EOS 24/7 use reliability

I have been running it on my daily driver for few years without a hiccup, I only nuked my install once because I wanted to rearrange my hard drives and partitions. I recently did have to reinstall, and I thought I had fixed it, long story short it was a specific program causing the issue, but I didn’t lose any of my data as my /home partition is separate. A few configs were messed up during the reinstall, was a quick fix, nothing major. As far as 24/7 usage, I think the longest I’ve run was 6-7 months across one summer. Our power goes out a LOT here due to storms/trees falling on power lines. It’s never crashed and needed a full restart, and better, nothing bad seems to have ever happened to it despite the power outages. So far only one update caused an issue, and it was a single package that I linked to above.

You can skip the blogpost below, it just a summary of my journey that landed me here. EOS is great and I’ve been running it for a few years. I was one of the original WinXP holdouts lol before I got stuck being a Win7 holdout, and then after Win10 decided to be spyware I officially jumped to linux around 2018.

I run steam games, video transcodes, and occasionally mine crypto as a hobby for fun. Every now and then a program will crash, but its completely unrelated to EOS. I run a first gen Ryzen cpu and it has segmentation faults from time to time that crashes whatever program the fault happens to. Running at a slower RAM speed keeps the issue at bay, I’m lucky if something crashes once a month. At Higher RAM speeds, about 2 minutes lol. :upside_down_face:

I also run it as a reverse proxy server on another pc. I ran Kubuntu, Fedora, Mint, and a few others as daily drivers/servers, being rather afraid to try an Arch distro like Endeavour. You’re encouraged to use distros like those because they hold packages back to be tested before being release, which seems like a good idea, but I consistently had nothing but problems. After system hangs and buggy outdated held back packages/backports on other distros (for security’s sake) and having to go to the Arch wiki for help trying to diagnose something, I thought why not give Arch a try, at least they write info pages to help others that are very well written. If they’re that well written, maybe they’re tidy and thorough elsewhere despite it being rolling release and bleeding edge. So I tried Manjaro, which to be fair wasn’t bad, but I did have issues and it did crash from time to time on more than one pc. But, Manjaro holds their packages back a cycle “to be on the safe side,” much like Ubuntu, but it seemed to cause more problems than it was worth for me, just like Ubuntu did

Sadly, the worst part was the community. I’m not trying to bash or cause a stink here, I’m mentioning it because getting help is a necessity to new users. If you want reliability, you need a good forum with good people. There is a quite a few good people on the Manjaro forums, and they want to help, but there are a few who are incredibly toxic and will go as far as deleting your posts even if its a real problem you’re dealing with. It’s just that when you go somewhere for help, you expect a certain “air” of, well, help, not someone throwing your post in the trash and then telling you that you/yourself/your hardware/etc are the problem. I’m not bashing Manjaro, there were many people who did in fact help me there and they were very nice. But, I decided to move on anyway as the few bad apples had left a bad taste in my mouth. Other distro’s forums were much less toxic. To repeat, I mention this because it a BIG help to average users who just want their pc to work, and the less toxic a community/forum is, the quicker more people are onboard. It’s a good thing. The faster an issue is mentioned and worked on, the faster it can be fixed, Everybody’s happy.:grin: This adds to the 24/7 reliability question, if something pops up, the forum can help. When someone else has the same problem, they can find your solution very quickly here. This is something that is lacking in modern social chat areas like Discord, as they are less “concrete” or searchable.

So me liking Arch slightly more due to not hiding behind “making it easier for the end user by making it somehow less usable” that happens with other distros and the previously mentioned ever so slightly toxic community made me jump to distros again. I decided to stay Arch-ish. Something about Arch giving you the wiki/manuals you need is like teaching a man to fish instead of handing him a fish, or giving them a repair manual when something is wrong with their car instead of fixing it for them. In the long run, its better for the individual and the community.:muscle:

I switched to Endeavour to be more bleeding edge after backing up my necessities and had read the Arch wiki quite bit. Since the switch, Ive never looked back.:+1: Been smooth sailing despite the claims that bleeding edge distros are dangerous and I’ve had basically zero problems otherwise. It’s nice when things just work, and if you need help, its just a click a away. Better yet, you’re encouraged to be here if you need help. :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

I just remembered after typing out this blogpost… I do have a Dell Latitude laptop that once in a blue moon will completely freeze with the caps lock key blinking. It’s rare enough that I’ve never bothered to look up whats causing it and it never happens while using it. I believe it has to do with the laptop going to sleep while on a battery. Happened probably twice in 3 years lol