this post was submitted on 03 Dec 2024
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Linux
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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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I have an Arch laptop that I didn't update for 3.5 years. The system update took a while when I finally went through with it. Amazingly it didn't break anything!
Yes, I am amazed that quite a few people in this thread are saying they 'had to completely reinstall the os' and that it broke everything after not much time. As long as one doesn't rely on the AUR for system critical packages or much in generel, it is incredibly hard to break an Arch system (Manjaro and other Arch-based distros don't count). This is due in part to Arch being quite reproducible but it also having very good maintainership.
It doesn't hurt to apply new package configs by going through
pacdiffonce in a while though.Edit: Typo
I switched from Windows to EndeavourOS a few months ago and haven’t had any issues on my personal computer, it’s amazing.
I also have EndeavourOS as a VM on my work laptop and I somehow managed to break systemd-boot when trying to do a system update though. The system update died halfway through and I defaulted to the classic solution of rebooting, which definitely made things worse because my boot partition in the VM broke. The great thing about Linux, and especially Arch, is the tools and knowledge readily available to fix things and everything was working again (with no data loss) in under 15 minutes. I’ve dealt with similar problems on Windows and either had to accept data loss or deal with significant headaches trying to resolve what should be a simple issue because the operating system refuses to provide basic information.
I think this has a lot to do with it. I have seen people say they use Arch before and then find out they're using a derivative.