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points by com2kid 4 days ago | 0 comments

> Linux: Install and use.

I mean yes, but an update on my Linux box just installed a new kernel, uninstalled the old video card driver, and didn't install a new video card driver.

I have taken to asking claude "is it safe for me to reboot now?" before restarting after updates. So far 3 times in a row it has come back with "no, your system won't startup".

Edit: I also just woke my desktop up from sleep and the alt-tab service failed to resume. Just... wut.

[–] samiv 4 days ago

Unfortunately this is still the reality of many Linux distros. On every update something breaks.

Just as an exMple I'm on arch myself and after last update if I use X11 screen saver with lock some service crashes and the computer cannot be unlocked.

Maybe next update will have a fix but then something else will be broken instead.

Linux (as in the kernel+user space of your choice) is a perpetual alpha. Has been for 30 years and will always be.

Whenever GTK/Gnome becomes reasonable stable it's time for a rewrite!

(And I'm a Linux user since red hat 7.2)

[–] anthk 4 days ago

I stopped to care since Flatpak. Pull down the same dependencies everywhere. Oh, disk usage, right. It's 2026, and BTRFS either compresses stuff and/or deduplicates.

[–] anthk 4 days ago

Get an inmutable distro. For everything else, Flatpak. For gaming, AppImages are not sandboxed but you can always create a user account for gaming and logout/login again to avoid nasty surprises.

For instance, I use RecompLauncher as an AppImage, but I launch the recompilations themselves from a desktop shortcut after closing the launcher to get every CPU cycle for the game.

[–] tom_alexander 4 days ago

Both AMD and Intel have open source graphics drivers which are upstreamed into the Linux kernel, so that situation would be impossible with an AMD or Intel graphics card. Any driver issues are a pain that nvidia decided to inflict on you.

[–] prmoustache 4 days ago

I am not sure you know what you are talking about. What is the "alt-tab service" you are speaking about. There is no systemd service with that name in any linux distro I have used.

Also if you are able to know that the new video card driver hasn't been installed, you also know that you can solve this by doing it yourself. In that case why wouldn't you do it?

Ultimately if all those things are too hard for you there are a number of immutable "image" based distros where packages/drivers aren't managed individually during updates and where you can always boot to the previous version. Maybe that is what you need.

[–] com2kid 3 days ago

> There is no systemd service with that name in any linux distro I have used.

Cosmic desktop uses a separate executable just for alt-tab. Currently there is a bug where sometimes it falls to grab ahold of a surface when the system wakes from sleep, and the process dies, and then alt-tab doesn't work.

> Also if you are able to know that the new video card driver hasn't been installed, you also know that you can solve this by doing it yourself. In that case why wouldn't you do it?

If I run my distro's updater, and I then reboot when it asks me to reboot, I expect my system to properly start up.

I've had that not happen so many times now that before rebooting I ask Claude if rebooting is safe.

Most recently I was informed that my kernel had been updated, my old graphics driver uninstalled, but the installation of the new graphics driver had not proceeded as expected. Mind you the updater reported everything as a-ok.

[–] prmoustache 2 days ago

> I was informed that my kernel had been updated, my old graphics driver uninstalled, but the installation of the new graphics driver had not proceeded as expected. Mind you the updater reported everything as a-ok.

It may have been ok anyway. Without further details we can't say. Most drivers are included with mainline kernels so your "old graphic driver" may have been an out of distribution gfx driver (nvidia?) that doesn't support new version of kernel for example or said driver may have been replaced by something else with a different name.

[–] com2kid 1 day ago

The driver binaries for the old kernel got cleaned up and new ones never got downloaded. I'd have been stuck on the CLI, which wouldn't have been the end of the world, I'd just have to pull the drivers down myself.

But not an experience for non-technical friends.

I am using Nvidia so I have to be very careful. I regularly run into issues with system vs flatpak driver versions getting out of sync and losing acceleration in most of my apps. Thankfully it has happened so many times now I know how to resolve it quickly.