Arch is different…
i use arch btw
this happened to me once in 6 years. it was my own fault.
“No way to prevent this” says only distro where this regularly happens
Foot-guns are my PROTECTED SECOND AMENDMENT RIGHT.
Reminds me of my try of Nobara. I do clean install, it installs and starts updating itself for a long while. Afterwards it tells me to reboot, and that the update has failed. I am??? Since I am a noob, so I reboot. And the whole system fully breaks, and no trouble-shooting helps, so I have to re-install. No biggie, just mildly annoying, it was a clean install after all. Then I do some searching to figure out, what went wrong, and find out, that updates failing and the system fully breaking, and having to re-install it if you reboot, is apparently normal behavior for Nobara.
I’ve had Nobara on my PC for several years and not had a problem, though I know others have
Having said that, if I could be bothered I would probably just return to regular Fedora again so that I could have a decent package manager and updater…
News from this year:
- virtualbox-ext-vnc >= 7.2.12-2 requires manual intervention (package won’t install)
- Active AUR malicious packages incident (the AUR is locked)
- Arch Linux 2026 Leader Election Results
- Breaking changes for all users of
varnish, which is renamed tovinyl-cache(it’s a proxy, only affects servers) - kea >= 1:3.0.3-6 update requires manual intervention (dhcp server, affects routers)
- iptables now defaults to the nft backend (affects pretty much nothing)
Repost.
Also, my Mint install broke, uh, shit I don’t remember, 5 times? Arch broke zero times. Zero times not my own fault for forgetting I was installing something and shutting off the computer, of course. Except for the times I tried the fucking installer python script, but since I never even booted the install it doesn’t count.
Active AUR malicious packages incident (the AUR is locked)
🤭 heh
Really? It happens this often?
In 26 years, I’ve seen this happen in two occasions with enterprise Linux. One of them was my own damned fault for using a marginal config. The other was an update that added a new dependency in the code but not the package.
That’s it. Twice.
That’s why I go for boring distros like Fedora
Gnome or KDE ? I like gnome over KDE in general but the top bar in gnome seems to create a blank bar in games at top of screen.
Haven’t figured out how to fix it.
Back when I started Linux, poking at the system was fun and exciting (also you had to poke at the system anyway if you wanted to run anything). Now, I just want it out of the way and convenient.
I understand that newcomers might feel that they want to touch everything because it’s all new and shiny, but I think the OS ought to be a creature of the shadows.
If you want really boring, go for Debian.
It’s a peaceful life
Hello from Mint :)
Mint based on Ubuntu or Debian? Debian mint is probably the most boring … and stable and great for anyone who just wants a computer to work.
Hell yeah – I do want my OS to be boring.
Indeed. or fed. the only drama i want in my life is the stuff going on IN the game. not some OS cockblocking me.
Yeah, lol. Arch people keep telling me that this never happens, and yet here it is.
Nah. Debian is fine for me.
I’m definitely lucky that I’m pushing 3 years on my desktop arch install and have never had any updates break it. Had some issues with Nvidia and Wayland over 2 years, but that wasn’t really an arch thing, more an Nvidia thing.
My laptop is the same, but I use it far less, so really a fair of a comparison, although I do update every time I use it, which is every couple of days.
You just need to keep an eye on the news and it won’t happen 99% of the time. Ive got it set up so news updates go to my email in a specific folder. That means i get the notification on my phone as well. Or just get into the habit of checking the page before updating
I don’t need more shit to remember to do. I need a computer that works without me micromanaging it
Thats fine, then arch just isnt for you. Use what you want, but if someone installs arch then complains that it broke because they didnt check the news (something that the maintainers recommend you do) then the blame/fault shifts to the user, not the system.
but if someone installs arch then complains that it broke because they didnt check the news (something that the maintainers recommend you do) then the blame/fault shifts to the user, not the system.
The question is though why pacman does not display these news during the update. Gentoo has been doing this for decades.
Thats a separate issue, but i do agree with you that it would be extremely helpful if it did
That is why I am using Tumbleweed, rolling release without the expectation of reading news before hitting zypper dup and stuff still being fine. The price for that is a few days of delay for testing, so that major stuff does not break.
Manjaro has also shown how an Arch distro can achieve this as well, by releasing tested sets of updates slower.
But OP is correct in that’s not the point of vanilla Arch and people who use vanilla should assume the risks.
What’s annoying is people who use vanilla and tell everybody “oh don’t worry nothing ever breaks”. Something always breaks. You have a couple thousand packages installed on the average desktop system, dozens are updated to bleeding edge every day, something will break.
Manjaro maintains a crowd-sourced list of the most egregious defects (+ their fixes) that crop up in popular packages, suffice to say it’s never empty.
Many of them are not system-breaking and may not impact everyone, which is where I’m guessing the “nothing ever breaks” dissonance is coming from.
Fair enough. I am all for choosing a distro that aligns with the own reqirements. It is strange to use a misaligned distro and then complain about it.
then the blame/fault shifts to the user, not the system
Nah, lol. Not when lots of other systems manage to not break userspace on random updates.
You can claim that blame shifts to the user, but I’m still blaming the shitty system.
In a good system, you can trust that updates are well-vetted already before they’re pushed to average users, and you don’t need to check the news or anything else before updating. You can even set updates to be automatic with a high degree of confidence that it won’t mess anything up for you. (Imagine that, the computer automatically updating itself, saving you the trouble of doing it manually… What a thought!)
“Good” means different things in different contexts. Here you mean it as something like “user friendly”. Of course, there are other priorities that someone else could call “good”. It’s not a helpful word for honest debate, but it’s very convenient for hiding a bunch of semantic puns and confused reasoning behind.
Youre right for most systems that are advertised as stable. Arch however is rolling release, so this doesnt apply. You get package updates as soon as theyre available pretty much. So no, the fault lies with the user when it comes to arch 99% of the time
Edit: i also said the blame shifts to the user if they don’t do something the maintainers specifically say you should do before every update. If you check the arch news, update, and it breaks then yes, the fault is with the maintainer. However this rarely happens nowadays. Ive been on arch for almost 6 years and have not had to do a reinstall ever.
That seems like a pain in the ass. like the sort of shit why i left windows behind. noted: will not touch arch. thanks for the heads up.
It comes from a very different place than Windows, and the data here is very transparent, unlike your average Microsoft KB.
dont care. It’s still going into my “places i will never go.” box. dont need an OS cockblocking me from my games. that shit can fuck right off.
Besides, some of is use our OS for work. cant afford telling a job “wahh im too stupid to use a reliable OS” just doesnt fly.
Ya then you need an application and you need to jump hoops or have certain versions of packages not available in your package manager, and on arch, here we go.
Hm… btw, I hate fedora.
Lemmy always seems downvote heavy. Why don’t you like fedora?
https://archlinux.org/news/virtualbox-ext-vnc-7212-2-requires-manual-intervention/ dont worry you only need to shit your pants if you are using virtual box and dont read (sorry OP)
Who uses virtualbox on Linux having KVM, QEMU and virsh/virt-manager?
It’s gonna be slower, proprietary, and it’s not even as easy to install
Nice bait there, I nearly started writing an actual answer.
It’s not slower.
proprietary
Only the extension pack, the app itself is GPL.
not even as easy to install
How do you mean? You simply install virtualbox (and virtual-guest-iso if you want). All the relevant packages are available from official repos, at least on Manjaro, including a linux-virtualbox-host-modules-meta package that maintains the required linux*-virtualbox-host-modules as needed automatically.
Also, I prefer virtualbox because it makes a lot of stuff easy to do.
File sharing with the host for example, it’s a matter of simply pointing at a dir in settings, as opposed to having to set up Samba on the host (which I don’t have and don’t want) and deal with wierd networking issues, or deal with virtiofs.
Don’t even get me started on selecting locations for the vm files. Whatever you think it should work like, virt-manager’s way ain’t it.
So, I use it on my workstation because I have to also use windows and virtualbox’s cross system integration is far more mature. I really only use it as necessary and it isn’t running all the time.
I would prefer to use qemu, but I’m not doing anything serious with it. I’m just sometimes running a windows instance that I need to be able to easily share files with, and copy/paste across. Once virt-viewer gets there, I’ll switch.
Though, to be honest, it actually uses kvm as its backend so it really isn’t any less performant than qemu for this.
I love me my arch, but yes. This is a reality.
It’s super rare in my experience over the last 10+ years.
Used to get it like every other update on arch. For it once or twice on Manjaro and once on catchyos.
But in also on an nvidia card. Can’t afford to switch these days lol
Weird. I wonder what makes the difference because I’ve got an RTX 4060 in my main machine and a laptop with an AMD card and haven’t had an issue. Idk I’ve also got the mesa driver’s installed as a fallback though and headers.
I guess I also don’t use a typical DE so that could have something to do with it. Dwm seems to basically always just work as long as the system posts.
De souls have nothing to do with it. Circa 2015 I’d literally drop to a shell on boot. I think I had a 500 series nvidia card back then. Is have to use the cli with lynx or something to download the driver and install it lol.
I just had my first one. Update shows a change in the template for official mirrors. Updated asks me if i want to view, merge or cancel. I view, looks okay? Merge. No more updates, corrupted. Heeeeetyyyyhh?
When I type “yes” for view pkgbuild, it always shows failed to retrieve message. Then without asking for a retry, it asks to continue with installation!
That’s why I use archdebian gives me all the latest software 5 years later.
archdebian? arch+debian dual boot?
Good to know
What specifically happened? Can you share the news item?
I think no rolling releases has gotten their act right. All eventually break with an update, and if you skipped several, the likelihood of reinstalling is high.
At least they teach you good backup practices.
Wouldn’t say that. OpenSuse Tumbleweed might got some tech debt with their backend and doesn’t come with fancy stuff such as Kernel modifications like Cachy, but their rolling distro is rock solid. And for the few cases where something really breaks the bootable btrfs Snapshots come by default.
It still is for Intermediate users for sure (the installer expects you to know what you want - yet is a GUI). But in terms of stability they really nailed it, I’d absolutely use it for work horses that require newest software. Or Leap if I require binary compatibility to SLED/SLES.
My record with Arch is longer than 6 months without updates, and it completed the updates fine.
My oldest install is 4 years old, and it’s true, it became unbootable once. But it was my fault, for generating an initramfs without free space in /tmp, which caused it to fail. It was a quick fix once I figured it out.
All of this isn’t to say rolling is as stable as Debian, of course. Rolling is inherently gonna be more unstable, and that’s by design.
But if you take some care, you can actually make these rolling distros pretty stable. Hell, my servers run Arch (I’m working on migrating them to Gentoo to get rid of systemd, but I haven’t yet commited to it). And I haven’t had any serious breakages, even on Arch Linux ARM.
But it was my fault, for generating an initramfs without free space in /tmp, which caused it to fail.
I really don’t think that was your fault. A critical build process that’s not checking for resources and not failing gracefully and leaving the machine unbootable is not the user’s fault.
A build+install can fail for many reasons. It’s actually annoying how many critical system updates on Linux don’t use a staging process and a sudden power-off at the wrong time can leave the machine completely crippled.
Some distros have taken to doing a BTRFS snapshot before they start the upgrade but (a) they’re far and few in between and (b) that still doesn’t fix the upgrade process, it’s just sweeping the problem under the carpet.
Who needs research when you have backups?
My system creates automatic snapshots and that’s usually enough. Restoring a snapshots takes me literally 1 minute.
This should be built-in on every modern distro.
I don’t mean it happened right now. I mean it often happens. Probably when i tweak too much or more installs from AUR.
Manual intervention announcements happen far from “often” though, tinkering with your system is a different thing
