I have been distro hopping for about 2 weeks now, there’s always something that doesn’t work. I thought I would stick with Debian and now I haven’t been able to make my printer work in it, I think I tried in another distro and it just worked out of the box, but there’s always something that’s broken in every distro.

I’m sorry I’m just venting, do you people think Ubuntu will work for me? I think I will try it next.

  • 𝕽𝖚𝖆𝖎𝖉𝖍𝖗𝖎𝖌𝖍
    1•11 months ago

    That sounds stressfull! It’d put me off a distro, too. I had something similar happen in the early days of Gentoo - multiple times. Those trials by fire did teach me a lot, and I’m now consequently far more sanguine about the boot process, and thank god these days we have smart phones as mini-backup computers to search for solutions! Still, we’re in a time when PCs are not as indispensible, and having one down for a couple days can be a minor disaster.

    Rolling updates or no, I rarely -Syu on my desktop more than once a week, and most of my machines get that TLC more like monthly. And sometimes I’ll hold out packages that require rebooting, because FTN. It probably contributes to the fact I’ve avoided these types of dramas --statistically.

    • @Nisaea
      2•11 months ago

      Yeop, you can say that again. Can’t read the Arch wiki on a Nokia 3310 for sure lol

      Tbh I’m not too careful about updates, I have regular backups and grub exploding wasn’t enough to stop me, so eeeeh, if something really goes awfully wrong I have enough free time to deal with it and use it as a learning experience. I know I should be smarter about them like you are, but on my personal computer I just cannot be asked. ^^

      • 𝕽𝖚𝖆𝖎𝖉𝖍𝖗𝖎𝖌𝖍
        2•11 months ago

        I know I should be smarter about them like you are

        TIL being lazy is “smart”.

        Nokia 3310!! Those were the days. When you had drive over to your hosting provider (some guy’s garage, who was paying for a T1) so you could sit at your server (a tower you’d built) to fix something that an upgrade had broken. Those experiences with dependency hell put me off Redhat forever.

          • 𝕽𝖚𝖆𝖎𝖉𝖍𝖗𝖎𝖌𝖍
            1•10 months ago

            Are you updating with eos-update, or yay? TBH, I only use yay, or pacman. I don’t imagine it makes any difference, but… IDK. I happened to upgrade and reboot two EOS machine yesterday, with again no issues. Are you running an NVidia card? I’m an Radeon guy, won’t touch NVidia, myself. How about Wayland? I’ve alwayw found Wayland to be super flakey, which keeps me on X.

            I dunno. I wonder why you’re having so many issues, while for me EOS has just been Arch with an easier install.

            • @Nisaea
              1•10 months ago

              Mostly using eos-update by clicking on the notification, unless I’m on a terminal where I still have the yay reflex from arch. I should remember to use eos-update though, I do appreciate the extra housekeeping.

              Nop, I avoid nvidia as much as I can as well, I already can’t avoid it at work, too much driver drama. Ryzen and radeon it is, with (almost) no fuss.

              Also mostly using wayland, it works well even on KDE, but got Xorg around just in case, and I’ve had the occasional issue on both. That being said, it’s plymouth that blows up, long before the graphical session is opened, so that shouldn’t have an influence either.

              Maybe I’m just a black cat, and/or maybe it just comes with the territory when you stay long enough on a bleeding-edge-use-at-your-own-risk kinda distro and update almost every day. Something’s bound to go wrong eventually. Which, has also “been Arch with an easier install” for me, tbf.

              Gonna investigate a bit more today, couldn’t be asked yesterday. But if you’re curious I can keep you updated when I find a fix. :)

              Edit: Found the solution by essentially doing the same thing the folks on reddit did with nvidia by enabling early KMS start, and learning quite a bit along the way. Apparently it’s now required by Plymouth and my system didn’t get the memo? Or something? Eh it works.

              • 𝕽𝖚𝖆𝖎𝖉𝖍𝖗𝖎𝖌𝖍
                1•10 months ago

                Ah. K, I think the differrence is that I’m the outlier. Your system has far larger components, with more moving parts, which I think is more common:

                On most of my systems, I’m not running any graphical system; they’re all servers. That eliminates a huge amount of stack that can fail. On all but non-servers I run X, which is very stable (in that upgrades almost never impact it) on non-Nvidia GPUs. And of those, all but one run herbstluftwm - Gnome and KDE are both large systems with a lot of moving parts, any of which can break (or be broken) – in your case, it was Plasma, a KDE component. And the last desktop is running Budgie which, while still Gnome, is a lighter one based on the older GTK3. All of these things tend to make for more stable systems.

                But, most people are probably running fancier, full desktop software. Larger, more complex, more development, more frequent changes. And, consequently, more prone to cascading packaging breakages, like the Plasma one.

                I think if I were using software like that, I’d consider either giving up Arch and using an immutable distro, or using something like snapper or timeshift that allows boot-time system roll-backs.

                • @Nisaea
                  1•10 months ago

                  Ah no no, maybe I was unclear, but the issue occurs during the initramfs stage, long before any of my KDE/Plasma nonsense had any chance to run! KMS has nothing to do with KDE. ^^

                  Edit: You still likely are an outlier though :)

                  • 𝕽𝖚𝖆𝖎𝖉𝖍𝖗𝖎𝖌𝖍
                    1•10 months ago

                    Oh, that plasma. Yeah, that naming conflict is totally not confusing.

                    You could switch all your repos to the core Arch ones. I did that by accident once, and it was fine (although, I did switch them back eventually). Maybe it’d add release stability? I’m not really clear how the EOS repos vary off the baseline, except by adding some custom packages.

                    Inspired by our discussion, I installed snapper on two boxen. I included snap-pac and snapper-support to get system change and grub integration; there’s probably also a utility out there that adds visudo-like snapshot-before-manual-edit of anything in /etc. If not, it’d be an easy script. snapper-gui and btrfs-assistant both look useful. While I’m comfortable with rescue SDs and restic backups, what I’m seeing with Arch’s snapper package is pretty nice, and super easy.

                    I suppose anything that borks grub is going to be a PITA no matter how immutable your OS, or how fancy your rollback. Or - god forbid - fucks up your BIOS firmware. I have never had that last happen, yet (knock on wood).