• 3 Posts
  • 63 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 18th, 2023

help-circle













  • I haven’t tried not touching it for years to be honest. Longest period without a reboot was something between half a year and a year and it worked without a problem. Check the Arch website, breaking changes or manual interventions are very rare nowadays. There’s just one thing you have to do if you start an update after a long time: make sure to update the keyring first or pacman will exit with an error. That’s also mentioned in the wiki.

    I installed Arch on my server because:

    • I know it very well.
    • The base system is tiny. Fewer packages = fewer problems. Everything else is in Podman containers anyway.
    • It’s very flexible. I have a customized encrypted rootfs which needs to be unlocked through SSH, not a very common thing I guess.

  • I’ve been using Arch for over a decade now. On a laptop, desktop, VPS and now it’s also driving Steam OS on the Deck. I had very little problems with it compared to our Ubuntu setups at work that randomly break on updates. Ubuntu is not as bad as it used to be but from my experience (i.e. the way I use it), Arch has been more stable and reliable.


  • Just because it’s not possible on a Turing Machine doesn’t mean it’s impossible on a PC with finite memory. You just have to track all the memory that is available to the algorithm and once you detect a state you’ve seen already, you know it’s not halting ever. The detection algorithm will need an insane amount of memory though.

    Edit: think about the amount of memory that would need. It’s crazy but theoretically possible. In real world use cases only if the algorithm you’re watching has access to a tiny amount of memory.






  • It’s the amount of legacy it’s carrying on that drives me crazy. Many of the implicit default implementations are confusing. That’s where all these “rule of 3”, “rule of 7”, “rule of whatever” come from. The way arguments are passed into functions is another issue. From the call-side you (sometimes) cannot tell if you’ll end up with a moved value or a dangling reference. The compiler will not stop you from using it. Even if the compiler has something to tell you, it’ll do it on the most cryptic way possible. I’m grateful we have C++, it paid lots of my bills. But it’s also a pain in the ass.