Update on my new rolling cycle Linux experience

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Slowly things that once gave you joy, that exited you or took up all your time and mental capacity becomes daily life. I have used Gnu/Linux for more than 20 years and my family has been using it for just as long. Yesterday my wife was helping my youngest daughter with some school work on her Microsoft Windows school computer, and after about three seconds she self-ignited and starting shouting about what a ridiculous way to place all the buttons, as if she was a weathered accountant that had had her old ms-dos custom company system replaced with an office suite spreadsheat.

But lately things have changed and I am again slightly interested in how my computer works. Before I changed to Manjaro I always was behind with updating my own and the family computers, running versions of Mageia Linux that no longer was supported. But now we are running Manjaro Linux which has a rolling release cycle (which means that you do not need to update the whole system every 1-2 year). So the thing that really has changed is the software-tools. Nothing is now more interesting than when the little shield icon turns red.


Manjaro.jpg

Everything looks as my old KDE/Plasma workstation did, apart from the Manjaro icon and the software management shield icon.

The thing is that there still is large updates, and even though I do not need to make a bootable usb-stick, I have to watch out for these large changes as I realised with this New Year update. My own computer did fine... log out-log in and I was working with the latest plasma version. Not so with my eldest daughter's computer.

I had told to just update, but after rebooting nothing was as it should be. Her Windows double boot (used for gaming) had no problem, which was a relief. Nothing is worse than installing Windows on a double boot system. But Manjaro Linux jumped directly into some non responsive promt. I couldn't write. It was dead...

So back to my own computer to make an account on the Manjaro Forum, which turned out to be just as responsive and friendly as I have gotten used to from my old distribution. And I was not the only one with this problem.

The Nvidia card is one of those old arch-enemy supervillains of any veteran Linux user (at least if you have top use some of that cryptonite GPU-power). The board was flooded with messages of people with black screens or this promt where you couldn't write anything. I was (as usual suddenly hit by severe depression). But then I started to read and it made (also as usual) no sense at all. Just complicated, weird tech-gibberish. But then I had a response from a forum user with a link to a possible fix. I sat down and read through it sifted away the things that seemed unnecessary and... well it worked! I had to go in through a live-usb and chroot, but then I simply just ran

sudo pacman -S nvidia-utils
sudo pacman -S linux510-nvidia

And I could log in again.

So the wisdom I could distil from this incident was that even though I am happy with the new system it is really just the same old Linux geek life. The larger updates of the windows manager and the kernel still contains dangers and bleak times, and I am obviously not done hanging out on forums.



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5 comments
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Good to hear you fixed it. It's frustrating when updates break things, but the Linux projects may lack the resources to test every configuration.

My Ubuntu Studio system was playing up the other day. Didn't get the login prompt, so did it through a console then startx. It worked, but the theme was messed up. Without me doing anything it was okay the next day. I wouldn't know where to start looking for some issues.

Meanwhile I'm sitting here waiting for my work laptop to restart several times for an update to complete. Welcome to the future.

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Sometimes I am simply out of options when such things happen, but it always end up getting fixed thanks to these forums - The Linux community is much more than just open source programmers.

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Oy. This is why my technology is so awful. This could be me

a weathered accountant that had had her old ms-dos custom company system replaced with an office suite spreadsheat.

DOS was fun, but I do not have the energy for this stuff. I do very much need to upgrade. Do you have any suggestions of where I could start learning about Linux? I barely know what it is.

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Linux is the operating system kernel running inside most of the worlds computers, including Android smartphones. It is free and open source, which just means that the programmers have donated the actual code to the world.

What I am talking about here is an operating system and whole eco system of free software called Gnu/Linux built on top of the Linux kernel. By using it you can run a free system (free both as liberty and free beer).

Here's a video that gives an ok introduction.

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