- Published:
- Apr 12, 2020
After 10+ years of dedication and constant tinkering, I finally lost my battle with arch Linux.
My installation had not been upgraded for over a year. The first signs of trouble appeared when my primary browser, Firefox stopped updating itself and no longer worked on streaming sites like Amazon Prime Video. Upon investigation, I discovered that Arch had switched to a new archive format called zStandard (zstd
), which my installation didn't support. This breaking change change effectively blocked me from updating anything.
Going by the "Arch philosophy" of upgrading the entire system instead of individual packages, I decided to perform a full system upgrade. I hoped this would also add zstd
support. Unfortunately, this led to a cascade of issues.
The upgraded bumped my Linux kernel to v5, which my old Nvidia GPU doesn't support. Well, there is the open source Nouveau driver. I no longer do any graphics intensive work on that machine. So, I removed the proprietary Nvidia drivers. I no longer had a GUI desktop environment to boot in to. From this point on, I was confined to the CLI.
To compound matters, most of the GPG keys in my keyring were no longer valid. Yes, you can get new keys. Only if you have zstd
support! Talk about a frustrating deadlock.
In a last-ditch effort, I found a binary version of pacman with zstd
support on a third-party site. I manually replaced my existing pacman with this version and updated my keyring. However, package integrity tests continued to fail, forcing me to disable signature checking (not recommended!).
After downloading 4GB of packages, pacman encountered a bazillion file conflicts and refused to proceed. From pacman's error logs I compiled a list of conflicting files and wrote a script to move them out to a temporary location. This allowed me to install a few packages successfully.
With fingers crossed, I started a full system upgrade which completely stalled the machine. After a hard reboot, I was greeted with a kernel panic - the final straw in this arduous process. This was the dead end after three nights of wrestling with these issues.
A Fresh Start
After three nights of battling these issues, I made the difficult decision to move on from Arch Linux. Nuked the /
and /var
directories and installed Manjaro, an Arch-based distribution known for its out-of-the-box functionality.
It's unfair to call Manjaro bloated but it does come with more features and software out of the box, compared to Arch. That may be exactly what I need at the moment. As much as I love geeking out with Arch, my need of the hour is for the OS to stay out of my way so I can get some work done. Hoping Manjaro, with its added layer of polish, will provide that stability and peace of mind.