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Linux @lemmy.ml IsoKiero @sopuli.xyz

My ubuntu installation broke completely

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.

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  • 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.

    • With each new version of an application there’s the change that configuration files or functionality changes. Packages might even get replaced with others.

      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.

      • how would that impact your configuration?

        It impacts my documentation. If, for example, gsettings set org.gnome.software allow-update false no longer works, because they changed the key from allow-update to updates-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.

        which as nothing to do with rolling release or distributions.

        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 ...

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