So four days ago, November 16, 2024, it finally happened to me. An update “broke my system” and brought me to a TTY instead of the login manager. Yep, it is a rite of passage here, I guess. Anywho, I attempted to use Timeshift to restore to a last known good system snapshot, only for the TTY error (it said to check journalctl for some logs or something) to persist upon reboot. I ultimately had to reinstall my Arch Linux system, restore my personal files from a known backup from Déjà Dup Backups, and reinstall all of my previously installed packages from a pacman package log list of past packages.
My guess is that due to the rolling release nature of EndeavourOS, updates that break a system are bound to eventually happen, and “manual intervention is required” for those cases. So I do believe from my research that an EndeavourOS user is expected to read from the Arch Linux Newsletter of any updates that require manual intervention and do the necessary steps to resolve the issue. Was there anything I did wrong that led to my system being broken at that point? What can I do to better create snapshots of my system files besides Timeshift so that if this happens again, I do not have to reinstall my system and restore my personal file backups over again?
I hope this post does not rub anyone the wrong way. I just need some guidance on “manual intervention” and updates potentially breaking the system.
so did you check this? This could have told us what happened so that we could explain to you what you could have done or what you can do to fix said issue.
you didn’t follow instructions and see what the issues were. I mean we have no idea if this is hardware related (nvidia update) or a software issue(SDDM)
Honestly you could have probably just rolled back a package and saved yourself a lot of extra work. Being a DIY System means you are ultimately responsible for keeping up with the updates and the possible side affects of them. Before I run my updates i actually look and see what is being updated. This allows me to know if there could be a possible issue ie Nvidia. and what steps to start to fix said issue
I’m the soggy old fuddy duddy, but I believe that Arch Linux is still for people that want to understand the rock bottom basics and do troubleshooting.
I agree with TheFrog, you didn’t give us enough info (by reinstalling) to even know what the problem was.
What about it? Maybe if you explain the problem you had with Timeshift (explain exactly the steps you took and the errors they receive) someone who uses it could help.
I’ve been using EOS for more than a year now. I update every day.
So far it’s not been my experience with EOS that breakage will happen due to it being a rolling release.
The only time the system did not work after an update, was when I experienced a "partial update’. Partial updates happen when an end user runs the update process whilst the devs are in the middle of updating the repos.
Solving the partial update is rather simple: wait a bit for the devs to do their thing, then update again, and the rest of the required updates will be pulled in.
So my advice would have been to again run an update to see if that would have resolved your breakage.
As always, as your setup may be very different from mine, YMMV.
As an example, a Grub update a couple of years ago resulted in a broken boot loader (#75701) on Arch systems (and therefore EndeavourOS). Our friend @dalto was quick to jump on that and provide the community with answers and a solution:
These sorts of show-stopping update issues are fortunately rare, but it can happen. Some members have mentioned they update infrequently, to reduce the likelihood of being caught out by something like that.
Others (like myself), continue to update readily, but it’s understood there is some potential risk to that.
It really comes down to how you use your system, and how involved you’re prepared to be in resolving any potential issue. If it’s a mission critical system, update with some care (or really, consider a different distro).