System Stability

October 17, 2022

The #1 reason I hear to discourage people from using rolling-release Linux distributions is that they're unstable and will constantly break. However, I'd like to present an anecdote here about how I've had more issues with Debian in terms of updates breaking things than I ever have had on Artix (an systemd-less Arch derivative).

And no, I don't mean rolling releases only caused minor issues that I already knew how to fix so those issues don't count like someone on the Fediverse strawmanned a week or two ago. I mean in the four years I've been running Artix, I literally have never had to touch my any configuration or have to pause my normal tasks to fix stuff after an update, bar one (1) time over a year ago. Notably the one singular time it had an issue after an update, it was very weird and difficult to debug, wheras with Debian it usually is obvious where the issue is and you just have to fiddle a bit to fix it. The problem was that my my hosts file was improperly formatted, and there was an update to some component of the system that made hosts file parsing stricter; but what made it confusing is that networking itself worked fine and the only issues were bizarre Xorg errors, for reasons that remain unknown to me:

https://tilde.zone/@nytpu/105782619220741231

I've had issues on Debian every time there's a full release, typically fixing weird driver and firmware breakages. I am being a bit unfair to Debian because the system I have it running on has a very bizarre hardware configuration, and I have no monitor for it so I depend on ssh to work unless I want to haul it and plug it into my TV. That's not even taking into account all the issues I've had trying to get various software from outside of the Debian repos compiled and running on it, since outdated packages naturally come with the territory of Debian.

Rather unrelated, but I'd like to point out that systemd-journald corrupts the logs every time the system shuts down abnormally because the root disk is a slow 2.5 inch 5400 RPM HDD scavenged out of a netbook; and since journald is galaxy-brain and uses binary files instead of plaintext for logs, the corruption makes even minor issues 100x harder to debug. (This computer has four 10 TB WD Reds in it and yet that disk holds the actual root partition lol)

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P.S. I know I've gone quiet for a long time (at least compared to previous gaps); but rest assured I still read stuff on Gemini almost every day and somehow haven't grown any less enamored with it. I just haven't written anything myself because I made the unwise decision to take 18 credit hours of classes this semester and as such have been pretty busy; plus I just haven't felt like I had much to write about.

Actually, that latter point not quite true, there's a few things I've wanted to write about but it's all tech-related stuff that I feel disincentivised to write about because everyone on Gemini complains about there being too much tech-centric content. Plus I doubt anyone cares about reading my turgid prose other than when I write a reference guide or something.