So yeah, just like the title says. Arch Linux was a mistake on my computer, and let me tell you why.
So like every Linux user, I decided to give Arch a shot on my main mission-critical system. Why? You may ask. I wanted something different, and since I used Fedora on my laptop, I wanted to move my desktop to Linux from Hackintosh, but it didn't went very well.
As you guys may know, I use a Hackintoshed system on my desktop. Which is a Dell Optiplex 7050 running MacOS Sonoma 14.1 with OpenCore version 0.9.0. Everything was fine with it and I didn't actually needed to change how it worked because it was the mission-critical machine for our work and it was getting the job done perfectly.
Our workflow needs some old apps that only runs on Windows 7 and some others that needs Windows to work and at those times firing up a VirtualBox machine wasn't always enough. Since VirtualBox doesn't supports GPU to be utilized on guest OS. I either needed a bare metal Windows installation or a Linux setup that can run Windows with GPU passed in. And the second option was the thing I wanted to do.
Both my experience and research told me that best Linux Distros that runs KVMs best was Fedora and Arch. And when I looked it up on internet I saw some people that has the setup I wanted on Arch Linux and with that I told myself "What could go wrong?". Well turns out a lot of things.
I installed Arch using the new builtin installer with Hyprland WM and after configuring it I watched the video down below and followed the steps and I got the setup I wanted and it was great! Just for a week tho.
1 week after I created this setup I had to upgrade the system and just like the end of every other Arch installation, that killed my setup. There was a update for kernel and systemd-boot and after I updated them both of them failed at the same time at the worst possible situation. At that time we were working on a video project with some guys over at another university and our only communication and almost all the needed files for project was stored at that computer and that left me in the worst possible situation ever possible.
And to get myself out of that situation I needed an Arch based distro becouse the ext4 filesystem was created using the latest ext4progs package and for some reason not every distro was able to open files from that partition. And yes before I tried Arch Linux GUI, I tried at least of 7 different distros in their live installer. And after finding out the Arch Linux GUI I used it to mount the FS, shrink it down, got the KVM image, wrote it down to new volume and booted that VM image on bare bone hardware (which suprisingly worked very well) and used it like that until our project has done.
On paper this doesn't looks like a big deal or problem but in reality that costed me a lot of extra work that I shouldn't have and 3 days of delay at our project. And that really shows me the importance of the enterprise grade distros like RHEL. and why people use them. Because even though Linux runs the web, it would be a disaster just after one week if it were arch-based.
Reply via E-Mail
Thank You!
Batuhan Y. Yilmaz - 03.12.2023 - 35/100