this post was submitted on 10 Jan 2024
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EndeavourOS is pretty good, too; also Arch-based with an easy installer.
The advantage to Arch-based-distros is rolling releases, and the Arch wiki instructions are more easily followed. And right now, the Arch wiki is probably the single best resource for Linux instructions and troubleshooting on the web.
I daily drive endeavour and love it to bits but let's not recommend it to someone who wants an OS with no fuss. It WILL break and require experience to fix. Remember the grub update fiasco?
No. Was there a grub issue? I've only been running it for about 10 mos, but have had no issues in that time.
https://endeavouros.com/news/full-transparency-on-the-grub-issue/
A LOT of people's PCs were bricked, including mine. No boot, just blank screen with blinking cursor. Thankfully Endeavour's team was quick to react (quicker than Arch, as it happens) and published a full tutorial on how to chroot into your system and downgrade grub, but that already required a good level of knowledge and confidence in the Linux system as none of this was trivial, or intuitive for any stretch of the imagination. I woudl imagine most affected EndeavourOS users who were new-ish to Linux threw the towel that day. Wouldn't blame them, it was jarring even for me, and it wasn't my first chroot.
That sounds stressfull! It'd put me off a distro, too. I had something similar happen in the early days of Gentoo - multiple times. Those trials by fire did teach me a lot, and I'm now consequently far more sanguine about the boot process, and thank god these days we have smart phones as mini-backup computers to search for solutions! Still, we're in a time when PCs are not as indispensible, and having one down for a couple days can be a minor disaster.
Rolling updates or no, I rarely
-Syuon my desktop more than once a week, and most of my machines get that TLC more like monthly. And sometimes I'll hold out packages that require rebooting, because FTN. It probably contributes to the fact I've avoided these types of dramas --statistically.Yeop, you can say that again. Can't read the Arch wiki on a Nokia 3310 for sure lol
Tbh I'm not too careful about updates, I have regular backups and grub exploding wasn't enough to stop me, so eeeeh, if something really goes awfully wrong I have enough free time to deal with it and use it as a learning experience. I know I should be smarter about them like you are, but on my personal computer I just cannot be asked. ^^
TIL being lazy is "smart".
Nokia 3310!! Those were the days. When you had drive over to your hosting provider (some guy's garage, who was paying for a T1) so you could sit at your server (a tower you'd built) to fix something that an upgrade had broken. Those experiences with dependency hell put me off Redhat forever.
Eyy friend, guess what! An update broke my EOS install again! Wish me luck lol
Edit: found brick mates: https://www.reddit.com/r/archlinux/comments/19bc9b8/plymouth_splash_screen_causing_black_screen_and/
Edit2: Honestly, I daily drove Fedora for years, didn't do a clean install from fedora 13 through 25 and it worked like a charm. I guess they improved wildly since your Redhat days!
Are you updating with eos-update, or yay? TBH, I only use yay, or pacman. I don't imagine it makes any difference, but... IDK. I happened to upgrade and reboot two EOS machine yesterday, with again no issues. Are you running an NVidia card? I'm an Radeon guy, won't touch NVidia, myself. How about Wayland? I've alwayw found Wayland to be super flakey, which keeps me on X.
I dunno. I wonder why you're having so many issues, while for me EOS has just been Arch with an easier install.
Mostly using eos-update by clicking on the notification, unless I'm on a terminal where I still have the yay reflex from arch. I should remember to use eos-update though, I do appreciate the extra housekeeping.
Nop, I avoid nvidia as much as I can as well, I already can't avoid it at work, too much driver drama. Ryzen and radeon it is, with (almost) no fuss.
Also mostly using wayland, it works well even on KDE, but got Xorg around just in case, and I've had the occasional issue on both. That being said, it's plymouth that blows up, long before the graphical session is opened, so that shouldn't have an influence either.
Maybe I'm just a black cat, and/or maybe it just comes with the territory when you stay long enough on a bleeding-edge-use-at-your-own-risk kinda distro and update almost every day. Something's bound to go wrong eventually. Which, has also "been Arch with an easier install" for me, tbf.
Gonna investigate a bit more today, couldn't be asked yesterday. But if you're curious I can keep you updated when I find a fix. :)
Edit: Found the solution by essentially doing the same thing the folks on reddit did with nvidia by enabling early KMS start, and learning quite a bit along the way. Apparently it's now required by Plymouth and my system didn't get the memo? Or something? Eh it works.
Ah. K, I think the differrence is that I'm the outlier. Your system has far larger components, with more moving parts, which I think is more common:
On most of my systems, I'm not running any graphical system; they're all servers. That eliminates a huge amount of stack that can fail. On all but non-servers I run X, which is very stable (in that upgrades almost never impact it) on non-Nvidia GPUs. And of those, all but one run herbstluftwm - Gnome and KDE are both large systems with a lot of moving parts, any of which can break (or be broken) -- in your case, it was Plasma, a KDE component. And the last desktop is running Budgie which, while still Gnome, is a lighter one based on the older GTK3. All of these things tend to make for more stable systems.
But, most people are probably running fancier, full desktop software. Larger, more complex, more development, more frequent changes. And, consequently, more prone to cascading packaging breakages, like the Plasma one.
I think if I were using software like that, I'd consider either giving up Arch and using an immutable distro, or using something like snapper or timeshift that allows boot-time system roll-backs.
Ah no no, maybe I was unclear, but the issue occurs during the initramfs stage, long before any of my KDE/Plasma nonsense had any chance to run! KMS has nothing to do with KDE. ^^
Edit: You still likely are an outlier though :)
Oh, that plasma. Yeah, that naming conflict is totally not confusing.
You could switch all your repos to the core Arch ones. I did that by accident once, and it was fine (although, I did switch them back eventually). Maybe it'd add release stability? I'm not really clear how the EOS repos vary off the baseline, except by adding some custom packages.
Inspired by our discussion, I installed
snapperon two boxen. I includedsnap-pacandsnapper-supportto get system change andgrubintegration; there's probably also a utility out there that addsvisudo-like snapshot-before-manual-edit of anything in/etc. If not, it'd be an easy script.snapper-guiandbtrfs-assistantboth look useful. While I'm comfortable with rescue SDs and restic backups, what I'm seeing with Arch'ssnapperpackage is pretty nice, and super easy.I suppose anything that borks
grubis going to be a PITA no matter how immutable your OS, or how fancy your rollback. Or - god forbid - fucks up your BIOS firmware. I have never had that last happen, yet (knock on wood).They don't afaik. EOS uses Arch's repos directly, unlike Manjaro. Just adds its own on top for all the fancy EOS stuff. Which is why EOS was immediately affected by the grub meltdown and not Manjaro. (which kinda digs a few holes in the stability hypothesis, though Manjaro is another kettle of fish tbf)
Snapper sounds really interesting, and I didn't expect "super easy" to be the feedback there. Sounds a bit overkill for my use case at home but I might look into it for work. Thanks for the info!
Oh god a borked BIOS is my nightmare... I don't even know how you'd go about fixing that on a modern PC mobo... Let's not jinx it shall we?