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Hah. I spent more time writing this post in the gaps between waiting for work stuff to finish work stuffing. I can’t just… not sit down for work for an arbitrary amount of time because I’m busy arguing with the Linux Nvidia drivers.
I agree that’s the point of Bazzite, though. So if it doesn’t in fact “just work” for me, then what’s the point of it?
If you just want to boot whatever you were running prior to the last update, yeah, it’s typically in the GRUB menu. If you updated more than once (which I believe I did) you need to go find the previous snapshot, but it’s not too much more hassle.
That doesn’t particularly fix anything, though, unless you’re cool with not updating indefinitely the thing you wanted to use or with updating everything else manually until the issue is fixed. If you want to be able to fix the update you still have to go into the logs and figure out what’s going on (since the failure isn’t universal and I know people are running these drivers without issues this must be possible). And of course all that assumes it was actually the update that broke something and the rollback actually fixes the issue.
Or, hear me out, I could reboot and choose Windows in GRUB instead, and that works for sure and I don’t have to think about it.
So Windows it is until I feel adventurous. I owe my Bazzite install zero extra time. If it can’t run as conveniently as clicking down one more time to select Windows then it’s not running.
As I said elsewhere, people really underestimate the level of stability it takes to be a mainstream option for a desktop OS.
I’m not saying it’s okay for Bazzite to have shipped a broken update. That’s sloppy.
But you really are being a dumbass here. The solution for your problem is a rollback. That’s the whole point of atomic distros: rollback when something breaks using a single command (or just reboot and pick the grub option). Why bother with atomic if you’re not going to use one of the killer features?
And in case you didn’t know, Flatpaks aren’t part of your OS, so you can still do flatpak update even if you don’t update Bazzite. There is literally zero cost to doing a rollback, and that’s by design.
I know how flatpaks are updated, thanks a bunch. Not that it matters particularly on Bazzite these days, because Bazaar will do that for you on the gui, too. Gear Lever will handle your appimages, if you’re lucky. We could have a conversation about how much sense it makes to have updates happen in four different places and how much sense it makes to advise people to stop using their pre-bundled “update everything” script and start updating each of those separately to avoid a troublesome updated driver as a permanent solution.
In any case that’s not the only part of your software that comes with a system update. The list of end-of-life features and warnings I see reported on OS updates has been steadily growing as my install ages, which has been interesting to see simmer, given all the “it’s foolproof” talk about immutable/atomic distros on the internet. I have to assume some of those will get sorted out in future updates, but so far the list has been moving in the wrong direction.
Honestly, when I do have the time and motivation I will likely just rebase to a whole different branch and go from there depending on what fixes itself or breaks. I assume that will get rid of a bunch of stuff.
But that’s already waaay past what an average user should have to do to their OS. Especially in the time this install has been live without a rollback or rebase (and it’s had some, because it’s not the first time it breaks). I’m not even sure Bazzite shipped a broken update. It could just be an issue on KDE’s side. Or on Nvidia’s side. Who knows. Being able to roll back my system to a point where it worked is not a fix, it’s a troubleshooting step. Having to troubleshoot IS the problem in itself.
I mean, unless you broke something yourself, I suppose. But you’re also supposed to not be able to do that in an atomic distro, if you believe what people will tell you.
For the record, as I told someone else, I didn’t choose Bazzite because it was an atomic distro (in fact it’s kind of a pain in the ass that it is, KDE really doesn’t like it when you try to customize stuff in one of those and doesn’t handle it gracefully at all). I chose it because I had a hell of a time finding a distro that would pick up my sound hardware properly (sound on Linux is yet another rabbit hole) and still have proper HDR and VRR support with my display setup. The list of distros that did not do both of those things at once before I landed on Bazzite includes Manjaro, Ubuntu, Mint, Fedora Workstation and a couple of others I didn’t test for long enough to remember.
That’s a lie. Manjaro aaaalmost got there. It worked for a while. I kinda forget what broke that made me try something else.
You can see how that entire ordeal is… not mainstream-friendly in aggregate, though, surely.
It’s probably worse than it’s been, less bad than people around here think.
One thing MS does is they have a TON of silent channels and branches, so every release they do is a rolling release. As a result, when you see in the news that they fucked up again and messed up a bunch of something somewhere it tends to be relatively contained still. I think the latest was a bad patch breaking a bunch of stuff that required a couple of emergency patches and I think there may be more to go.
It’s 100% not good, and it almost certainly affected a lot of machines, but it probably got stopped from spreading further. If they had a signed driver update break their entire desktop interface in an update sent to every user they’d be (rightfully) crucified endlessly.
I get that there is a massive discrepancy of resources at play, but that doesn’t make it better from the end user perspective. I’ve been saying for years that the Linux community keeps saying that “you can choose the distro you like” is a feature, but it isn’t. Desktop Linux should be one thing. A couple, max. Contributions should be way more centralized and pool resources, like they are on the kernel. Distro choice is an anti-feature and a massive waste of resources.
why not today it takes 2 minutes
you spent more time writing this post
the whole point of bazzite is that it’s trivially easy and just works unlike the old “tweak linux” approach
make use of the distro you chose
Hah. I spent more time writing this post in the gaps between waiting for work stuff to finish work stuffing. I can’t just… not sit down for work for an arbitrary amount of time because I’m busy arguing with the Linux Nvidia drivers.
I agree that’s the point of Bazzite, though. So if it doesn’t in fact “just work” for me, then what’s the point of it?
You literally just reboot and pick the older image on boot, if it’s anything like Aurora.
If you just want to boot whatever you were running prior to the last update, yeah, it’s typically in the GRUB menu. If you updated more than once (which I believe I did) you need to go find the previous snapshot, but it’s not too much more hassle.
That doesn’t particularly fix anything, though, unless you’re cool with not updating indefinitely the thing you wanted to use or with updating everything else manually until the issue is fixed. If you want to be able to fix the update you still have to go into the logs and figure out what’s going on (since the failure isn’t universal and I know people are running these drivers without issues this must be possible). And of course all that assumes it was actually the update that broke something and the rollback actually fixes the issue.
Or, hear me out, I could reboot and choose Windows in GRUB instead, and that works for sure and I don’t have to think about it.
So Windows it is until I feel adventurous. I owe my Bazzite install zero extra time. If it can’t run as conveniently as clicking down one more time to select Windows then it’s not running.
As I said elsewhere, people really underestimate the level of stability it takes to be a mainstream option for a desktop OS.
I’m not saying it’s okay for Bazzite to have shipped a broken update. That’s sloppy.
But you really are being a dumbass here. The solution for your problem is a rollback. That’s the whole point of atomic distros: rollback when something breaks using a single command (or just reboot and pick the grub option). Why bother with atomic if you’re not going to use one of the killer features?
And in case you didn’t know, Flatpaks aren’t part of your OS, so you can still do
flatpak updateeven if you don’t update Bazzite. There is literally zero cost to doing a rollback, and that’s by design.I know how flatpaks are updated, thanks a bunch. Not that it matters particularly on Bazzite these days, because Bazaar will do that for you on the gui, too. Gear Lever will handle your appimages, if you’re lucky. We could have a conversation about how much sense it makes to have updates happen in four different places and how much sense it makes to advise people to stop using their pre-bundled “update everything” script and start updating each of those separately to avoid a troublesome updated driver as a permanent solution.
In any case that’s not the only part of your software that comes with a system update. The list of end-of-life features and warnings I see reported on OS updates has been steadily growing as my install ages, which has been interesting to see simmer, given all the “it’s foolproof” talk about immutable/atomic distros on the internet. I have to assume some of those will get sorted out in future updates, but so far the list has been moving in the wrong direction.
Honestly, when I do have the time and motivation I will likely just rebase to a whole different branch and go from there depending on what fixes itself or breaks. I assume that will get rid of a bunch of stuff.
But that’s already waaay past what an average user should have to do to their OS. Especially in the time this install has been live without a rollback or rebase (and it’s had some, because it’s not the first time it breaks). I’m not even sure Bazzite shipped a broken update. It could just be an issue on KDE’s side. Or on Nvidia’s side. Who knows. Being able to roll back my system to a point where it worked is not a fix, it’s a troubleshooting step. Having to troubleshoot IS the problem in itself.
I mean, unless you broke something yourself, I suppose. But you’re also supposed to not be able to do that in an atomic distro, if you believe what people will tell you.
For the record, as I told someone else, I didn’t choose Bazzite because it was an atomic distro (in fact it’s kind of a pain in the ass that it is, KDE really doesn’t like it when you try to customize stuff in one of those and doesn’t handle it gracefully at all). I chose it because I had a hell of a time finding a distro that would pick up my sound hardware properly (sound on Linux is yet another rabbit hole) and still have proper HDR and VRR support with my display setup. The list of distros that did not do both of those things at once before I landed on Bazzite includes Manjaro, Ubuntu, Mint, Fedora Workstation and a couple of others I didn’t test for long enough to remember.
That’s a lie. Manjaro aaaalmost got there. It worked for a while. I kinda forget what broke that made me try something else.
You can see how that entire ordeal is… not mainstream-friendly in aggregate, though, surely.
Fair enough. Although I wouldn’t call Windows 11 stable, nowadays.
It’s probably worse than it’s been, less bad than people around here think.
One thing MS does is they have a TON of silent channels and branches, so every release they do is a rolling release. As a result, when you see in the news that they fucked up again and messed up a bunch of something somewhere it tends to be relatively contained still. I think the latest was a bad patch breaking a bunch of stuff that required a couple of emergency patches and I think there may be more to go.
It’s 100% not good, and it almost certainly affected a lot of machines, but it probably got stopped from spreading further. If they had a signed driver update break their entire desktop interface in an update sent to every user they’d be (rightfully) crucified endlessly.
I get that there is a massive discrepancy of resources at play, but that doesn’t make it better from the end user perspective. I’ve been saying for years that the Linux community keeps saying that “you can choose the distro you like” is a feature, but it isn’t. Desktop Linux should be one thing. A couple, max. Contributions should be way more centralized and pool resources, like they are on the kernel. Distro choice is an anti-feature and a massive waste of resources.