I know that it's rolling release, but 4 times this year seems a bit much

I'm probably jumping to conclusions, but Nvidia?

Yes it is
- I explicitly bought an AMD CPU and GPU and did not have any trouble with both of them ever since
God, nearly every time I Google a problem I have, it's NVIDIA. The rest is that I want to share my steam library from my windows-installation on a NTFS drive

Nvidia Arch user here, are you just forgetting to rebuild your kernel modules after a kernel or nvidia driver update?

You can just add a pacman hook that triggers mkinitcpio -P after the linux or nvidia packages are updated. I've never had a no-GUI situation from a stray update... maybe one or two that were my own doing when trying to set up UKI's though.

Why not just use DKMS?
- I think dkms is for inserting kernel modules, but I'm dumb and what's the difference between both these approaches?
The Arch Linux team releases Nvidia updates at the same time as kernel upgrades which should trigger a initramfs rebuild via mkinitcpio anyway

unless you do a partial upgrade anyway (never do that)
I just followed the note that's mentioned on the top of your link and installed the Nvidia driver as dkms package. I originally did that because of trouble with a new driver version and temporary downgrading is much smoother with dkms.

Also never had issues with the DE starting properly after upgrade since then.
- I'm usually using nvidia-beta drivers from AUR because they're newer, so I just added the hook as an insurance policy.
  
  The DKMS drivers are probably the safer option because they'll handle rebuilding the kernel modules. Even though (like EddyBot said) the kernel and nvidia packages are supposed to get updated together, sometimes you can spam pacman -Syu at the wrong time and only one package is updated and things go wonky...
yep, just as easy as windows

(I actually work with redhat and cent ... bring it on neets)

Me looking from openSUSE Tumbleweed:

Me feeling slightly more smug on opensuse slow roll 😊

Just learn how to do everything in the TTY. GUIs are bloat

I already did, but wobbly windows is my love!
- Somebody needs to make a wobbly terminal
Don't bother with the tty. If experienced chess players can play entire games in their heads, why can't you just do the same to use a computer? Just type away and use your superior power usering skills to visualize the output in your head.
- Thanks, now I'm running Quake on my brain.

When the rolling release is a rolling release: D:

When bleeding edge bleeds: ¶:
I want it rolling in updates. Not rolling into the river and drowning itself.

What did you edited ? Arch user here, never had this kind of issue. Also if you managed to install Arch, you should be able to fix it(maybe you switched from terminals, try ctrl+alt+1-9)

You were just lucky. For some of us ut was just about having the wrong hardware at the wrong time.

Not complaining, I knew the risks going in and still love my distro, but arch updates totally can brick a PC with no PEBCAK involved. It does happen. :3
- Arch dosn't break by itself, i've used bunch of Arch installations and every time it broke it was because of bad manipulation, not pacman -syu
Sounds like a skill issue. Some people just don’t know how to use Arch.

Signed,

Someone who has spent more days reinstalling Arch than using it.

Why are you using arch Linux if not to debug your system though?

There's a difference between "can" and "want." For example, OP might have been planning to watch his home vids with your mom, but couldn't due to a rolling update.
- That's the problem with obnoxious updates, actually.

Can I talk to you about our Lord and Savior Tumbleweed?

Funny because just like those door to door bible sales, Tumbleweed promises magic and salvation, but completely crumbles under any stress or expansion
- Not my experience at all. It's the one distro that stopped my distro hopping.
  
  Besides, something goes fucky or (more likely in my case) I fuck something up, I can just roll back the changes with a single command and reboot. It's awesome. I've also used to just test things out, removed all KDE stuff, installed GNOME, tested it out for a while and then did a snapper rollback. The system was just like I hadn't changed anything. It's really cool, more distros need this feature.
Last time I tried it, the more custom stuff I put on it(custom color scheme, window decorations etc.) the more it fell apart
- Admittedly, I haven't done too much of that, but it might still be more stable than needing to reinstall your OS every 2-3 weeks?
- How did you manage to break it with themes lol
Just got a new laptop and put an arch flavor on it, keep thinking of going back to Tumbleweed. I've kept on Arch derivatives cause of the AUR, but I haven't actually touched the AUR in a while, and a couple of the things I used the AUR for are now being published as flatpaks by the creators because of the Steam Deck.
- Give it a shot, you can always go back

Join the NixOS side! I almost never get a broken boot, and if I do, I can always rollback and debug my config when I have time.

Just curious before distro-hopping.

What functionality does the reproducibility of nixOS serve to a user (like me) with only one desktop. Like I won't be installing the same system multiple times, I understand the 'predictable-ness' of a declarative system. But are there some other advantages?
- I find it useful to not have to remember how I set things up when I last touched it months ago. You can do really ricey tweaks if you want to, without worrying about breaking the whole system, or having to set it all up again if you have to reinstall.
  
  I work in Devops, so being able to track my system in git is insanely useful for maintainability.
  
  The fact that NixOS has fearless bleeding edge is just a plus; Being able to install the latest packages before Arch even gets them, without worrying if something will break.
- Maybe your drive(s) fail and you want to reinstall. Then you already have a setup with all your software and config files installed. Just reinstall NixOS and re-apply your configuration (or build your own Install ISO ).
  And if you ever get a new laptop/desktop/VM/VPS you can do the same.
  
  Don’t forget to take backups, regardless of your setup tho.
  
  The reproducibility also leads to some surprise features, like being able to wipe your entire system on every boot. Since NixOS always puts the necessary files in the correct place, this is perfectly fine. If you then add some mechanism to persist specific data across reboots (a separate partition, or the Impermanence module), you will remove all kinda of randomly accumulated files on every boot.
  
  This means I have very small backups, because I have three kinds of data: stuff that is wiped on every boot, stuff that is persisted but not backed up (/nix/store, all kinds of caches) and stuff that is persisted and backed up (documents, repositories, media).
  
  None of my OS’s files are in the backups, which makes of them a lot smaller than my previous arch install.
- I installed some broken Nvidia drivers and lost all video out. I rebooted the PC, selected the previous generation, and voila… working PC again. On Arch I’d be debugging it for hours.
Hm, this does seem pretty good. I was worried about losing AUR until the author of this says it's pretty similar in terms of package availability...

https://itsfoss.com/why-use-nixos/
- Yup, the official nixos repo is about the same size as the AUR, so you get all the same packages, and they're usually more up to date.
  
  The only drawbacks for availability is that writing your own packages is harder, and there are some quirks if you're trying to use appimages. But overall, really good for daily driving, and it's really easy to request new packages on the nixpkgs Github if anything is missing.
I'm in the middle of nix syntax (nixtax?) and good lord it is quite the learning curve. It has been fun hammering my system back to where it was with Arch though and I'm looking forward to the magical powers that will come with mastering the language.
Nothing but respect for the community, y'all are something else.
The „almost” part makes me a bit concerned, but i'm planning to give it a try
- I think the only time I've broken my boot was when I was messing with the boot settings and set something wrong with luks decryption. I just booted the previous config from the boot list and fixed it, no problem.
- The "almost" applies to every distro in existence.
A few days ago I started using NixOS as my daily driver. I am yet to understand how to use home-manager and the nix language but right now I'm good with the main configuration.nix and fleek.
- Yeah, I didn't touch home-manager for a while, it's not really that important to start using. It's nice for managing dot files, but the main configuration.nix is much more powerful.

well arch moment, you could use snapshots or ostree to rollback if something like that happen

I usually just do a full reinstall, it's faster, requires less storage, and it's more futureproof. I have my home folder at a different partition, so the files aren't a problem. Archinstall made this a lot easier, and i love it.
- After being with my current distro and install for several years I've accumulated so many small changes and tweaks into the system that it'd take ages for me to get back to where I am with a fresh install. Snapper snapshots for life
- yeah, separated home folder is also a solution, now, faster than "rpm-ostree reset" or pulling the old snapshot? idk

Time to switch to NixOS!

It's the second time sddm broke for me in the space of a week

I just disabled its service for now and am launching plasma manually.

Speaking of -- Plasma 6 hooray!

As long as I can get into the terminal I can fix the GUI. What really sucks is when it something that runs in the DM init sequence was using Python but a Python upgrade changed the import path and no it keeps restarting and I need to boot from a USB to disable that service so I can log into something and properly fix it.

Pass something stupid via your bootloader so it aborts boot and dumps you in an initrd busybox shell. No usb required.

This was my poor man's boot environments when I was using zfs on root. I had a pacman hook to snapshot before package transactions, then if it became unbootable I'd interrupt the following boot attempt, edit my grub command line with something wrong so I'd get dumped in the busybox shell, import my zfs pool and roll back before finally rebooting again.
- That's nice. I've later googled it and found out that I could have added 3 to the end of the grub command to make it boot in runlevel 3 which does not trigger the GUI, but I guess your way could also bypass boot issues that prevent even non-gui boot.
  
  I also see that there is runlevel 1, which is kind of an emergency mode, so maybe that would be the best thing to use?
damn thats oddly specific XD

🦎 Tumbly bumbles