Features & Stability Questions

Ain’t that the truth!! As a programmer, I think the same thing… layers upon layers of abstractions that change at any time.

Another video to watch :slight_smile:

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I told my computer to kill itself and it did. My computer is:

  • Great, it does as its told
  • Crap, it killed itself
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I strongly disagree here. Lots of people use their computer to work and it just has to work. They have no time to “debug their laptop” instead of delivering work.

The video above, he didn’t do anything unreasonable, he just tried to install some app with the Garuda Assistant and it broke everything. He re-installed fresh and tried again with no luck.

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You misunderstand. Computers LITERALLY barely work, that's why so much money is spent on tech support in business (though typically not nearly enough, which often ends up costing them more in the long run).

Imagine trying to fit modern vehicle safety features, fuel economy & comfort features into the chassis of a 1970s car, using the same drivetrain. That's what's computers are doing. It BARELY works thanks to a lot of really smart and dedicated people. It could work much better, but there's not enough profit in it for those industries to invest, especially when they can make so much more money from tech support. (think of the car industry making highly reliable cars... they'd lose too much money from maintenance).

I'm just trying to provide you with the context of the situation. The only way to have "stable and reliable" is to not update it at all, which means you can't run the latest software, the internet would quickly move too far ahead and the security holes that exist would be exploited and you'd be hacked.
"Maintain a robust backup solution" isn't tech guys "get out of jail free card", it's an acknowledgement of the problem and a way to minimize harm when the inevitable happens.

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We can’t tell you what happened to someone else’s computer. I am not going to watch a 30 minute video to find out.

I did skim through it and it seems clear that he doesn’t understand two things:

  • How a rolling distro works as it relates to updates
  • How to uncheck the box in pamac that installs updates when installing software. (Not that you should)

As someone who has installed an Arch-based distro on his wife’s laptop I have some advice here. Don’t.

The reality is it doesn’t “Just work”. You need a bit of knowledge to have long-term success with any Arch-based distro.

When I switched my wife over to PopOs my life got a lot easier.

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As someone who has installed an Arch-based distro on his wife’s laptop I have some advice here. Don’t.

dalto I think you answer my question the best. Garuda makes installation the smoothest and easiest, but being Arch-based, it will break sooner or later – at which point I’ll need to debug and seek help.

ON THE OTHER HAND…

So far, I’ve had less issues with Garuda than I had with Korin OS. There was an issue that Steam wouldn’t respect DPI scaling and in fact would display smaller than normal instead of larger! There is no such issue in Garuda. So it’s a trade-off. More things work out-of-the-box but more things will break the box.

I think I’ll install Zorin OS on my wife’s laptop, and Garuda on mine. While I love Zorin’s simplicity (such as renaming app names to “Software”, “Partitions”, “Music”), I also feel that its over-simplicity can get in the way of properly learning Linux. I need to dig to find the “real” name of the default apps.

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I would disagree on both points.

  1. Garuda uses the Calamares installer, as do many Linux distros, so its no easier or harder than the dozens of distros that rely on the same installer.
  2. Being Arch-based does not predispose a system to breakage, far from it. I have run Arch for a couple of years without one single breakage, and very few manual interventions. Arch is about as stable as Debian in my experience. I have a few rules: don’t get stuff from the AUR and always use pacman to do all package management. As long as I follow those two rules, Arch is rock solid. The occasional package from the AUR may be fine, but keep it simple and build the package yourself with the pkgbuild file. All third party package managers will screw up your system sooner or later.

A corollary to point 2 is that any Arch-based system that strays from Arch will be less stable than Arch. The more customization a respin builder puts into their Arch-based system, the more likely it is to break. Stay as close to the source as possible. Best is to learn to install Arch by hand if you want the most reliable system.

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On that point, Garuda has tons of customization that may or may not run nicely with some Arch updates in the future (?)

I also read somewhere that Garuda was using some stuff from the AUR out-of-the-box (can someone confirm?)

Also Garuda Assistant to install apps – that’s using PacMan right? With the video above, it was the pacman system update that screw things up it seems. On a fresh install, why would a pacman system update break things? Seems like a bogus package in the repository; as he tried again with another clean Garuda install and it failed again.

I don’t think it uses any packages from AUR itself. However, since chaotic-aur is also Garuda’s repo, there are packages from there in the base install.

Is there a point in the above video where you can actually see a pacman update “breaking” his system? I didn’t watch the whole video but it mostly seemed to be him ranting and claiming it broke his system.

The incident starts at 8:40

It's not a ranting video at all, it's mostly positive. He just ran into some issues, doing the same things I'd do myself.

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A lot of those “customizations” occur subsequent to installation, and depend upon how and what additional software is installed by the user. Please don’t base your expectations on an event that you have yet to instigate by installing Garuda.

Yes, as do many (all?) of the “arch-based” distributions I have investigated over a period of several years.

Garuda is a rolling-release and, as such, packages in the repositories are updated subsequent to the distribution’s spin date. So “things may happen” that require user-intervention. I believe Garuda and other “bleeding/leading edge” distributions are not well suited to beginners and/or users not willing or not able to self-educate.

I absolutely believe everything @eznix postulated in his post above. That he has devoted the time and work to base his points upon, is very obvious. He is the type of user for which Arch is best suited. In my opinion.

Anyone that wants to be successful with Arch or Arch-based distributions need only follow the practices outlined in @eznix brief post. Including myself. I doff my hat to you, sir.
:wink:

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I saw that part, but doesn’t show anything actually breaking. There is no way to know if the system failed or the reviewer did something wrong.

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omg... ok, so I just listened to that section, and ....
I will not say anything more, unless I am allow to go full rant mode!
And I don't mean ranting as "personal", but merely technical ranting!

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So… he clicked “install” and it started updating the system too (I’d assume to make sure there wasn’t a partial update). Then, it closed the terminal once installation finished.

Then he goes on a rant about how updates are bad and it’s somehow hypocritical that a Linux distro would want to update its installed packages.

I stopped watching when he got annoyed - again - that packages were going to be updated.

As has been said, this guy has a fundamental misunderstanding about how a Linux distro works - it seems he’s expecting a consumer OS.

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Many of its apps stopped working after that. He tried Garuda Assistant's "reinstall all packages" -- that's where it failed a bricked, going from bad to worse. From a fresh system install so he didn't do anything fancy.

On the other hand, when his applications started throwing errors on launch, could he have simply rebooted and restored to a previous time? Is the Btrfs restore automatic or he'd need to create checkpoints or something?

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Yes; it’s why Garuda includes this functionality.

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If you look at Game over, Windows - YouTube he is installing wine-staging instead of wine. He said he was installing wine, but he was getting a testing version instead of the version out of the chaotic-aur from Garuda. Possible problem? :stuck_out_tongue:

Also, wine has seen a few updates recently:

It is certainly possible that a wine version is simply now breaking games that used to work?

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Yes, and I think you should test it quickly on a vm or so ( tip: try quickemu, its pretty good for “quick … emulation” :slight_smile: with --display sdl, that uses virgl, desktop performance is almost native )

Try to do what he did, or do a “poo poo” on purpose. and then restore it! that way, you will be relaxed knowing that you can always restore and get working.

As to installing to wife’s laptop… If you don’t mind this restoring when issues appear, do it. If not, then i second @dalto 's advice.

Now the bad news that I have to be honest is that … you will never be safe! see external disk backups, I use borg, but there are others: restic, kopia, bupstash, etc.
There is nothing, in windows or linux land, that is “safe” ( although distro’s like debian stable or rhel clones, etc kinda are almost there ).

For example, see my thread about kernel 5.15 and bcache. It only lasted from 5.15.0 to 5.15.2 ( 5.15.3 was already good ) but anyone using bcache would LOSE EVERYTHING .

About the youtube video, the only thing that I totally understand the dude, is when he explains why he is salty. I too get frustrated with all the fanboys and idiots saying that linux is perfect and will make your pentium 2 with 512MB of ram fly like a 32 core threadripper, without any single bug, forever!
But then again, being a victim of stupid advices/opinions, he decides to create some of those himself.
I would fully respect him, if he had the trouble to video shoot the problem and show it. He didn’t cared enough to give it a serious try.

Bottom line: Garuda has some pro’s, has some con’s. Its up to you to see what your priorities are. If anything happens, we are here to help, if you approach us with seriousness and respect!

EDIT: As replying directly to this topic’s tittle: Garuda has all/most features, it isn’t missing on features for sure.
The stability is a little compromised because its rolling release, from arch, ( which is very quickly updated ). There are ways to mitigate that, easilly and quickly. But if you are looking for a “fire and forget” distro… maybe … not garuda :slight_smile:

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Garuda’s stability is not so much compromised from Arch’s rolling release system, but from mixing chaotic-aur packages in with stock Arch packages and expecting it to just work over time. Eventually, things will break. In the video it was evident that one, if not some, of the game emulators he was trying to install had a dependency on wine-staging which conflicted with wine from the chaotic-aur supplied version.

I have come across a few chaotic-aur to Aur conflicts. I mean, if you know what you are doing, not hard to fix, but I always imagine a newbie would freak-out.