If you think you have ever felt true fear, you havent tried Gentoo yet
Meh, I used Gentoo in its literal first release off a DVD with only printed instructions for a stage one build on an old Pentium II. No internet or anything to fall back on. Learnt a hell of a lot (like don’t select Firefox and Open Office and do an
emerge worldas your first package step after the initial boot because it took literally a week to compile with no indication when it would be done). Definitely have a soft spot for Larry the Cow but after running that setup for a couple of years I feel I’ve taken what I needed from Gentoo.Would recommend it to anyone who wants to dig in and really learn what makes their system tick, but not as a daily driver. I feel for me Arch hits the sweet spot, but was happy with Debian/Ubuntu too (at least until Ubuntu went to shit with snaps).
Why would you run -Syyu? -Syu is what you want 99% or the time.
Noob here what is the difference?
also why would an extra but the same character
ymake a difference? Is that common in the arch linux ecosystem?The y argument tells pacman to update the package list. This is so your computer is downloading the new packages instead of old ones from last time you updated it. The second y tells it to delete the old package list and download it from scratch. This is useful if pacman isn’t working correctly. Maybe the files got corrupted. But it wastes more resources for the repo so it is not recommended as a default.
Oh wow, I have always thought the
ystands for “yes to any questions” turns out it has a--noconfirmShould have read the man page…
-y, --refresh Download a fresh copy of the master package databases (repo.db) from the server(s) defined in pacman.conf(5). This should typically be used each time you use --sysupgrade or -u. Passing two --refresh or -y flags will force a refresh of all package databases, even if they appear to be up-to-date.Y is a mnemonic for Refresh, of course!
Not everyone uses their computer all the time.
Still no reason … unless the repo is volatile, and potentially you have a corrupt version, a simple -Syu is always enough.
Over a year, many repos become relative volatile.
pacman-keyring or what that package is called gets stale really quick over longer periods of time. Large updates are quite smooth in Arch, but IIRC, -Syyu has helped me before.
The extra
yjust forces a database update. The mechanism to detect when not to update the database is a simple timestamp compare, and shouldn’t break.archlinux-keyringmight need a “manual” update if an Arch Linux system is left without updates for a longer period of time. That’s the only situation doingpacman -Sy, thenpacman -S archlinux-keyringis recommended, and it needs to be followed withpacman -Syuto avoid a partial upgrade.Was any of this different in the later 2010s? Thanks for that, but I feel like there was a time when there was a mentioning of a database upgrade in the wiki.
Maybe I’m confusing it with multilib enabling
Pfft, the losers 😎
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Can’t relate. I update compulsively every 2 hours on average.
Also hard to relate. Got my Gentoo server running full auto updates every morning and then send an ntfy alert on success or failure. Haven’t seen a failed update in so long (other than the occasional package that had a bad build or something once in a while).
Back when I was fresh in the Gentoo and Linux world (Gentoo is where I started) and updating once a month, I can definitely say I ran into issues… dunno if it’s that big of an issue these days though.
Real talk: so do I. Part of it is just being a computer nerd, part of it is working in IT, part of it has just been curiously testing Linux.
I have had more stability doing this over the course of a year than I had running the monthly Microsoft updates on Windows 10. On the rare occasions something broke (usually my own tinkering and not the update process) simply reinstalling it actually fixed the problem 90%+. I know I’m preaching to the choir here, but I was legit surprised and thought I would have slightly more problems with a bleeding edge distro.
As well, it’s great to be able to just update everything with one simple command on the command line rather than having each application install an updater task that sometimes sits down in the system tray doing nothing but nagging you. Or having a program prompt you for an upgrade only to take you to the download page and make you basically reinstall the app over the old version with questionable results every time …
One day maybe I’ll understand why people are fine with package managers that have you sweat if you’re updating whenever the heck you want rather than often and with a second pair of eyes on the news
There are too many in the Linux dev community who cling to their old concepts, even if they are objectively worse. Hell, 99% of distros still don’t even come with disaster recovery preconfigured; OpenSuse are the only ones I know where you don’t need to be a professional to revert back to a working state in case something broke. This conservatism as well as elitism (nobody needs the new stuff if everyone just gets good and becomes a CLI magician, right?) in the community is holding us back horribly, and it shows.
openSuSE comes with a fuck load of admin tools that I should probably learn by now, but i never needed it since it worked just fine
With nix it’s easy to revert, if you keep your previous config. Version it with git and it’s really easy.
“It’s easy with tool that requires extensive knowledge. Do it with another tool that requires extensive knowledge and it’s even easier.”
You just showed everyone the elitism I was talking about, thank you.
You talked about linux devs not embracing change and then promptly shit on NixOS for not understanding it lol
I also talked about elitism, lol.
Well yeah let’s elaborate on that. Merriam-Webster defines elitism as
- Leadership or ruled by an elite
- The selectivity of the elite
- Consciousness of being or belonging to an elite.
That comment was suggesting open source tools while you’re posting in an open source social media platform in a community that is geared towards open source software. Please explain how that comment fits the definition above. It’s not elitist to assume that you’ve heard of git if you’re posting here. Someone suggesting something to you is not elitist just because it doesn’t work for you.
I don’t think I’m better than you because I know git or nix, but I do know that in the right circumstances, knowing how to use git or nix is a very valuable tool. I would love to help you solve your problems with these tools if given the opportunity. When a member of the community finds a tool they love, they just want to help others and suggest what worked for them. You really think that’s elitist attitude?
sigh point 2 fits perfectly. The wider Linux community is full of people who’s openly oust you if you if you don’t know certain things or, beware, do not want to have to learn using a CLI but simply wish for GUI tools (in flippin’ 2025!). The elite here are people who like to tinker with tech, or rather those with certain knowledge the broader public doesn’t possess. On the other side are people who got other priorities than learning about the insides of an operating system, who get alienated by people who expect them to become CLI magicians as well because “it’s easy”. Completely ignoring how utterly lost most people feel at that moment.
Everything you said after that is rhetorical bullshit that’s also very common in the community and literally the reason I saw dozens of non-techy people reject Linux-based OS’ after they encountered their first issue and looked for help. You’re twisting my criticism of systemic issues in a way it looks like a personal failure of myself, because that’s something / someone you can argue against. Your last few sentences are also shifting the goalpost, I never spoke about that exact behaviour you’re describing there.
I’m done with this BS, bye.
I don’t feel like that’s much of an issue, new people are usually introduced to the easier and more robust options. There’s nothing wrong in how other distros operate, just that the community shouldn’t feel compelled to suggest them to people they can presume aren’t the target audience
I’m talking about the Linux ecosystem as a whole. You can always only get a few good things, but no distro ticks literally all possible boxes. Mint is really close, yet they decided to embrace the objectively worse .deb package system over Flatpaks and still got no proper disaster recovery like OpenSuse does (something that should be an imperative especially for “beginner” distros). Or as another example, Gnome devs acticely decided against overhauling their extension system in favour of more stable solutions that’d allow extensions to gracefully crash instead of crashing your whole desktop. No, apparently monkey-patching is totally fine because (I assume) radical developer freedom is better than stability for millions of people. I’m so fed up with people who’ll then proceed to defend what they rightfully love and tell me it was easy to get out of that! People just gotta learn to use the CLI, lol! 🫠 That’s what I criticize.
Oh yeah, I see what you mean better, I think there is a good trend nowadays though, for example what do you say is missing from openSUSE to make it tick all boxes for you?
I concur there’s a good trend, unfortunately it still takes some time to get there. About OpenSuse, to get the stuff out of the way they’re currently working on:
- Better, more friendly installer (Agama)
- Stable and Modern Software, not either/or (Slowroll)
That’s definitely good. Their default website for the preinstalled browser also includes all the community links as well as a search, leading people to stuff like the Forum which is indeed very friendly (definitely not hostile like f.e. the Arch forum). They also tick a lot of boxes basically no one else does with the bootable system snapshots and (almost) full graphical system management with their YaST2 Suite (because nobody should be forced to manipulate god damn system config files with a command-line editor!). My main gripes with OpenSuse are:
- Flathub not added by default (especially when using Gnome)
This leaves new users with either no (Gnome) or a lackluster (KDE) amount of Software in the store. The concept of adding more software sources isn’t generally known, and new people have no clue what to look for. When using KDE they’d just assume there’s very little Software available in general.
- Lackluster Onboarding Wizard…
It’s literally just a bunch of links. While one of the links leads to Documentation (as well as a Readme, but that thing is tiny), the docs are already extremely advanced and go into system details most people will have never heard of or will ever need. Examples of how to do this well do exist, like in Mint or Zorin.
- …which should include a quick Snapshot settings menu
By default OpenSuse tries to save 10 snapshots per day, another 10 per month, 10 per year… it’s flooding your disk with snapshots eventually, and that you still can only change in a config file!
- Making the Software Store properly update
It’s a necessity to know ‘sudo zypper dup’ since the Software Store more often than not fails to install system updates for some reason (especially with the Nvidia driver installed)
- Include the Nvidia driver in the installer
While OpenSuse did a great job with reliable Nvidia driver packages, the manual install is still really bad. Distros like Pop!_OS solved this with a dedicated image, however OpenSuse got excellent installers that could auto-detect the necessity for the driver and/or offer it as an option.
Those are things that come to mind. There technically is lots of more stuff, but those wouldn’t be a distro- but more of KDE / GNOME problems (especially around stability). I really appreciate the OpenSuse team doing lots of good stuff, but there are some things a normal user (and by that I mean someone who can’t use the CLI to administrate a Linux by hand) can’t do, yet would be forced to either immediately or eventually. And yes, of course OpenSuse isn’t primarily marketed towards “normies”, that doesn’t mean all these things wouldn’t also be nice for sysadmins to be fixed.
You asked him not me but the biggest issue (for me, that I lived) with openSuSE is that it’s not as… smooth of an experience (?), I definitely would say fedora has better polish compared to openSuSE
Same experience here, at least that was the case for me a couple years ago
(Btw, OMG another omega, hello brotha)
Not sure if my memory is failing already but I no longer see those “Update portage before anything else” messages.
When something tries to overwrite stuff in /etc and you have to etc-update your shit… that’s when things get real
Really hate those few packages that don’t give a shit whether or not you’ve already configured it or not…
That’s what the /etc/foo.conf.d/ is for :DDDDD
Yes. Once I actually locked myself out of using sudo and then forgot my root password because I updated the stuff without looking at the content of those files
I just had one of those portage update messages btw, so they are for sure still a thing
Isn’t using a rolling distro, without updating it at least every couple of days (or even every single day) a big security risk?
My 4000 packages to be updated:
Not any more or less than doing the same on a “stable” distribution.
Depends on what you have installed and your needs. It’s a matter of understanding your system and knowing how to manage it.
