Common Ways Arch Linux & Rolling Releases Break

Arch and other rolling releases don't break often but when they do rolling releases often times come with challenges that aren't faced by fix point releases.

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0:00 Introduction
0:53 How Long To Wait Between Updates
2:50 What Can Break
8:06 Mitigation Steps

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#ArchLinux #RollingRelease #LinuxTutorial

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[milohoffman]

Arch does not "break". It just has occasional pop quizes for your Linux training.

[lordofthemound]

An excellent and important point you made: when we talk about “breaks” — ANYTHING can be fixed without a re-install (depending on your level of determination to fix it, of course). I think as rolling release users we sometimes take this for granted but the non-rolling-release user doesn’t understand this and just assumes we’re talking about bricking the system.

[rmmichael]

Arch does just break sometimes but, in my experience, it is the easiest to fix and get things to work on too.

[GeoNeilUK]

I have to be honest, I have a computer running Debian Sid that I don't update anywhere near as much as I ought to.

Luckily, it hasn't broken yet.

[shizuvoice]

One time in my Arch system I did a full update and at the next reboot I was greeted with a black screen. And I knew I broke my system and I have to go to a TTY console and use Timeshift to revert things back. Am used to breaking the system as I moved to Arch.

And about the OpenTabletDriver, I encountered that preventing me doing a full update. Removing OTD first fixed it and I completed the update.

[poleprode]

After updated i had my suspend function break, thanks for Arch Linux forum and ppl on it, because without them i couldn't fix it my self.

[ezeicdo]

Recently had a broken gui because of aur package for gjs (there was a nasty bug involving Bluetooth that crashed gnome session frequently for me, but was fixed in master). The dependency for it updated which caused gjs to break and subsequently broke gnome and gdm. The moral is - never use aur for crucial system packages.

[insu_na]

The reason why I don't split root from home: I just don't know how to size them. my home directory currently uses ~125GB, /var uses 40GB and /usr uses 34GB
Now if I was following advice naively I would've set up a 40GB root partition and I'd be SoL there unless I start storing things on a different drive and hard-linking to it (which I'm already doing with my yay cache because dang that grows quickly and comes in handy often)

[zBrain]

This is a very good breakdown. I have been daily driving Gentoo since the early 2000s and have had my fair share of these circumstances. The Wiki actually has an article about how you can install a copy of Portage inside of a chroot and use that to update the system if it has become too out of date. I've had to do it a few times and it actually works quite well.

I also installed manjaro on a laptop and left it sitting on a shelf for 6 months. When I came back to it I experienced the key problem that you mentioned and was unable to fix it so ended up installing a different distro on it. A lot of the time it's what you're used to.

[Beyley]

ive only had 2 breakages running arch, that being the OTD one you mentioned and when the sks keyservers went down and me and a friend spent like a week fixing it due to no one really having a solution yet

[ilya_mzp]

I've been using Arch for a long time and became quite experienced at maintaining my installation. I only had a few breakages related to updates, most of them were caused by mirror being partially out of sync with the arch repos. Other than that, I've been using the same installation for a couple of years now.

[Zephyroths]

the thing about waiting too long can brick your system is, if between those updates, there is manual configuration needed to be done. if you wait too long there might be even more manual configuration needed. For example I think there was a change in compression in 5.10 iirc, if you're already using arch, you need to manually change the compression method. Sorry, it's been a while I kinda forgot what the steps exactly are.

[dungeonseeker]

Timeshift is love, timeshift is life.

[ildarakhmetgaleev]

I use btrfs with snapshots and rollback if something breaks. My gnome broke during the 3.38 - 40 transition, so I rolled back and left the system without updates for several months. Eventualy, the manjaro maintainers fixed everything.

[HowToLinux]

My only system "breakeges" were like when i was not experienced yet and removed a core package i think it was nvidia that removed everything gtk xorg dependent.
Also nvidia updates sometimes broke my xorg server most of the time i just reinstalled arch because, i wanted anyway to try out LVM or RAID and some stuff so it was a good opportunity.

My latest brakeg was when i switched to btrfs 2 years ago. I was using subvolumes and made timeshift backups. Even when i was removing the snapshots, the space still was not getting more till i had 0Byte left. Now i learned that it is because btfs is saving metadata and files differently so i had to balance the system, that moved the like chunks that were like user only for 2% to different chunks and that fixed it.

[killistan]

I lost a gentoo install on an old ppc macbook once; I had circular dependencies with the old and new version of pam -- so I just unmerged the existing pam (sometimes that can fix that problem). Unfortunately, I didn't think to open a few root shells first (pam being needed for sudo/su, generally)... At the time I decided recovering that would be harder than just reinstalling, so I gave up at that point. It had been a year and a half or so since I'd last done an update...

[gwgux]

This is an interesting topic that both makes the case for and against using a derivative of Arch like Manjaro at the same time.

On one hand, Manjaro is something like a week or two behind Arch so when something breaks on Arch, it may be fixed by the time it gets to Manjaro so they don't need to worry about that. On the other hand, if the bug slips through to Manjaro, it will be fixed in Arch first so now users will need to wait for it make its way into Manjaro from Arch unless they're confident in their ability to grab the latest from Arch directly...which defeats the purpose of having a derivative at that point.

[perilousintent]

I once had a manjaro update that broke grub. It would just endlessly loop to the bootmenu as if the OS couldn't be found. While I do agree that updating your system is good. It should not break core functionality. I don't want to have to keep going and read the forums whenever there is an update to see if there is anything that could break before updating. I'd rather not have a headache.

[ekcdggf]

The only problem that I had is when python was upgraded and that broke my nvidia manager from the AUR (optimus). How that happened for a minor release upgrade still baffles me to this date.

[CMDRSweeper]

Arch have "broken" for me in some instances, and I have had a few interventions to avoid breaking on updates.
However, compared to the massive pain it was when my home server ran Ubuntu and its guaranteed breakages on updates? I do not regret it.
As an added bonus, I run ANCIENT hardware, over 10 years old and it does its task just nicely (Core 2 Duo)