Meanwhile, I had to reinstall my dualboot of mint because without it I dont have a working grub configuration to boot into KDE Neon. I spent a very bitter sunday convincing myself I could find a solution that doesnt involve keeping a 64GB partition on my home directory purely to appease the fucking UEFI gods.
Latest kernel update restarted my session (closing all programs, including my terminal) before mkinitcpio, easy fix, but yeah, did require live boot media.
Good to know, I'll change when the dists start replacing grub with rEFInd, last time I changed bootloader was lilo -> grub from what I can find it was around 2013 Debian switched.
And also seems to get borked, bricking people's computers every few months.
grub is fine if users manually update it, and know what they're doing. I used grub for years with only a couple of issues of which all were my own fault. But rEFInd has made this particular bit of fuckery unnecessary, and has been a godsend for "The Year of Linux" - which is really just another way of saying "Linux for non-techies."
Okay but jokes aside, how many users actually have issues with that? So far it never broke anything for me, even when it apparently should have, according to a forum post I only read several weeks late, after finally noticing the intervention required tag
I have installed arch on my work laptop two years ago now and I have never had a problem with it booting, logging in or functioning. Never as in not once. I do update it periodically and every time it just fucking works.
I used debian at a desktop at another work and the desktop had an nvidia card in it. Every time apt said “nvidia” the computer booted in single user mode or kernel panic.
The first time that this happened i spend a good chunk of time to learn how to fix the problem without reinstalling, the secound time i just moced everything to another driver, reinstalled and moved everything back, it took a feel hours but most of the time i was just waiting for the files to move, so i was able to do something else instead, i don't use brtfs because it corrupted mi ssd once (i have no idea why), but i'm fine on mint, now i don't have much time at home, and when i do i need to be sure that nothing will broke because i have a lot of work to do from my job and college, i really like arch but i really need something stable right now
I've switched from Arch to Fedora about a decade ago, never had this issue with either. Actually I probably never had this issue with GRUB at all, maybe with LILO...
The faulty GRUB patch was a widespread issue. Syu -> reboot -> fail to boot. It was especially annoyng since you couldn't just rollback like with any other faulty arch update.
Besides that, during the 2-3 years I mained it, I've had Arch often fail to boot after updating it for the first time in a few weeks. And on endeavour the update script gave up one day, and so I had to remember to manually mkinitcpio or it would fail to boot.
My backup pc had the most issues with updates, and it doesn't have a dedicated GPU. I wouldn't update it for a few weeks or a month+, update, fail to boot, rollback, try again in a few weeks and it would work.
The final straw was when I was working abroad with bad internet, and had to weigh whether -S or -Syu is more likely to cause a failure.
Interesting. How long ago was this? I use arch daily as my main driver, but also run it on a vps, a laptop, and a raspberry pi (arm distro). Other than grub, I can't recall the last time upgrading caused an issue.
The last time was 6+ months ago because I stopped using Arch. It happened from time to time on both of my machines, but it had a lot higher chance to happen on that particular pc than on my ThinkPad. I'm guessing it was more frequent because the main one was getting updated multiple times a week.
There was one good warning sign though: if I needed to -Syyu, something was most likely going to go wrong with the update.
I've been using Arch for like 10 years and I never really have any issues. My biggest issue is with the ZFS module, but I solved that by using the LTS kernel.
Happened once around two years ago, s botched update from mainstream or something like that. Made me learn systemd boot which is simple and never EVER use grub again
Perhaps this is on me, but I've had issues with Windows monkeying with GRUB on dual-boot the first year or so I transitioned to Linux. Finally moved to systemd-boot and haven't looked back since.
The intervention last year was only required if the grub package was updated and generated a config the older bootloader didn't understand. You would have been fine either way as long as you didn't generate a new config. I ignore grub updates now because I was caught with my setup.
