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Finally got my mini Mint sorted. (thelemmy.club)
submitted 3 weeks ago by to c/linux@lemmy.world
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Tried for half the weekend to get elementary to work, it just refused to install for reasons unknown.

Gone with Mint for now.

I like the hardware (an old Intel MacBook Air) and didn’t want it to go to waste.

I’ll see how I get on with this desktop. Went feet first straight to bare metal because I couldn’t be bothered with dual boot. It was too much faff. Would value any insight from others who’ve found a lovely distro/DE combo with these tiny machines.

Making my first moves away from proprietary software. Thanks largely to being inspired by you delightful folk.

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[–] 2 points 3 weeks ago* (1 child)

On Debian, this risk is partly mitigated by the infrequency of updates and by pushing out very well-tested updates to begin with. On Arch, you just have to deal with it every once in a while.

... not if you just postpone updating to the same schedule as Debian, lol. By spacing your updates out, you reduce the risk of catching breaking changes in just the same manner as Debian. Although Debian probably has more rigorous human testing as part of its release strategy, granted.

At any rate, I haven't had Arch break on me due to an update in all of the years I've used it. Over a decade by now. And I update very regularly.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 weeks ago* (1 child)

    not if you just postpone updating to the same schedule as Debian, lol.

    LOL, indeed.

    About the breaking part, kudos to you for doing a great job at maintaining Arch. But I assume/think^[Please feel free to push back on this.] most people don't enjoy 'babysitting'^[This term isn't meant derogatory or anything. But it's what comes up to me whenever I see how involved this is. By contrast, I actually do apply daily updates on my semi-rolling daily driver. But I never have to give it any thought. Heck, it even happens automatically.] their OS 😅.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 child)

    Yeah, that's a very common misconception, that you constantly have to "maintain" Arch, as if something happens to it just by having your computer running.

    I do very little "maintenance" other than issue these commands:

    $ paru
...
$ flatpak update
...

    Before I upgrade the system, I check archlinux.org in order to see if there are any breaking changes that need manual handling. (Has happened maybe 2 times with packages that I have actually had installed, in 10+ years.)

    Then, when paru has invoked pacman and upgraded native packages (from the Arch repo) and starts to upgrade foreign packages (from the AUR), I check the diffs in the package files (paru displays them) to make sure nothing looks fishy. Obviously upgrading Flatpak packages needs no maintenance.

    This all takes about 5 minutes each time I do it, including downloading of new package versions, which is very little time per week. Even less if you do it less frequently, which you definitely can.

    So when you say I do a good job maintaining Arch, is not really me. 😅 The Arch developers have done a superb job for me. And the maintainers of the Arch wiki are also true heroes. I just use it. 👍

    The page you linked to is slightly FUD and yet simultaneously true because theoretically anything can happen and that serves as a disclaimer that the developers shouldn't be to blame, and nobody is owed support if something were to potentially break.

    Ubuntu broke loads of times for me back in the day. Had to reinstall it several times. And all I did was issue the command for upgrading to a new Ubuntu point release. 😅

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  • [–] 2 points 2 weeks ago

    Thank you for sharing that!

    Your approach to updating contains only a subset of what was found on the wiki, but I'm glad to hear that it has proven to be sufficient 🙂.

    Ubuntu broke loads of times for me back in the day. Had to reinstall it several times. And all I did was issue the command for upgrading to a new Ubuntu point release. 😅

    I've heard many horror stories of upgrading on Ubuntu 🤣🤣🤣. Thankfully, Arch has been good to ya 🙂.

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