Comment by foepys
10 hours ago
I don't know what you are doing but I have my Arch Linux running since about 2013. I needed to intervene a few times, I think 4 times in total but the base installation in from 2013, now nearly 13 years ago.
10 hours ago
I don't know what you are doing but I have my Arch Linux running since about 2013. I needed to intervene a few times, I think 4 times in total but the base installation in from 2013, now nearly 13 years ago.
I share the same sentiment. I've had the same Arch install running since ~2016 and have been using Arch since about 2013 and the number of times I've needed to chroot from a live image is under 10 and were mostly related to systemd breaking things during an update which is pretty much entirely no longer an issue these days.
Compared to Windows-land where nuking and reinstalling the entire OS is a routine maintenance task, checking arch news to see if there's any manual intervention and running `pacman -Syu` is all I really ever think about.
I think this is a very interesting observation, because my experience has been fairly opposite. Disclaimer, I've grown up with windows.
Yet I've never had to reinstall windows on any of my devices ever. I've never had things behave in unusual or unpredictable ways.
Meanwhile, a highly suggested utility (on reddit, SE/SO, and even a few distro forums) for touchpad gestures borked my gnome setup. (Uninstalling it, as you might have guessed from my story and tone, did diddly squat.)
Just today I manually flushed my dnf packages (or clear them? Not sure of the terminology.) In the past, I had to debug manually because apparently the default timeout for Fedora was causing timeout issues with a few 100ms internet latency. That was a fun rabit hole "why can't I install an app that's only available via dnf install" "Oh, because Fedora assumes you have good internet. But don't worry if you have Ubuntu, because that doesn't have these issues!".
...I've never even been made aware what download timeouts windows has. As it should be for a user.
I could go on and on. My windows partition goes nearly months without sleep, typically only rebooting if I run out of battery or want to install an update. Linux... doesn't have hibernate yet. Fortunately it doesn't matter! ...Because some odd memory leak (and gpu driver stuff perhaps?) forces me to shut down ever so often. Oh well.
That's pretty good, I'm jealous! The last time I reinstalled my OS (Slackware) from scratch was 2009, but I run into serious problems every couple of years when upgrading it to 'Slackware64-current' pre-release, because Slackware's package manager doesn't track dependencies and you can just install stuff in the wrong order: I usually don't upgrade the whole OS at once... just have to fix any .so link errors (I've got a script to pull old libraries from btrfs snapshots). I've even ended up without a working libc more than once! When you can't run any program it sure is useful that you can upgrade everything aside from the kernel without rebooting!