I found Garuda some time back, looking for an Arch, and wanting to try KDE again, after years of sticking with reliable ol’ MX w/ XFCE. In particular, I wanted the same OS on my laptop as desktop, and my laptop needs easy to configure GUI scaling. Gaming was finally getting good enough to ditch Windows. But, with rolling releases there must also come rolling inconsistencies. That’s especially true when using the latest hardware under Linux.
- You guys, or maybe Arch’s guys, decided to restructure the firmware packages, so I couldn’t update, right after I changed hardware. Even --overwrite ‘*’ didn’t get the job done. But, the problem files were some Nvidia files, and I haven’t bought anything Nvidia in many years. So, I removed that package, with prejudice. In my haste, I was not paying attention to the fact it was removing all of them. I then reboot. No wired network adapter. No wireless network adapter. Sub-1FPS SDDM screen (took a few minutes to successfully log in), and a slow half-scrambled desktop. GPU fans were going full blast. Upon seeing the lack of networking, what I did hit me. Oops. Automatically created snapshots to the rescue, at least far enough to get wire networking at boot, and fix the packages. I saw the forum posts, this time, and then did the update with extra steps, and decided to wait a few days before updating my other Garuda machine.
- Still with kind of immature Navi 4x drivers, I was messing around with power options, and got no GUI (SDDM), just a black screen, after a bunch of red lines flew by too fast to read, upon a reboot. I wasn’t rebooting after trying every little thing, so who knows what it was. After disabling modesetting, and with some debug mask in the kernel params, I could kinda get in there, but not to a GUI, and the errors I could get through dmesg were leading down unproductive rabbit holes. Somewhere along the way, it failed to mount sysroot, so it may have been more of a FS issue all along. It took a bit of searching for BTRFS tricks, to get out of that (the root entry was right, and I could mount all the subvolumes manually, so I was scratching my head a bit, at first), but then the snapshots worked, after getting BTRFS to go fix itself, and I was able to go back. I still don’t know what I did, but hopefully I won’t do it again.
- The weirdest one, from just a day ago. Everything was going just fine, except my CPU was locked to 3GHz. I regularly use sleep. While it reliably comes back, that happens maybe once every 20 times, or something like that – too rare to try to look into, and it only really affects CPU-heavy games. I have a 5700X3D, and the firmware tends to be very ticky about power management settings. So, I reboot, like I’d do any other time. It says my password is wrong. I bring up the OSK, just in case there’s been a secret layout change, or something (like an RPi OS changing to GB layout on its own), but same deal. I get the latest ISO, boot it up, garuda-chroot in, reset my password there, try to update, and then reboot. Nope. Everything I find on the web doesn’t seem to be my problem, exactly. The worst thing is that the newest snapshots that actually go back past any updates are days old, and I just spend a good bit of time installing the latest The Witcher 3 and mods (I played it once when it came out, then haven’t touched it since, so there have been many updates, two expansions, and mods galore). But, what could I really do? I hadn’t paid much attention to exactly how Snapper was configured, up to this point, and was expecting to start all that over. So, I rolled back to the 14th, and lo, everything in ~ was still there, open browser tabs and all. I reset my password, just in case, updated, updated, updated, and updated a few more times, before it got everything, rebooted again, and all has been well (warning about intermittent Intel WiFi driver issues in that other thread made mine angry, I think).
I’ve had a few more minor cases, too, since getting a RX 9070 XT only just after release. But, those above were the most notable, and the cases where it would have been a real pain to recover, with a traditional installation.