Getting Linux rolling

2018-09-23

A few weeks ago I upgraded my Ubuntu from 16.04 to 18.04.1. I wanted to do the upgrade earlier, but reports of compatibility issues kept me waiting for the first maintenance release. The upgrade went trouble-free as expected. I think Canonical did a great job on the installer and the Gnome customisations. However, as with previous Ubuntu upgrades, there were quite a few post-installation issues.

roundabout

The problem I noticed first was that the update had somehow jumbled the hotkey mapping. OK, no problem to fix that manually. Next, I couldn’t connect to the MySQL server any longer as the update had replaced the config file. This was also not a big deal, because the update process saves all existing configs. I simply had to restore the relevant lines. A bit trickier was the PHP installation. It seems that the old 7.0 package was left intact and the 7.2 version was installed only partly by the upgrade. I am not able to add modules to the 7.0 package any longer, since the PPA repositories changed.

I also encountered a few UI problems with scrolling and text pasting. For a week, I could not scroll terminal output back until I found a fix for this problem. Copying and pasting text is very slow sometimes. Could have to do with the switch from Unity to the Gnome shell. I wasn’t able to figure it out yet. All in all, a fresh installation would have been cleaner and less troublesome. However, I don’t want to go through that, as it would force me to reinstall all applications and reconfigure my Docker-based development setup, which surely takes more than a day.

With Ubuntu, or Debian, or in fact any other non-rolling Linux distro, major updates are released at least once a year. Even with LTS releases, you have to update every two years. Most packages are quite outdated at that time. In software development, we are striving to shorten release cycles ideally to a continuous deployment model. Therefore, it becomes more important to keep libraries and tools up-to-date. Simultaneously, deployments and tool chains are increasing in complexity. Hence, reinstalling environments from scratch becomes more cumbersome.

For these reasons, I decided to migrate to a rolling Linux distribution. Ubuntu is great and I really like the ease of installation and the fact that it is stable and well supported. But perhaps it’s time to try out something new. The obvious choice for me would be Arch Linux, so I installed Arch and a few of its derivates in virtual machines to get a feel for it. I am going to pick one of them and maintain the Vbox for a while before installing it on bare metal. As of now, I am not sure whether Arch is stable enough to function as a primary environment for daily work.

The Arch Linux base distro is certainly special. Its installation process is entirely manual and the resulting image is quite Spartan. You have to bootstrap everything by hand and even for someone experienced it takes a few hours until everything, including a graphical desktop environment, is configured and running. The advantage is that the system is completely customisable and can be configured exactly to your needs. Kind of nice.

I’ve also tried Manjaro and Antergos, both Arch-based distributions. They are significantly easier to install and also provide more convenience for configuration. For example, Manjaro has a nice graphical tool for managing kernel versions and Antergos offers six or seven different desktop environments out of the box. Like Arch, they are based on the Pacman installer. Although there are only about 11,000 packages in the Arch repository, the AUR (Arch User Repository) adds another 47,000 packages which is on par with the biggest Linux distributions.