meh, just backup home.
this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2026
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also, machines wipe themselves at each boot! service state data is distributed via zfs send! zfs that actually works!
I too, use impermanence with root on zfs. Not often you find someone in the wild with similar setup. Lol
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Hot take: I used arch for over a decade. It never broke unless I broke it.
By all means, back up your files but rolling release distros aren't made of arsenic, you'll be fine.
I think it's very much dependent on your hardware.
I had some issues with my Nvidia drivers getting messed up when the card was relatively new. I haven't had any issues in the past two years though.
I know people who've driven drunk for more than a decade, and only crashed when they were sober. Does that mean drinking and driving is safe?
I literally had one of my devices fail to boot after an update pretty much every month, and another a few times a year. Sure, I was able to fix it with only arch-chroot, but when I switched to btrfs I didn't need to carry around a flash drive with me when updating the system...
The last few years I'm on nixos, and while it sometimes fails to update, it has not once failed to boot.
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Meh, I keep everything important on a separate drive altogether.
Fuck it, we ball. 3 years no arch deaths. Windows is a fuck. 1,000,000 pacman warnings.
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i mean, all the important stuff is saved to OneDrive, right?
You missed the space between one and drive⦠and you accidentally capitalized a couple letters.
Donβt correct me on this one. Please.
Yes, but actually no.
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I feel attacked! (but I have /home separate; and backups of everything except big game installs I can easily reinstall)
Separate /home is such a scam. Never have I run out of home space, but boy is 27GB not enough for a root partition that runs any kind of service.
Use a modern filesystem like btrfs or even lvm with thin provisioning to solve that problem. Separate partitions for ease of backup, but they all pull from the same pool of storage.
I have / on SSD (less writes) and /var and /home on HDD
Probably my installed games alone are larger than that
Yeah i never bothered with separate /home because it feels like such a balancing act to decide on size compared to root. Especially when you use nix/guix, it would be annoying to have a small root with the store filling up over time and having to do garbage collecting often. Also, i just back up whatever files i want to make sure i don't lose, and when i do a clean install i actually want everything to be wiped anyway, including home.
It's the opposite for me.
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Iβm here for a good time, not a long time
Also, my last Arch death was due to accidentally ovverwritimg the whole drive, so no amount of split partitions is going to save me
They call it disk destroyer for a reason. You gotta alias that shit.
alias dd='echo Did you triple check which device you picked? Of course not, dipshit. Check again'
They call it disk destroyer for a reason.
There's nothing specially destructive about dd. It's just a program that opens a file, and if you tell it to open a device file and it's got permission to write to it, it'll write to it.
You can just as easily overwrite a disk's contents with anything else that will open a file and write to it.
# cp /dev/urandom /dev/sda
will wipe your drive with random data in the same way that
# dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sda
will.
You're technically right, but the way most people use dd ensures its like handling a loaded gun. How often do you cp /dev/sdwhy?
Hahahahah I need to do that lmao!!!
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My last Arch death was updating my 128GB laptop after a year and breaking it with partial updates. (Iβm better at partial updates now) It also made me want to, move away from having separate /home partition. It was somewhat sad, since it was the Arch that I installed on the previous laptop and just moved the SSD when I got a new one
I remember daily driving Gentoo unstable in the early 2000's on my rig in college. It was like trying to beat a Dark Souls boss every time I wanted to do an update.
In one of my university java courses, another student was frequently compiling Gentoo packages on his laptop during class.
Once I researched more about it I also installed Gentoo on my laptop and started building updates during class π
*BTRFS users when you don't rebalance soon enough and run out of inodes so you can't boot your computer
How often do you need to rebalance?
my current openSUSE install with btrfs has lived for about 6 years now and I haven't done any manual maintenance on btrfs
I think some distros have a systemd service that does it weekly or monthly which is usually enough but in rare cases it's not, just know that if you suddenly get out of space errors on BTRFS but you're not actually out of space that's probably the issue
When the moon is in the Seventh House and Jupiter aligns with Mars,
then peace will guide the planets, and love will steer the stars.
my manjaro has been running the same install for 6 years on ext4 no separate home partition...
what are yall doing to brick your machines?
Right? The OP describes me (except I like to think I'm not that sweaty) and I don't remember ever having reinstalled because things were broken.
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Important files go to repos / backup disks. Workstations are sinners in the hands of an angry god.
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Timeshift has indeed saved my distro's ass a few times. But is not a silver bullet. In the end I keep most of my stuff on an external HD and in there a folder with some notes and data about my distro configuration. If he dies (and he did) I'll bring him back.
Btrfs and snapper. Only time I ever had to reload a snapshot was because of my own actions. I've been fortunate to never have any update related breaks. Maybe a couple services had hiccups, but never breaks.