sxan

It could be Linux, too. Some distros have fancy boot graphics - look for something called "plasma" - not the KDE one, but a different one - and uninstall or disable that. It's a common thing that hides the boot log behind a logo-and-progress bar. Arch doesn't use it, so I haven't seen it in years, but IIRC it can cause problems on headless systems.

This is the exact same mentality that's resulted in the overconsumption and waste that's currently killing the planet. "Bandwidth is cheap! Diskspace is cheap! May as well be sloppy and wasteful, because resources are cheap." Sound familiar? It has an impact on real world resource usage; the computer industry alone is driving strip-mining as we try to satisfy demands for more rare elements needed to make computers-

Bandwidth and storage are cheap... if you live in a first-world country. Increasing storage demands drive up real-world crass consumerism to upgrade, upgrade; it allows developers to be lazy and write unoptimized, crap software and distribute web applications packaged up and thinly disguised as desktop apps that consume significants percentages of CPU, memory, and disk at (apparent) idle, as they waste bandwidth polling the network - I'm looking at you, almost every Electron app.

If you think sloppy and wasteful software (flatpack as an example isn't sloppy, but it is wasteful) isn't responsible for real world wasteful consumerism, ask yourself why you upgraded your last computer. Was it too slow? Not enough memory? Did you buy a bigger disk because it was pretty?

People bitch about proof-of-work cryptocurrency wasting electricity, and rightly so. But they do it while installing shit 1GB Electron chat programs on their computers, and 70MB calculators on their phones. Which they then upgrade because it's "too slow," or because they need "the bigger GBs." Flatpack and Snap aren't as bad as Node, but they're part of the "waste" trend, make no mistake.

Is it getting stuck in the BIOS? If you can't ssh in, can you even ping it? Network should come up before graphics.

Have you disabled the display manager?

As someone eles mentioned, boot it with a screen and check the BIOS. Since this was a laptop, the BIOS is certainly expecting a display, so you might have to adjust something there.

You might like to consider a job in system administration. It's like that, only with the added hell of users.

The first time I installed Linux, I had to calculate vsync modlines for the monitor to get X running. It wasn't worth it, and I used Amigas and then NeXTSTEP (for x86, I wasn't rich) and Solaris at Uni and work for a few years until it was easier to get X running.

Not at all. You seem to think there's a more appropriate forum for people to join the Linux community, and introduces. Where is that? And how do new Linux users find it? Knowing nothing about Linux distros, where should they ask about distros? Distrowatch catalogs 274 distributions - how do newbies navigate those?

I do think having a "which distro" stickie or sidebar would be handy, but I don't at all mind the "I ditched Windows" posts. It beats random venting, ranting, and flame wars.

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 snapper on two boxen. I included snap-pac and snapper-support to get system change and grub integration; there's probably also a utility out there that adds visudo-like snapshot-before-manual-edit of anything in /etc. If not, it'd be an easy script. snapper-gui and btrfs-assistant both look useful. While I'm comfortable with rescue SDs and restic backups, what I'm seeing with Arch's snapper package is pretty nice, and super easy.

I suppose anything that borks grub is 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).

While I applaud compensating FOSS developers, there's a devil in the details: all software stands on the shoulders of many giants. The nature of software, and software users, means that most money is going to go to front-end developers, regardless of effort. They, in turn, would have to rigorously re-distribute most of that money to the developers of the great many many libraries and frameworks that their software depends on. I would argue that it is practically impossible for this trickle-down to happen fairly, which would result in developers of deep, indirect dependencies used by everyone being ignored. Throw a shitty, low-effort GUI on restic, and you'd end up with all the donations. If you're ethical, you'd give 99 cents for every dollar to the restic devs; how likely is that? An added wrinkle is that people are really bad about estimating the relative worth of their efforts; even if everyone in the stack is ethical, how do you estimate the relative value of your effort against the effort of the database binding library you use? How much of your donations do you give to each developer of the 40 libraries you directly import?

Another issue I personally have is that compensation invites obligation. It breaks the itch-scratching foundation of FOSS.

Finally, I think introducing money into FOSS is a virus that ultimately destroys the only functioning communism in the world. It changes developer behavior, or at least introduces perverse incentives, in undesireable ways. I'd rather end-users contribute in whatever way they can: well-written bug reports, PRs that fix spelling in docs, wiki "how-to" contributions, code contributions. From each, according to ability. That's what keeps FOSS running, and that's the spirit of FOSS.

Now, I'm fully in favor of for-profit companies funding and supporting projects. They're making money off FOSS, and should roll that down. All of the same trickle-down issues apply, and certainly it introduces the same perverse incentives, but greed should have a cost, and all for-profit companies are by definition engines of greed.

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.

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.

This is why I stay away from Flatpack and Snap (and anything node or Electron). If I get a gig with my weevly Arch update, I think it's a lot.

Can't avoid it with some programs, but if there are options, there's a set of technologies I avoid like the plague.

I know I should be smarter about them like you are

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.