I undertook a sizeable upgrade today, bringing a skylake era build into the 2020s with a 13th gen. All core components- memory, motherboard, GPU, everything must goā¦ except the drives. We were nervous, my friend really felt we should reinstall. There was debate, and drama. Considerations and exceptions. No, I couldnāt let my OS go. I have spent years tweaking and tuning, molding my ideal computing environment. We pushed forward.
Well Iām pleased to say it was mostly uneventful. The ethernet adapter was renamed causing misconfigured dhcp, but otherwise it booted right up like nothing happened. Sorry, linux is boring now.
Sorry, linux is boring now now.
I found that on OpenSUSE. Once getting past the learning curve of linux and OpenSUSEās general use, It has updated flawlessly for years and there is never anything to tinker with.
Not tumbleweed, right? I recall generally recall liking it until the kde 6 update broke everything if you tried to update from konsole in kde, and I remember others having the same issue. Not sure how they didnāt catch that.
I was considering tumbleweed on my work laptop. This makes me nervous. Was it easy to fix?
Itās fixed. In general no distro is fail safe, recently even an immutable distro (our current hopeful advance in update reliability) had a hickup on an update that required manual intervention. It basically boils down to that itās not possible to test for everything, we can only hope to continually add more test cases and improve human procedures based on post mortems.
Some would kill for an uneventful upgrade.
Thatās one thing I donāt like about modern Linux is how it names network interfaces.
I miss the old eth0,1,3 or wlan0,1,2 etc.
Iām going to do the same later this year as like you my setup is 10 years plus, though Iāll re-install Arch again What MB, GPU card etc did you buy? , as Iām out of touch with the latest equipment now, so would be grateful for a heads up
I like your build a lot. Donāt forget to move your OS to another drive via clone or something occasionallyā¦ Your old drive will wear out eventually. If itās SSD, they often just work until they just donāt, so itās not like the old days when an HDD would just slow down and give you a warning.
Cheers!
Thank you :) I tried to be reasonable with it, itās all too easy to break the bank haha. I have two āsystemā ssds that replicates itself with a weekly rsync job, and the larger storage SSD has an even larger SATA HDD it syncs to. Good looking out!
I can recommend this site for up-to-date and fairly neutral parts recommendations split by budget https://www.logicalincrements.com
^^^ so many motherboards available not sure what iād even be looking for
Motherboards are tough to recommend because it really depends what you need from your system. My approach was to choose a CPU first then I could start looking at boards supporting the socket. I wanted ATX, nothing smaller. Memory support, just DDR5 and room to expand (it turns out most boards will handle like 192GB these days lol). I wanted the ability to change CPU frequency, that eliminated boards with a B-series chipsets. Next SSD support (at least 3x m.2) and USB ports (minimum 6x USB 3.0). Finally price, I didnāt want to exceed $250.
When all that was dialed in, I was left with like 8 options, from there it was manageable to read reviews for the nuance between them.
Congrats. First of all this really made me feel old ā¦ Skylake seems recent to me and thatās the year my kid was born. But secondly, this reminds me of those people who used to post in /r/debian about having like 20 years on the same install and they just kept changing the hardware and if a drive ever got replaced they used dd to clone from one drive to another without reinstalling. So when they would do something like stat /, it would be something like 2002 that the filesystem was created. I think those people/stories are awesome.
I think our expectations are pretty jacked up here because thatās how all the operating systems I remember are. Just pull the drive and plug it in another computer. From the DOS days to the BSD world. Itās only Windows and macOS that are the outliers here with their ātrusted computingā bullshit. They created the problem with tying the install to the hardware, and then they sold the solution of backing up to their cloud for a monthly subscription if your hardware ever just died.
Me either. My longest install is about to turn 5, but thatās an OpenBSD closet laptop server that gets upgraded remotely with every release.
Iām doing okay on this laptop; just hit 1 year on bookworm. But Iām also bandwidth constrained (kilo-bits per second) and canāt really distrohop like I used to.
