I undertook a sizeable upgrade today, bringing a skylake era build into the 2020s with a 13th gen. All core components- memory, motherboard, GPU, everything must go… except the drives. We were nervous, my friend really felt we should reinstall. There was debate, and drama. Considerations and exceptions. No, I couldn’t let my OS go. I have spent years tweaking and tuning, molding my ideal computing environment. We pushed forward.
Well I’m pleased to say it was mostly uneventful. The ethernet adapter was renamed causing misconfigured dhcp, but otherwise it booted right up like nothing happened. Sorry, linux is boring now.
That’s one thing I don’t like about modern Linux is how it names network interfaces.
I miss the old eth0,1,3 or wlan0,1,2 etc.
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Thank you!
THE NAME!
I agree
Why is the WiFi card called ws7w8n7s77
I think you still can do that in Gentoo
Glad to hear of this success story, never reinstall a perfectly crafted OS!
Around 2007 I had a Windows laptop die on me and drove me to device agnosticism. Maybe I learned the wrong lesson but now I keep my OS and data separate enough that a b0rked OS is an hour’s inconvenience instead of a day’s recovery.
Still, it’s pretty awesome that you can just shuck a drive into a totally new machine and only have to adjust network settings.
but the fun part is tweaking the OS 😭
linux is boring
now.FTFY :)
I once put an HDD into a completely new machine with all new hardware (same architecture, though), and it booted without any issues whatsoever. Must be 15-20 years ago but I still remember the new machine.
Linux always was exceptionally great when it comes to hardware changes after installation.
Advanced windows users are going to be checking you out
Congrats. First of all this really made me feel old … Skylake seems recent to me and that’s the year my kid was born. But secondly, this reminds me of those people who used to post in /r/debian about having like 20 years on the same install and they just kept changing the hardware and if a drive ever got replaced they used dd to clone from one drive to another without reinstalling. So when they would do something like stat /, it would be something like 2002 that the filesystem was created. I think those people/stories are awesome.
I think our expectations are pretty jacked up here because that’s how all the operating systems I remember are. Just pull the drive and plug it in another computer. From the DOS days to the BSD world. It’s only Windows and macOS that are the outliers here with their “trusted computing” bullshit. They created the problem with tying the install to the hardware, and then they sold the solution of backing up to their cloud for a monthly subscription if your hardware ever just died.
I am not nearly organized enough for a long install
Me either. My longest install is about to turn 5, but that’s an OpenBSD closet laptop server that gets upgraded remotely with every release.
I’m doing okay on this laptop; just hit 1 year on bookworm. But I’m also bandwidth constrained (kilo-bits per second) and can’t really distrohop like I used to.
if you have an os that modified you should have scripts to redo it. or at least have it written down.
it helps a bunch!
One would kill for an uneventful upgrade.
I’m going to do the same later this year as like you my setup is 10 years plus, though I’ll re-install Arch again What MB, GPU card etc did you buy? , as I’m out of touch with the latest equipment now, so would be grateful for a heads up
I can recommend this site for up-to-date and fairly neutral parts recommendations split by budget https://www.logicalincrements.com
Thanks will check that out 👍
Ooh, nice, I didn’t know them - thanks!
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Okay, at least that gives me an idea, thanks
I like your build a lot. Don’t forget to move your OS to another drive via clone or something occasionally… Your old drive will wear out eventually. If it’s SSD, they often just work until they just don’t, so it’s not like the old days when an HDD would just slow down and give you a warning.
Cheers!
Thank you :) I tried to be reasonable with it, it’s all too easy to break the bank haha. I have two “system” ssds that replicates itself with a weekly rsync job, and the larger storage SSD has an even larger SATA HDD it syncs to. Good looking out!
So about that. I don’t use rsync, but any regular bulk reads/writes will wear an SSD quickly!
What I meant was, if your drive(a) isn’t new with the new build, I would recommend it. I’ve been seeing failure rates on SSDs with hard use (like weekly backups) at only the 3-5 year mark. And usually when they die its all at once.
No worries, it’s all good! It’s basically two identical drives. The backup drive doesn’t get much use outside of the rsync process, but if the main drive fails, I am able to jump onto to the backup drive without much interruption. Before rsync runs it does a comparison and only moves modified files, so it’s not a bulk rewrite every week- just brings the target up to parity with the source. If both of these drives kick the bucket at the same time I guess that will just have to accept it as very bad luck lol, only so much I can do. But the plan is when the main drive fails, backup will get promoted to main until I’m able to backfill another drive.
Oh right on, I didn’t realize rsync was just a differential copy–thays dope! I hope I didn’t come off paranoid lol… I work in a PC repair shop (mostly Windows machines) and I am not used to the average consumer giving a cleaver answer about backups and drive maintenance.
Congratulations again on the new machine. Hope it treats you well!
Nice build but I cringed when I read Nvidia
I’ve got a fever recently, and the only prescription is more cuda cores.
^^^ so many motherboards available not sure what i’d even be looking for
Motherboards are tough to recommend because it really depends what you need from your system. My approach was to choose a CPU first then I could start looking at boards supporting the socket. I wanted ATX, nothing smaller. Memory support, just DDR5 and room to expand (it turns out most boards will handle like 192GB these days lol). I wanted the ability to change CPU frequency, that eliminated boards with a B-series chipsets. Next SSD support (at least 3x m.2) and USB ports (minimum 6x USB 3.0). Finally price, I didn’t want to exceed $250.
When all that was dialed in, I was left with like 8 options, from there it was manageable to read reviews for the nuance between them.
What are your needs? I work in a PC shop and answer this question everyday lol
Sorry, linux is boring now now.
I found that on OpenSUSE. Once getting past the learning curve of linux and OpenSUSE’s general use, It has updated flawlessly for years and there is never anything to tinker with.
Not tumbleweed, right? I recall generally recall liking it until the kde 6 update broke everything if you tried to update from konsole in kde, and I remember others having the same issue. Not sure how they didn’t catch that.
I was considering tumbleweed on my work laptop. This makes me nervous. Was it easy to fix?
It’s fixed. In general no distro is fail safe, recently even an immutable distro (our current hopeful advance in update reliability) had a hickup on an update that required manual intervention. It basically boils down to that it’s not possible to test for everything, we can only hope to continually add more test cases and improve human procedures based on post mortems.
I understand your point completely. I’m a long time Arch Linux user, so I’m not averse to manual interventions.
Leap with Gnome. Really solid
That’s the power of Linux, mister/miss.
That’s the power of Linux, tuxoid.
That’s comforting to know.
I have kinda the opppsite: a machine that isn’t changing it’s hardware, but it hasn’t had updates in ~2 years (due to some issues with an AUR package back then…)
I wonder if it’ll upgrade…?
I’ve kept arch-keyring updating now & again… so it should work, but I know packages change dependencies so, it’ll be an interesting one (ie full backup first)
I brought a 10 month old system up to date and here is the advice I was given:
- Update from tty
- Update archlinux-keyring first
- Reboot immediately after update is complete
Unexpectedly, I did not have to resolve any dependency issues. I just hit “enter” on any prompt lol
Thanks, good to know… although I’ll do one other thing first… a full backup with clonezilla first ;)
Why are you keeping the drives? You should get a fast SSD
The ssds I kept are newer, system was moved off spinning disks around 2018. SSD undeniably better performance for any machine still running HDD
SSD is a drive
I know
