Just think of all the great things you’re going to learn about emergency boot recovery!
Side note: “I’mma” is a contraction of the whole phrase “I’m going to” or “I’m about to” so it’s followed immediately by the verb indicating what you’ll be doing:
“I’mma rawdog this sucker without backups.”
Yes, I added sucker, because it’s going to suck up all your time and data, sucka!
I’ve always thought of it as I am gonna
Op should have used “I’m finna rawdog this jawn no backup style”
For no reason other than mixed US slang from different regions sounds funnier to my ear
kde?
Removed by mod
Just do a fresh install man. I’m getting anxiety just by looking at it.
That clock placement is giving me anxiety
what’s there to not like about 7:40PM?
That’s probably one of the updates
The clock updates every minute.
What a resource hog
Maybe I’m just screaming into the void here, but does it seem like, as a person who is still relatively out of touch with linux, I don’t necessarily have to update my Arch distribution whenever there are new updates available? I could theoretically just go on downloading new programs, uninstalling old ones, using everything as it sits until theoretically something breaks?
You should always run a full upgrade when installing a new package to make sure your versions are all in sync. Like if your new package is looking for version 1.1 and you have 1.0 installed, the new package won’t work. In general, everything should be installed with ‘pacman -Syu’ not just ‘pacman -S’
If you don’t install any new packages, then no you don’t need to upgrade anything. You’re just missing out on security patches and upgraded features. It’s worth running occasional upgrades.
I don’t necessarily have to update my Arch distribution whenever there are new updates available
Clearly, op agrees
You’ll run into security and stability problems if you put it off for too long.
Op, it’s been an entire day… How’d did it go?
I fear the worst
Light the signal fires.
He’s dead, Jim
2,409 updates could mean like two days of restarts… I’m just going to turn on some bagpipe music and stand on a hill in the wind looking out at the computer shaped clouds on the horizon.
And they were never heard from AGAIN! Oooooooo It is horror month, and that’s pretty scary! :-D
Don’t try to install Arch after midnight.
How long should you wait before installing? It was midnight over 9 hours ago so am I good to go?
Praying for your computer, friend
Average rolling release distro user experience
Not if you update every 4 hours ;-)
I’d automate it but the greybeards tell me it’s a bad idea :(
I do the same as OP with my Fedora workstation, which is wait till I have to summon all the available mirrors just to serve me several gigs of software updates every other week.
For my servers I have an ansible script to update most of the machines. I fire that up every start of the month after the automatic backups. Seems like I’m a week late again already. In these I use apt dist-upgrade since that seems more robust, but I’m still to shy to run it in a cron job.
tbf fedora isnt bad for updates in this way
yolo, friend. yolo.
what packaging system?
Duct tape and baling wire, perhaps?
If forgetting/not wanting to update puts you in this hole, like… ever, you should really give an atomic distro some serious consideration.
Say more please? What’s the advantage?
The system files aren’t writable, instead you download a new system image when you want to update. No dependency hell or weird issues because these system images are all tested. Your system also keeps one or two old ones around and if by some chance something does go wrong you just select the old one at boot.
Downside is you’re more limited on installing software. You can force install things the traditional way but that kinda defeats the point. Instead you have to use things like FlatPak or AppImages which covers most GUI apps you could want. For command line apps you will have to use something like DistroBox.
It’s a trade off but for casual desktop users it is super stable and pretty simple. Updates come out daily (depending on distro) and they just get all their software from the software center app with a nice GUI.
The atomic distro would do a backup and if update goes wrong, it automatically boots back into the previous one.
(correct me if I’m wrong, I’m also new at this)
There are two partitions. One with the current system, one with the previous system. Updates are applied in a whole batch at once, once in a while.
Current system is cloned into the old one and an update is applied to the clone.
Once the update is complete, system reboots in the clone, and what was the current system becomes the previous one.
If something goes bad, you can reboot into the previous system and fix the clone.
This is how the steam deck works. I think newer android phones do this too.
I know its a meme but nixos is actually good for this. You can be on the unstable branch, not update for 5 years and still get everything working after updating(tho i dont recommend because of security). I think nixos has some fucking AMAZING features but the problem is its paired with features that make it extremely hard to use for a casual user.
Agreed! I think a part of the “problem” is that with Nix, there’s now at least 3 sides: application specific knowledge, system knowledge, and you have to use the nix language, architecture and tools to interface with it. so for a seasoned linux user, there’s maybe just a new programming language, but if you’re new to Linux, it’s quickly gonna overwhelm you. which in a way is a bit ironic because I’d argue that it’s easier to manage a NixOS system, and getting help is so much easier when your problems can be replicated by just aharing your config.
Id say its easy to share your problems with other people because its a few files unlike distros like arch where your packages can be fucked up and then you have to reinstall in most cases. But the support it self isnt too good. Arch has archwiki, ubuntu has a lot of channels of support while nixos has a badly written wiki.
if it’s an actual wiki, you can fix that :)
So many Linux problems are solved by using NixOS, it’s amazing. Immutability? NixOS. Atomic upgrades? NixOS. Whole system rollbacks? NixOS. Versionned system settings? NixOS. Impermanence? NixOS. Multiple versions of the same program installed at once? NixOS. Containers? NixOS. Multiple hardware profiles on a single installation? NixOS.
At this point, I think the only thing remaining is a Flatpak-like sandbox.
I’ve updated an Arch install after not being used for 2 years. I don’t think there were any issues.
I’ve experienced far more issues upgrading to a new major release of an apt based distro though…
That apt based distro was Ubuntu, wasn’t it?
I never successfully upgraded that from one release to the next.
Do it!
