I think that installation was originally 18.04 and I installed it when it was released. A while ago anyways and I’ve been upgrading it as new versions roll out and with the latest upgrade and snapd software it has become more and more annoying to keep the operating system happy and out of my way so I can do whatever I need to do on the computer.
Snap updates have been annoying and they randomly (and temporarily) broke stuff while some update process was running on background, but as whole reinstallation is a pain in the rear I have just swallowed the annoyance and kept the thing running.
But now today, when I planned that I’d spend the day with paperwork and other “administrative” things I’ve been pushing off due to life being busy, I booted the computer and primary monitor was dead, secondary has resolution of something like 1024x768, nvidia drivers are absent and usability in general just isn’t there.
After couple of swear words I thought that ok, I’ll fix this, I’ll install all the updates and make the system happy again. But no. That’s not going to happen, at least not very easily.
I’m running LUKS encryption and thus I have a separate boot -partition. 700MB of it. I don’t remember if installer recommended that or if I just threw some reasonable sounding amount on the installer. No matter where that originally came from, it should be enough (this other ubuntu I’m writing this with has 157MB stored on /boot). I removed older kernels, but still the installer claims that I need at least 480MB (or something like that) free space on /boot, but the single kernel image, initrd and whatever crap it includes consumes 280MB (or so). So apt just fails on upgrade as it can’t generate new initrd or whatever it tries to do.
So I grabbed my ventoy-drive, downloaded latest mint ISO on it and instead of doing something productive I planned to do I’ll spend couple of hours at reinstalling the whole system. It’ll be quite a while before I install ubuntu on anything.
And it’s not just this one broken update, like I mentioned I’ve had a lot of issues with the setup and at least majority of them is caused by ubuntu and it’s package management. This was just a tipping point to finally leave that abusive relationship with my tool and set it up so that I can actually use it instead of figuring out what’s broken now and next.
Honestly, for a long term usage like this a rolling release distro is better. I’ve never not had massive issues upgrading ubuntu release to release, but I’ve only ever had minor ones on arch and pretty much nothing on gentoo. Arch is bleeding edge, so can’t recommend it to you all that much and gentoo has some learning curve initially. But I’ve heard good things of whatever rolling names are from fedora and opensuse.
There is no problem with using a point release system long term. The problem is using Ubuntu. I’ve never once successfully upgraded it from one release to the next without issues, errors, things breaking or loss of functionality. It’s the main reason why I’ll never use Ubuntu again.
I’ve upgraded several Ubuntu LTS versions to newer LTS and have been running fine. The problems come up when you wait too long and the repos don’t have the needed packages anymore. You can still fuddle your way through even that scenario and retain a fully working system.
Ubuntu changes the entire underlying technology too often cause they always try to introduce their own system in place of something that’s already established (Upstart, Unity, Snap, etc.)
My last experiences with Ubuntu were one upgrade that failed to boot after following all the recommended steps, one upgrade where the release notes themselves recommended a fresh install to enable all functionality and a fresh install where the first thing I saw after booting was an error message by Gnome about a crashed service.
I left the distro after that and haven’t looked back. Admittedly, that was quite some time ago. It’s likely they’ve improved since then (but so have all other distros).
I’m glad we have companies helping to push the envelope and try new things. I may not always like the direction they take things, e.g., the Unity desktop turned me off for a few releases, and I always seem to run KDE since gnome went off the rails (imo), but it doesn’t hurt anything and the whole ecosystem is probably better for it. If it hurts then people move to alternatives and hopefully Canonical backpedals, or people move on and Ubuntu withers.
Or at least you used to have that option without too much of a headache. I’m pretty sure you can still do it tho, but the steps required to ‘rescue’ old installation tend to be more complex than they used to be.
For a desktop system, I think something like NixOS is probably the way to go. Keep your home partition then blow away the system and boot if there are ever any issues then install the system from your backed-up system config file and you’re golden.
I just had pacman uninstall itself the other day during a routine -Syu. I was finally able to figure out how to fix it, untar the pkg to / and then tell pacman to install pacman with —overwrite.
That sounds fun
My first arch system and so far haven’t completely borked it yet haha
You won’t. Arch has very little glue that holds it together and the components are quite robust. Buntus of this world, on the other hand, have plenty of glue to enforce their way. And it might be good for first timers, but definitely gets in a way as you start learning the system. My last annoyance like this was disabling gdm - it just kept coming back. Some script somewhere was making sure thr service was running no matter what.
People think “updates are time consuming” therefore prefer LTS because its supported for longer. I parole for quite some time that LTS has no place for private use and rolling release is the right way.
I haven’t been paying attention on the rolling releases scene, but I’m pretty sure there was no mature option back when I installed that thing in 2019 or so other than Debian Sid (and daily driving that used to be an adventure in itself, but it’s been years since I last had a system like that). With ubuntu since at least version 14 upgrading from stable release to another was pretty stable experience, but that’s not the experience I’m having today.
Iam using Tumbleweed for close to 10 years now and it was pretty mature from the start. You can’t go wrong with rolling release + perfectly configured btrfs + snapper by default.
Debian sid is not a distro, it is a staging area for Debian testing. It is not meant for use other than testing new packages.
But regardless of that you can still daily drive it as your distribution and many do. That’s why I said it’s an adventure of it’s own, but if you know what you’re getting into and accept the reality with Sid it can work. Personally I don’t want to use it at this point in my life, but I used to run it for several years when woody was getting a bit old on packages and sarge wasn’t out yet (and I think I just continued with sid after sarge release).
I can’t stand rolling releases (for personal use) and I never recommend them to anyone. To me it feels like being in drift sand.
I need fixed releases to test my documentation (shell scripts) against something. With a rolling release those scripts can break at any time, unless you read the changelog of every package update.
But I also want and use fully automatic updates, so reading changelogs for every update would be the direct opposite of what I am looking for in an OS. I am ok with reading release notes every couple of months for a distribution upgrade though.
I want my systems to be reproducible and that’s impossible with
drift sandrolling releases. In my opinion Fedora or Ubuntu have a decent release cycle, I would never consider Arch or Tumbleweed or Solus.Uhm you never actually used a rolling release distro obviously. Why would you have to read change logs? Also what are you referring to with “test my documentation (shell scripts)”? Why would those not work if package xyz is updated? You are not making much sense, but maybe I am lacking the experience in UNIX to understand your point of view.
Your package manager should tell you about conflicts and even if it doesn’t and something is not working like it did before, you do a simple snapshot rollback and wait another week to update or actually read what might cause the issue. And those incidents are like super rare, at least on Opensuse Tumbleweed (e.g. 2-3 times in a year).
I’ve used Arch Linux and openSUSE Tumbleweed in the past and I have been using Linux for over 10 years …
With each new version of an application there’s the change that configuration files or functionality changes. Packages might even get replaced with others.
You would be surprised how much changes between Ubuntu LTS versions … My archived Ubuntu installation script had lots of if-statements for different versions of Ubuntu, since stuff got moved around. Such things can be as simple as gsettings schemas (keys might get renamed), but even these minor changes make documentation and therefore reproducable reinstallations troublesome.
With a fixed release all these changes are nicely bundled in one large upgrade every couple of months/years, which makes it easy to document and to plan when to do the upgrade.
Even if this would be true, how would that impact your configuration? It doesn’t full-stop. If you want to access those new features you simply need to check how to activate them in your config file. Or are you making config edits in /etc/ ?!
Your next paragraph I don’t understand, it seems specifically aimed at some kind of self “maintained” script, which as nothing to do with rolling release or distributions.
It impacts my documentation. If, for example,
gsettings set org.gnome.software allow-update falseno longer works, because they changed the key fromallow-updatetoupdates-allowed, then my documentation no longer works correctly. Same when new technology is introduced, e. g. a switch from Pulseaudio to Pipewire. With a rolling release distribution these changes can happen at any time, whereas with a fixed release these changes only occur when a new release of the distribution is made and I upgrade to it.I don’t have the time to continously track these changes and modify my documentation accordingly. Therefore I appreciate it if people bundle all those changes for me into one single distribution upgrade and write release notes with a changelog. Then I can spend a day reading the release notes, adjust the documentation, apply the upgrade on all devices and then move on for the next couple of months/years.
I tried to explain to you why I dislike rolling release distributions. That’s why I tried to give you one example where a fixed release distribution is more suitable in my opinion.
I understand that these things might not matter to you, if you only have one computer (or so) to maintain at home or maintaining home computers is your hobby. But I have four personal computers and multiple devices from the family to maintain and system administration is no longer my hobby …
but you are writing documentation for scripts?
No, I document my installations with scripts, so that I am able to install multiple computers the same way.
LTS does have a place on the desktop: Learning how to daily drive linux. I started with kubuntu non-LTS and didn’t know you needed to manually start a full-upgrade to not get moved to backport repos. Of course that came crashing down on me at the worst time and I took a break from linux. But I did learn enough that I can use arch now and it’s been great.
I don’t understand what it means to "not get moved to backport repos, but this seems ubuntu specific. What you need is proper rollback/snapshot mechanisms in place. Looking at Tumbleweed which offers it out of the box. For Arch you can set it up yourself or use something community made like EndeavourOS.
LTS has no place on personal desktops.
My biggest complaint with Arch was that downgrading wasn’t officially supported.
With Gentoo I don’t have pretty much nothing to complain. But I get it’s not for everyone.
That said I’ve not ran many different distros as my main distro. I went with mkLinux --> Gentoo --> Arch --> Gentoo.
You might be correct, but I haven’t found one that I’d like (not that I’ve really looked for one either). Maybe you know if there’s any Debian derivatives which do rolling releases?
I like cinnamon and I’ve been running mint on my laptop for quite a while and I like it, so I’m going with it right now and plan for my next distro-hopping needs more carefully when installing.
But in general I’d say that Ubuntu is far from what it used to be and the TLC the latest version wants is just something I’m not willing to put up with. If something breaks on a update then it breaks, but at least give me an option to choose when it happens.
No need for derivatives. Just use Debian Unstable. It’s the most stable rolling release distro I’ve used so far.
There is MocaccinoOS based on gentoo, I used it when it was sabayon and was a great experience overall.