Most definitely! Although I haven’t found much!
Recently did the do-release-upgrade thing to Ubuntu 24.01 LTS on my three Ubuntu machines, worked fun on all but my old quad core AMD 8gb backup machine, couldn’t even reboot. No worries, home and backup are on separate drives, but I decided to install Debian instead. Thing is, as an eval system it’s not likely to tell me much, it has gnome but I usually only do shell stuff on it.
Distro upgrades are pretty foolproof now, irritated I had to spend time on it. Got enough on my hands now trying to figure out c++20. Grrrrr…
4 Likes
I had a full system crash mid update on arch a few days ago. This borked my system heavily as I couldn’t boot into it. After using chroot, pacman wouldn’t even work since libssl was missing. Thankfully you can now use pacman with a different root, so from the install ISO I managed to reinstall pacman, libssl, and gnupg, then chroot into my installation and do a full system reinstall (2400 packages) and it worked just fine afterwards.
I had just finished moving my system to a different ssd with clonezilla, so I had a working copy, but it takes so much time moving 2TB that this route was faster. It did leave a sour taste in my mouth “I’m too old for this” 
2 Likes
On my Arch systems I use a second partition to keep a copy of the root system. In case of an emergency, I can boot the substitute system. When I find the time, I can at leisure repair the main system. However, two times during the last 13 years I “destroyed” the main system completely (in both cases entirely my fault 
) and had to mirror the substitute system back to the main system.
The synchronization is done every few weeks by rsync (script) and is quite fast, because only changed files are transferred.
3 Likes
That’s a good solution, I’ll look into that 
Since I’m not using a filesystem that has snapshots I can’t take advantage of that, so that seems like a good solution.
I already have a home backup, but never looked into backing up my root system.
Let me tell you about NixOS! Yes its a pain to get going the first time, but after that updates are pain and stress free and its quite hard to boink your whole system. Even if you do boink it, you can rebuild quickly to exactly the same place.
2 Likes
NixOS does looks great and I’ve read about it here and there, but as an outsider the developer community has so much drama that I never committed.
This being the most recent one A few months ago was the whole defense contractor and Jon Ringer being banned. Although I’m sure the distro itself is fine as a lot of people use it without problems. A lot of these problems seem to arise from the way they govern themselves, as opposed to more quiet distros that have BDFLs.
1 Like
Yes that is all true, rough time right now, but its being worked on. That doesn’t make the technology less good
2 Likes
Yes they are, but I still like to keep the older version on hand and bootable. So I copy my new root and home partitions elsewhere, get it bootable and running, and upgrade that. All data is on other file systems, including eg browser and mail config/data files, so I can have as many running OSs as I like.
I’ve never yet had to go back, but it is nice to know I can.
3 Likes