On Sat, Feb 27, 2021 at 11:34:10AM +0300, Semih Ozlem wrote: > Also even though I have been using linux for a while, that still does not > mean that I would know everything about linux or that there would be no > details that I miss...
Nobody does. The Linux kernel alone receives roughly 6000-8000 patches *a month* [1] [2]. That amounts to a steady stream of one patch every five minutes, if I didn't miscalculate. A tad less than 2000 developers are contributing at any given time. And a (GNU)/Linux distro is a bit more than that. No way to keep up on each and every corner of that. Much less as a single person. That said, I'm around that stuff since... something between 1993 and 1994. My main workstation (and a couple of other installations, often at customer's) have been purely GNU/Linux things, most of the time Debian. I haven't experienced that kind of catastrophic failure since... well, let's say 1996 or so. Most of the time, I've had fairly clean upgrades, with few pains (and I /do/ customize my systems. I'm sometimes picky. I don't like systemd, for example, thus I do increase my risk by departing from the beaten path here and there). What may be elements contributing towards keeping an installation happy? This surely depends on many things. Here are a couple of advices from an old jeezer: - community Find people "around" you (geographically is the best, but sometimes you don't have that luxury). A mailing list like this is an option. People you trust, and you learn to understand. - OS usage model think about how you are treating you OS: is it a pet, you know by name (upgrade frequently, install this-or-that utility from source, let it develop a "personality" over time, you're kind of sad when it dies) or is it "cattle" (you invest a lot into automating install and deployment, which happens nearly instantly. When the system coughs, you dump it and deploy a new one). Those are very different approaches, and have different properties. It pays off to think about what you want to do. I'm (pretty firmly) in the "pet" camp, although I see what the "cattle" model is good for. For a perspective from the "cattle" camp, see [3]. I have the feeling that you dither between both positions (you deploy as "cattle", i.e. don't dare to install to disk) and expect "pet" behaviour (i.e. long-time stability). Sorry for this philosophical interruption :-) Cheers [1] https://lwn.net/Articles/839772/ [2] https://lwn.net/Articles/845831/ [3] https://joachim8675309.medium.com/devops-concepts-pets-vs-cattle-2380b5aab313 - t
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