Common Ways Arch Linux & Rolling Releases Break

when you use a rolling release distro like arch void gen 2 or anything else out there dealing with system updates is something you just have to learn to deal with but this is part of the reason why you use that distro so you can have more up-to-date packages and package managers do an absolutely fantastic job at dealing with a lot of the update magic in the background things like listing out the updates need to be done compiling the code installing the binaries where they need to be finding the dependencies you need and in many cases post install setup to make sure the application is configured the way it needs to be configured but package managers aren't perfect and sometimes things are going to break while this is mainly talked about in the context of arch linux probably because arch frankly is the biggest of the rolling releases it's absolutely true for every rolling release distro out there and one of the things you're frequently told not to do is wait too long between system updates no one really has a specific number some people wait one day some people wait one week but people always say make sure you're frequently updating your system because otherwise it's going to break but what does time have to do with your system actually breaking so time between updates does not directly equate to a system breakage it's not like if you wait you know one day to do an update everything's going to be fine but then you wait one month and it's going to break that's just not how that works i've left my laptop for example i think for seven or eight months it had gigabytes of updates it had hundreds of things to go through but it got through it perfectly fine but then i've left the system i'm recording on right now for about a week or so and i had a major breakage that took me about two hours to fix so it's not like the amount of time you leave your system for determined if it's going to break it's more like the longer you leave your system without a system update the higher the chance of something going wrong actually is now while i'm calling these system breakages i don't mean it's something where it's going to brick your system and you have to reinstall your operating system because ultimately on a rolling release especially something like genji but even arch and void anything can be fixed if you want to put in enough time even something that is five years out of date if you really want to uh you can get that working so here's an article where someone actually did that i would not recommend doing this but if you happen to find a five-year-old laptop that has arch installed on it you can update it to the latest version it's just going to be a big waste of time so with all that in mind then what can actually go wrong well one of the most common things is known as manual intervention now technically everything we're going to be talking about today is a form of manual intervention but certain things will get documented in things like the art news or if you're on void the void news gen 2 genji news so on and so forth this is basically something where files already exist config files are modified in weird ways you have to go and like manually merge some files these are things that weren't supposed to happen in the package manager but got i guess noticed by the arch team before they became widespread issues it's something that they know is going to affect kind of the vast majority of arch users so they want to make sure it gets documented early on an example of this was when the base group was replaced with the base package this required you to go and explicitly reinstall base to make sure you still had you know the absolute core system packages so your system continued to work properly when it comes to packages on the arch linux repos every single package is going to be signed with a pgp key and every single distro that cares at all about the safety of its users are going to be doing the same or using some other form of key verification system the specifics of how it actually works is a bit too much for today but basically it's used to verify the integrity of the package to make sure that what the developer puts into the package is what the user actually gets locally you'll maintain a key ring of the keys used in the arch repo and this is used to verify the signatures on the packages now sometimes keys in that key ring will expire every single key has a date when it is no longer going to be viable or sometimes the key used to sign the packages by the developer is going to be reset because they lost the key or something like that and then the key that you have no longer lines up with the key they're using and the signature cannot be verified this is why it's very important to make sure your key ring is always up to date and if you ever have any problems with packages not being able to be installed the first thing you should probably do is make sure that key ring doesn't have an update that you didn't know about another problem you have to deal with is mirrors so when you download something on a distro like arch linux you're not just downloading it from the one central arch linux server or even just a bunch of servers all managed by the arch linux team what you're actually doing is some of them maybe by the arch team some of them are going to buy third parties and not all of them are going to be completely up to date and sometimes your mirrors may fall so far out of date that the packages you have installed are more up to date than what is on the mirrors because you can go and change your mirrors at any time you want i had a problem with this a while back when i was trying to update wine a program i was trying to install relied on a newer version of wine but for whatever reason the mirrors that i currently had set up none of them had updated one yet but as soon as i swap those mirrors out for newer mirrors everything was fine so occasionally what you should be doing is re-updating your mirrors to make sure that one they're ordered by speed that's very important but also so that everything in your mirrors is actually up to date generally you're going to be fine but some of the smaller mirrors do occasionally have issues another problem you might face is sometimes packages will be removed from the repos or maybe they'll be moved from one repo to another so say from the main arch repo into the extra repo or maybe they'll have their name change because some other package comes along where it makes far more sense for that one to have that name instead and then you have packages dependent on those packages that aren't updated alongside of them and no longer have any idea where the dependencies actually are now this usually isn't going to be a problem with the main repos but if you're using say something from the aur you are going to see this for example i was using the open tablet driver and the version of the net sdk was updated but the open tablet driver wasn't so it still required the older version but the older version was no longer available in the repos and while this isn't going to happen very often or hopefully ever for most people occasionally there's going to be some massive change to the package manager that fundamentally changes the way that actually handles packages and the old system may not seamlessly migrate into the new system let's say for example it changes the compression format being used and for whatever reason it's just not migrating properly this usually isn't going to be a problem unless you have an absolutely ancient system let's say you know a system from five years ago like i showed earlier but it can happen it's something that you may need to look out for once in your life so now that we know what can go wrong how do we stop these issues from happening well you don't you don't stop the issues from happening but you can mitigate the damage they're going to do so what you should always be doing is reading your distro update news now i won't pretend that i do that all the time i'm fairly lazy with it but if a problem occurs the first step you should be doing is always going to your search engine and seeing if someone else has had that exact same problem whether it's intended manual intervention or not it's very likely that someone else has had that problem and is already reported on it and someone's already came up with a solution but keep in mind that error message is there for a reason and in a lot of cases it's going to tell you exactly what you need to do obviously if you're not sure about it and it's going to be doing something that might break your system dude look it up but if it says hey run this command and it will work look before you make a forum post asking how to fix it maybe do a tiny bit of reading and when you're building from places like the aur actually look at the build files i don't mean you have to know every single line and everything it's going to be doing but at least look at the build files and try to understand some of the things it's going to be doing because when something goes wrong with that build file and you need to go and make some modification to it to make sure it actually functions properly having that prerequisite knowledge is going to make that a little bit easier but luckily the aur website does have a comment section so when something does break or even on like really really unpopular packages there's generally going to be a comment on how to actually fix it and the last thing i keep telling people this and people keep making software that does not do it always separate your route and home because in the case of an absolutely catastrophic breakage where you know it's quicker to just reinstall your system you want to be able to just wipe out your root petition reinstall your distro and not have to deal with resetting up everything inside of your home obviously system backups are very useful in that regard but if you don't need to use your system backup and your home is still perfectly intact that saves you a bit of extra time and on that note i think that's going to be it for me so if you use a rolling release let me know in the comment section down below what your experience with system breakages are or if you're one of those people or like i've been using arch links for 50 years and i've never had my system break because i know that people say the arch never breaks but look most people use a rolling release once every so often something out of their control is going to break so that's going to be pretty much it for me and if you like this channel and you want to support my work yep that's how i do my outro uh these people awesome people uh patreon subscribers silly perfect down below i've got a podcast with tech of a tea where i make just as many mistakes as this uh that's available basically anywhere gaming channel brodie robinson plays live stream twice a week upload about files to youtube shorts and this channel is also available over on odyssey that's gonna be it for me and i'm out [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: Brodie Robertson

Views: 10,533

Keywords: brodie robertson, brodie robertson linux, linux, arch linux, rolling release, arch linux break, arch linux broke, arch linux broken after update, brodie robertson arch linux, gentoo rolling release, void linux rolling release, bedrock linux rolling release, best rolling release linux, best rolling release linux distro, how to fix arch linux, arch linux pgp, arch linux pgp signature, arch linux package manager, arch linux keyring, linux keyring, package manager arch linux

Id: EVGLjphtUmA

Length: 11min 36sec (696 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 04 2021