The power is out and my laptop has less than 10% battery left?
It's pacman -Syu time.
this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2024
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Exactly my thoughts as well.
Why update on that little battery life left... the power will return sooner or later, going without updates even for a week or two is no real problem. Hell, I update like once every 3 weeks to a month, it's not that big of a deal.
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Wait if the power is out, how do they have Internet to load new packages? Something doesn't make sense here
It first downloads all packages from net, then it proceed totally offline starting by verifying downloaded files, signatures, extracting new packages and finally rebuilding initramfs.
Because arch is replacing the kernel and inittamfs in-place there is a chance that it will not boot if interrupted.
This issue was long resolved on other distro.
One way to mitigate it is by having multiple kernels (like LTS or hardened) that you can always pick in grub if the main one fail.
This issue was solved on Slackware in 1993.
It installs a "huge" kernel that contains all drivers to run on almost any hardware by default, alongside the "generic" kernel with only the modules you need. If the generic kernel fails to boot, you always have the backup, which is known to work, cause it's the kernel you first boot into after installation.
I'm not familiar with slackware but why is specific kernel called generic, while generic one is not called generic? I'm puzzled
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Cable internet tends to stay online even if your power is out. You'd need a battery backup for your modem/router, but it is possible to stay online. Houses can be clever like that, almost all of your utilities will partially work, even when service is interrupted.
That depends on the ISP having backup batteries for their equipment. It will usually only last a couple of hours. 5G will usually stay up for a few days. For longer outages, you will need satellite internet and lots of fuel for your generator.
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I don't think I've had a pacman update take longer than 10 minutes before. Sounds like OP was updating all their AUR packages too.
Still absolutely a terrible thing to do on 10% battery life. I bet there's an AUR package for "check battery level before update" out there somewhere though.
OPs meme is "use distro whose model is 'give users enough rope to hang themselves' " and complaining he's at the gallows
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shutdown a computer when you shouldn’t computer breaks
how could a computer do this
Power outages do happen, and I'm pretty sure 90% of the people on this community are not using an UPS.
Given enough users and enough time, it's inevitable that a power outage will happen to some people at an inopportune moment, like while updating an important package like the kernel.
Blaming the user for this is not fair, it's just dumb bad luck.
That said, OP could have done a bit more to fix the issue instead of being an angry man yelling at the cloud. When you're using Arch, the expectation is that you are able to fix relatively simple problems like this, or that you're at least willing to learn it. If you find yourself getting angry when Arch doesn't hold your hand, you probably shouldn't have chosen Arch.
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I think I didn't make it clear enough: My laptop was on the power during the update process, when the power randomly cut out - for the first time in about 6 years, it doesn't happen often. Of course you can interpret it as user error - but I think it's reasonable to update my system when plugged into, normally reliable power. The laptop battery is pretty much dead, so it would've shut itself down automatically anyway.
sure, but what os wouldn't break if you did this?
Just about any Linux I've ever used keeps the previous kernel version and initrd around. And nowadays snapper makes a new snapshot before and after every package installation or update.
So, I'd think there are a lot.
So what I'm hearing is install Linux-LTS and pacsnap
Plus in Linux you can actually fix this with a live USB, while on Windows you can run startup repair and hope for the best.
In Windows you can also fix this with a live Windows USB, manually.
Windows doesn't in my experience, it's surprisingly robust.
But also I thought Linux distros normally keep the old Kernel around after an update so stuff like this doesn't cause a boot failure?
Yeah windows "cumulative update" upgrades for the past couple of years basically duplicate the whole system directory and apply the update to that leaving the existing one to roll back to if anything fails
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Any immutable distro, Debian, Ubuntu, all their derivatives, Fedora, all its derivatives, OpenSUSE, Slackware, ...
Basically, 95+% of installed Linux systems would retain the old or a backup kernel during an upgrade.
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I still don't get the problem. Are you complaining you have to chroot into your system and finish the update because your power got interrupted? Is a 5 min detour into a live system making you unconfortable? This is how you would fix it in any distro except the image based ones and the arch wiki will guide you excellently how to do it. Good luck!
I mean any which way you try to frame this, saying that you won’t use Arch anymore because you didn’t take the precautions necessary based on your situation is gonna take some heat here.
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- Boot to usb
- Mount your root filesystem
arch-chrootyour mounted root filesystem- mount
/boot mkinitcpio -p linux
Steps 1,2 and 3 are the entry way to solve all "unbootable Arch" problems by the way, presuming you know what needs to be changed to fix it of course.
I'd gladly take an Arch wiki article
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Out of curiosity: Which operating system(s) can you shutdown while the kernel is being overwritten? I wouldn't imagine that as a limitation of Arch Linux specifically.
I think fedora would survive this abuse. It doesn't replace when you install kernels, but instead adds it.
Also Fedora ships 3 kernels by default. If one breaks, maybe the others will keep working.
With Manjaro you choose how much kernels you want.
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Arch Linux with 2 kernels ;)
Mint definitely keeps a couple of previous kernels around, so that might be a Debian and Ubuntu thing too.
That said, there's always going to be a critical point of failure that a power loss could cause things to break, no matter your OS or distro.
Writing the bootloader or updating a partition table for example.
Anything running on a copy-on-write filesystem can trivially rollback changes using a rescue partition.
I also expect most immutable distros would be able to be especially good at tanking this.
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If you're planning for this type of failure, what you probably want instead is Aurora from the Universal Blue project. Since it's fedora silverblue underneath, your OS either updates all at once or doesn't.
"Arch is stable"
It is! My Desktop hardly ever topples over!
So I'm trying to understand if you think that shutting down an update during regenerating the initramfs indicates that Arch isn't stable? Because that's a FAFO move and would crater any non-atomic update distro.
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When talking about Linux, "stable" usually means "doesn't have major changes often", or in other words, "doesn't have lots of updates that break stuff". That's why "Debian stable" is called that. Arch is not that.
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I have LTS and zen kernels installed in addition to the default Arch one, that should prevent this yes?
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This is why you keep a backup kernel
Ive been here. U can use a bootable usb to boot. Then use switch root to change to ur actual filesystem (I'm glossing over a lot of complications here ask chatgpt) and update from here or just copy over the kernal.
When I used Arch I updated once and it removed the running kernel and its modules. So when I plugged in a webcam it didn't work, since the module was gone.
Not a catastrophe, but it was an off-putting user experience coming from Debian. Arch felt more like a desktop OS, Debian feels more like a server OS to me (updates generally warn/confirm when you need to restart services or the machine).
To each their own! Having more up to date stuff was a nice perk of running Arch, certainly.
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