this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2023
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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Tbh, Linux atm needs a good way to restore incase something goes wrong. The rule to use a USB stick and then chroot and fix is not the best idea.
A week ago I ran into issue where my Storage ran full (I was downloading+ manjaro was updating in BG) and then apparently the system didn't boot up coz of this. It took me sometime to realise this issue and fix it.
You can't expect an avg user to be able to perform so much.
Another incident, My friend somehow ended up in a state with no kernel installed and thus couldn't boot up.
Pretty sure this is exactly what the "immutable OS" is for, like what's found in Fedora Silverblue (and less notably in the SteamDeck).
It essentially lets you break whatever you want in userland, but it mounts the root filesystem in read-only, and literally re-images the entire machine each update w/ the added bonus of halting and rolling back the update if any errors are detected during the update. All of which occurs "magically" behind the scenes upon shutdown, so it requires essentially little to no user interaction to manage core updates.
Also all graphical software is limited to flatpaks, so you really take out a lot of the user confusion about installing on Linux and dealing with system-specific weirdness.
Woah. Didn't knew about this. Looks very promising.
Yeah, honestly without memeing, if it ever does happen it would probably be the causes of "the year of the linux desktop".
A lot of distros already implement different methods to avoid this. There are already comments about a couple of methods, timeshift is another one, it's pushed heavily by Linux Mint, for example.
I see most of these tools are more to prevent them from going broke. A GUI recovery tool which is distro-agnostic would be gold honestly .
That sounds like a job for btrfs snapshots, they're provided by default in openSUSE
Cries in ext4
You can try doing an in-place conversion, here's a guide and the official documentation, remember to BACKUP and TEST your BACKUP at least twice, if things don't go well, you'll be able to fall back.
If you want to avoid all the setup headache, just reinstall with btrfs by default (I suggest Fedora Silverblue or openSUSE Tumbleweed for that) of course you'll still have to backup, just your data though, to be restored on the new system
Second suggestion for SilverBlue today. Maybe I will try it out once I have enough time on hand to backup my system and then restore.
I've been loving it honestly, I used to mess up my systems pretty often in a way that upgrading to new releases had to be done from the command line because of random repositories I added, so things felt unstable.
Immutable systems on the other hand are dumbass (me) proof and I can still do what I used to do with those repos in safe environments or Flatpak now that it has become so ubiquitous for packaging.
Immutability is not a must, even though I really like the philosophy, in fact, if you're comfortable with what you have, you might be fine just converting over your current OS to btrfs.
Good luck, whichever option you try!
Thanks for informing. Will be definitely trying it.
Manjaro is... less than stable, at least in my experience.
I wouldn't say that tbh. Sure it has some issues, but it has been stable enough for me for the past 2+ years.
I wasn't using my Linux system daily, so I had to update things in bulk when I would open it up. That can apparently lead to a lot of problems with Manjaro. If you used it daily, I'm not surprised you didn't run into issues.
Yup. If you are updating on regular intervals it works pretty well.
Is Linux meant for the average user then?
Honestly, the current DEs like GNOME and KDE are at the point that they can be driven by your avg user without much efforts.
So polishing these parts of the system will really help in adoption.
If the average user doesn't need some specific products, yes. Gaming is not an issue anymore. You are only constrained by products that can't run on a browser and lazy ass companies like Adobe.