1y ago

chroot is still black magic

28 comments

I never understood these. Arch has always been rock solid for me and in 10 years or so I have never had to chroot to fix an issue. The most annoying issues have been related to PGP signatures or old certificates but those have been easily fixed.
What is it you people do to your arch installs that fucks them up so much?
- forcing reboot when mid update cause u think the system froze
  
  Drop to tty when in doubt
  
  Flashbacks to me having borked my manjaro install trying to update after having gotten stable diffusion running on older AMD hardware, and subsequently panicking and fucking it up more trying to repair it
  
  I redownload and reinstall all packages if an update is interrupted. Sometimes a pacman -Syu completes the upgrade but usually it is not enough. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Pacman/Tips_and_tricks#Reinstalling_all_packages
- The only time is during setup once I forgot to download iwd so I had to chroot back in to install that from within the installer.
- I've fucked up my grub install before, that's the only time I've needed to use it, and it was an easy fix
- X11 had some breaking updates in the past, my monolithic multi monitor config was suddenly in the wrong spot. Or packages I was supposed to delete before an upgrade according to the newspage, but I updated impulsively bam chroot times. That was years ago and made me switch, maybe it has become better?
- Nvidia driver (not me, I'm poor)
  dubious/niche AUR packages
  Wrong settings on BIOS/UEFI
  Windows Update on dual-boot setup (sometimes)
  I don't know why, but my archlinux bootloader always disappear if I connet bootable disk when my computer is booting, lol...
  
  What the hell are people finding on the AUR? I just need it to install like... Discord and Lutrus?
  
  It's possible your uefi has a thing about default EFI boot names. I ended up changing mine to just boot because if I update the bios it clears everything and doesn't automatically pick up any EFI except boot.
- Using Manjaro+Nvidia. About a 20% of kernel or driver updates leaves me with a black screen. Then I do rollback and wait for a bit more stable version ¯(ツ)_/¯
  
  Your mistake was using manjaro
- I recently had to when sbupdate wasn't compatible with the latest systemd
- Only time I've had to do it so far was due to dual booting Windows and it overriding boot thingies. Apart from that it has been running more or less flawlessly for a few years now.

In and out, 20 minutes...
- Best I can do is 20 business minutes.

Btrfs snapshots are a blessing. Call me a cheater :P
- Timeshift makes it even easier
  
  Timeshift <<< btrfs + snapper
  Snapper comes (at least in TW) with snapper-grub, so yeah, you can go back to a working state from grub.
  If an update botches your boot process, you're SOL with Timeshift.