Your everyday Linux maintenance experience

Honestly my Windows 10 experience wasn't much different.

Atleast I can actually fix most of the issues that pop up on Linux

And then you suddenly start cooking blue stuff in your mobile kitchen.

It’s funny, but as an adult now… I’m more concerned my ADHD is like this. It’s so annoying. I don’t even mean to do it. I set out to clean my desktop computer files and the next thing I know I’m painting the garage. Oh and ESPECIALLY if something is important. My mind creates these distractions or ‘focuses’ which allow me to fully set my mind on something, as long as it’s to avoid doing something else… 🤦‍♂️

What distro is buddy using 💀

It's either this or everything works for years literally without a single problem.

I'm on Debian and that kind of stuff basically doesn't happen. For the first couple weeks I broke stuff every once in a while because I didn't know how Linux worked, but it's basically been smooth sailing on all my computers for about six months.

Contrast with the Windows 10 on the same laptop which just the other day decided it doesn't want to play anymore. I guess I ran an update the last time I touched it (like a month ago) and now it won't boot. Debian boots perfectly. Even in safe mode, I can't boot into Windows and Automatic Startup repair refuses to work even using both the recovery USB and installation media. Probably going to have to reinstall Windows from scratch.

That's me running Debian. Or rather...

FrankenDebian.

I literally didn't even boot Windows for a month and then when I did, I got BSOD on boot, and it gave me some bullshit about not being able to find a device. How's that for maintenance? I can't say I miss it.

Must be doing something wrong if this is the everyday experience (especially for production). And there's the ones wanting to experiment, which is a different thing. I guess that's why this is a meme.

Been running Fedora since June of last year, and it's the most "boring" distro I've ever used. It's been rock solid and I haven't experienced a single issue. None! I have an all-AMD build. The funny thing is that I recently installed Ubuntu 23.10 on a different PC, and I managed to break it after a couple of hours 😂

Been using Linux on and off since 2008 (ish).

This is why I use Arch. I enjoy the tinkering. One day Arch won't be enough and I will have to install Gentoo. You will probably never hear from me ever again after that. Mostly because I will be too busy compiling firefox again after a minor update.

This is after the third reboot, and automatic updates were off and I never accepted an update. All I wanted to do was sideload obtanium into the Facebook spy mask and I thought it would be easier than figuring out why it wouldn't show up in adb on Linux.

I just turn on the Ubuntu computer, play games, Clic the occasional button to install updates and then keep doing my stuff. No maintenance stuff needed unless I mess something up on purpose with tinkering.

I run Arch by the way

Community will crucify me for this, but Linux DE maintenance is the bane of my existence.

Shit "just works" until it inevitably doesn't, and it takes Linus himself to figure out how to unfuck it due to the absolutely insane level of version churn packages & distros see over the years, making most resources short of "just reinstall it" a fools errand.

Servers? Beautiful. Desktop environments? I literally can't anymore... Having something go to shit when I REALLY need to get something done has forced me to always have Windows on hand.

Which has turned into "Windows primary" and "Linux DE secondary " over the years. I hate Windows, I yearn for my plasma desktop, but it's almost always more reliably stable without maintenance for longer in my experience.

/rant

This is why I run Debian. 😀

paru -Syu

I don't need anything else.

I just turn on my computer and it works, sometimes I have to answer a couple questions zypper asks me when updates do weird things and cause dependency issues but that's not difficult

I don’t use Linux too much, but this matches my experience… I have a raspberry pi 3, running a home automation server.

One day I go to upgrade a plugin for it. It tells me I need to upgrade the home automation server first, so I go do that. It fails because my Node.js install needs to be upgraded too, so I do that. Then, I try to upgrade the home automation server again, but that now fails with a strange error. Stack trace says something about a missing C++ lib in my Node.js install, so I look it up. I try to install the missing library, but it gives more errors. I do more searching and find loads of other people with this issue, my raspbian version can’t support this C++ library version without first being upgraded. Damn, well, it’s midnight and I have work in the morning, I don’t have time for that. I try to get my home automation server up so I can go to bed, but it fails due to problems with the Node.js install. Can’t go to bed without this server running or my smart home accessories don’t work. I try to downgrade to the previous Node.js version. This fails with another error. Couldn’t upgrade, now I can’t downgrade, I’m stuck. I read a thread on GitHub… other people are reinstalling the OS from scratch and starting over. Damn… I start trying to backup my config files so I can do this too. One more check of another post on GitHub and I find some guy shares a command to downgrade Node.js without a fresh OS install. Perfect! I run this, restart my home automation server, and go to bed. Maybe I’ll try to figure out this problem another day.

Classic! Love this clip!!!

This is accurate. Getting error codes in coding is like buy one get an additional 100 free

My Fedora Kinoite box is fucking effortless, it updates in the background just needs a reboot from time to time. I have scripted updating the containers that host my home services, I run the script from time to time and it pulls a new container image and recreates the container, updates the systemd services to match the new container ids.

This can for sure be me when setting stuff up. I'm currently playing around with self-hosting some stuff on my local network, you wouldn't believe the amount of tabs I have open on my desktop, plus on my phone, plus on the laptop I'm using as a server.

This definitely isn't me on a day to day basis though. For the most part, unless I'm actively tinkering, Linux just works.

On the headache-inducing side of things though, I'm currently trying to figure out why I can't run Wordpress over Docker on my laptop. It quickly uses up all resources and even then spits out a "error connecting to database" message when I try to access it.

Type yay hit enter.. Sometimes reboot, sometimes just suspend... Its all pretty wild

yay

NixOS was like this for me in the first 1 or 2 weeks, after that it's been a breeze and very easy to keep my desktop and laptop configurations synced.