined.
These memes have always been propagated by people that decide that fucking with their OS is a good idea.
It is.
Rule of thumb I adopted: If you never update arch, it will never break.
