The State of Linux Gaming After the Advent of Steam Play and Other Tools

[Mazzspeed]

Updates to specific libraries along with old kernel versions can break the boot sequence, or if you use a kernel that's too new. I'm not sure about Grub though.

I've personally never had that happen. The worst I've ever experienced is Nvidia drivers borking as the kernel was too recent for the binary blobs, in which case I simply held down shift at the GRUB bootloader and selected an older kernel.

 

[Nobu]

I've personally never had that happen. The worst I've ever experienced is Nvidia drivers borking as the kernel was too recent for the binary blobs, in which case I simply held down shift at the GRUB bootloader and selected an older kernel.

It's more likely on a distro like arch, where if you haven't updated in a while and when you do, something goes wrong with the kernel update (say, building the new initrd failed, maybe because the old compression library isn't compatible with a new glibc, but it wasn't updated yet), then you end up in an untested situation where you have a really old kernel and a new environment (including new glibc) which may be incompatible.

It's rare, and may not happen exactly like that, but I have had it happen once or twice. The solution was simply to chroot in and do a pacman update/upgrade to ensure everything was up to date, and then ensure /boot was in good order.

 

[ChadD]

Die hard Linux people are never going to Like Ubuntu. There really isn't much anyone that loves Ubuntu can do about that.

Really all Ubuntu is, is a commercialized version of Debian. A few years back it was more compelling imo. I was never a fan of Unity or the Mir project but at least the fact that they where a thing... and Canonical was supporting their development imo gave Ubuntu a reason to be.

Now to be honest I'm glad they dumped both projects. There was no real need for Mir or Unity imo. Just without them... it really is just Debian with a corporate sponsorship.

Ok I'll step away from that one now... I have nothing against Ubuntu really. lol

 

[ChadD]

It's more likely on a distro like arch, where if you haven't updated in a while and when you do, something goes wrong with the kernel update (say, building the new initrd failed, maybe because the old compression library isn't compatible with a new glibc, but it wasn't updated yet), then you end up in an untested situation where you have a really old kernel and a new environment (including new glibc) which may be incompatible.

It's rare, and may not happen exactly like that, but I have had it happen once or twice. The solution was simply to chroot in and do a pacman update/upgrade to ensure everything was up to date, and then ensure /boot was in good order.

Perhaps that was an issue at some point in Arch history... if you update via pacman now it 100% updates anything required to build packages FIRST. Really nothing from the main arch repositories should break. Stuff from the AUR should mostly be ok as well although it is more likely I guess.... it depends I guess IF the package maintainer is lazy. In general when most maintainers update their AUR packages they ensure they use proper >= variables for dependency version numbers. Pacman checkes dependency versioning before building new packages. Anyway not impossible... just not something that should really be much of an issue for the most part.

At the very least its less of an issue then it would be in windows anyway... where new frameworks / java machines ect never get updated automatically. Arch (and most every major distro these days) do a pretty good job of ensuring main repository software and particularly important system packages like Kernel / GRUB / DKMS ect packages have well maintained >= versioning.

 

[BloodyIron]

For example? Because I haven't seen that. Well, I also haven't exactly pushed the envelope for kernel versions either. But the library stuff... what?

Updates to specific libraries along with old kernel versions can break the boot sequence, or if you use a kernel that's too new. I'm not sure about Grub though.

 

[Nobu]

For example? Because I haven't seen that. Well, I also haven't exactly pushed the envelope for kernel versions either. But the library stuff... what?

I already gave an example, but I guess I can elaborate. If a core library like glibc (or the other c lib, forget what it's called now) is updated, but the initrd isn't for whatever reason, then grub (or the kernel) won't have the library versions it expects in the initial boot environment. I can't remember the exact circumstances it happened to me, just that it had happened once or twice. That's over a decade of using ArchLinux on and off, so it's certainly not common, but it can happen.

 

[BloodyIron]

Okay well I haven't had that fail in Ubuntu once, in at least a decade man. And that's with looots of desktops and servers being updated regularly.

I already gave an example, but I guess I can elaborate. If a core library like glibc (or the other c lib, forget what it's called now) is updated, but the initrd isn't for whatever reason, then grub (or the kernel) won't have the library versions it expects in the initial boot environment. I can't remember the exact circumstances it happened to me, just that it had happened once or twice. That's over a decade of using ArchLinux on and off, so it's certainly not common, but it can happen.

 

[Nobu]

Okay well I haven't had that fail in Ubuntu once, in at least a decade man. And that's with looots of desktops and servers being updated regularly.

Well yeah, you shouldn't normally have that kind of issue. I stated the conditions it happened under (what I could remember anyway), normally you wouldn't leave a system without updating for a long period of time (in my case, sometimes half a year, maybe longer), but I had it installed on a laptop that I seldom used so that (among other poor practices) did happen. I've had other peculiar things happen with various distros due to bad configuration or poor practices, from mixing distro packages to compiling world, on fedora, opensuse, opensolaris, ubuntu, arch, mandrake... Distros have bugs, and not everyone experiences the same bugs (especially, because sometimes they skip an upgrade that someone else didn't, because it had already been fixed in a later version, a different configuration, or whatever.)