• 0 Posts
  • 18 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 12th, 2023

help-circle




  • I have been an Arch user for years now and anytime I touch a debian based distro it is such a headache: weird patched packages that don’t compile anything past or present, insta dependency hell with PPAs, package names of 200 characters because apt doesn’t have a good way to represent metadata… It made me a strong believer that trying to fight the bit rot and stick to the old stuff is counterproductive: a consistent head based development with a good community fixing bugs super quickly results in less hours of work fighting the paleolithic era dependencies, safer (as security fixes are faster to get in, packages are foreign to hackers and constantly changing etc), easier to find documentation as you don’t need to dig into history to find which option existed or not, recent stuff is also easier to support for the developers of the various packages as it is fresh in their minds. Another point is to look at it from a tech debt lens: either you fix your stuff to work with current deps now or you just accumulate tech debt for the next engineer to fix in a way larger and combining a mountain of breakages in the future that of course IT and SREs will never want to do until the 15y old software is a disaster of security issues…



  • Your overall process is perfect: first try to solve it from the UI, then the console, then the magic sysreq key.

    The fact that your kernel was not responding to the sysreq key could mean a couple things: is it enabled on your install? (cat /proc/sys/kernel/sysrq to check)

    Before trying to understand why the kernel locked up, are you sure everything is solid on the hardware side? ie. Did you overclock anything? If yes did you burn test the PC on some GPU demo?



  • I have seen another contributing factor in CS: it is really hard for the management to keep a good senior to junior ratio ie. A lot of juniors are trying to enter the workforce today. It means that during covid and shortly after the companies definitely relaxed as much as they could the geographical constraints for senior remote roles, also being senior they trusted them to work remotely not needing too much direct supervision. And now it backfires when your company is in silicon valley and you ask your senior developer from the boonies Colorado to move to an industrial concrete jungle.





  • I use paru and the default is “paru” with no parameter for the upgrade. But I am on your team here: I have to Google every single time the -Q params for all the queries and I have been using arch for almost 2 decades now: “who owns this file?” “what are the deps of this package?” “Which packages are installed?” “Which packages I explicitly installed vs dependencies?” Not a single one of them is intuitive to query with the pacman command line for some reason.


  • For me: Gentoo is a meta distro, you are the distro maintainer then the power user of that specific distro you created for yourself which can definitely be fun. Arch is more like: let’s give you one instance of a Gentoo distro when you are tired of being the distro maintainer.