Follow-up from “Dumbest Thing you have done distro-hopping?”.

Here’s mine - the laptop from which I’m typing right now has a broken touchpad that keeps jumping and clicking randomly, and does not work. Well, I can’t afford to fix it, but at the moment, I was so pissed off I punched the touchpad really hard, and the machine panicked with all the lights blinking. A few more revival abuses, and the machine was back to life, but since I was running a nixos-rebuild switch --upgrade in the background, I blew off my boot partition. I think I just broke the unbreakable distro.

  • Pantherina@feddit.de
    2·
    10 months ago

    Immutable Distros are key here. If an update fails its on their side and you simply dont get it. Havent tried it as I dont use NVIDIA stuff, but ublue-nvidia images are said to be very stable because of that

    • shadowintheday@beehaw.org
      2·
      10 months ago

      I mean the problem isn’t the update process itself, it’s Nvidia changing and breaking things that we have no idea. You only know when you boot up and suddenly something that was working such as a display arrangement gets messed up. After a few years using Linux you get used to cheroot using a live USB and downgrading Nvidia. Would immutable distros solve this?

      • Pantherina@feddit.de
        2·
        10 months ago

        Immutable distros solve the “distro broke and now its not booting” as in that case you wont get an update.

        Maybe if their testing is good other bugs are detected too. Also, everyone has the same OS. So the community can quickly report breakages and the update can be reverted.

        For easy rollbacks, regular BTRFS snapshots work too. But not sure if these boot options are just the kernel, Fedora has this by default. I guess immutable OSses are better here too.

        So having some way to detect nvidia updates (this is an open field but could be great, like a popup “nvidia drivers updated!”, as updates are done automatically in the background) could help. Always if you get this popup, reboot and check the OS veeery thoroughly.

        You could also increase the number of backup deployments to keep, like 3-4 or so. Takes up some extra GB of space but not really a problem.

        Or, you could do an ostree admin pin 0 whenever an update with nvidia finished. Then reboot and check it out. If it breaks, you have that working version pinned, just reboot and you have your working system back.

        So… yes immutable distros fix this XD