>Now do whatever you can to repair the system. depends on what broke.
What needs to be done to fix the system may not be obvious and the fix may not be simple. Furthermore, the trial and error for fixing may leave a trail of new issues.
And that is why I use NixOS. I have to wrestle with it to get something working, but once I'm done I can guarantee it will keep working until the heat death of universe. Compared to that, Ubuntu and others let me get off the land fast but I never know when I'll crash or if I'll able to fly back from it.
> As far as I'm concerned, the problem is that the system is unable to update itself without rebooting.
You are absolutely correct! There was a brief period during XP, I think, where this was the case. Irrespective of that, reboots are a fact of life if you have Windows installed, and allowing and choosing the best time for Windows to reboot is a part of having Windows installed.
Don't use Windows if you can't deal with the reboots. Use Mac or Linux.
That's not fixing the problem: that's ignoring it. Which might be the right decision if you need the computer to work now, but fixing it would mean it never happens again.
>Then, you run `nixos-rebuild` and then you switch your system to that configuration. The old state of your system stays around until you run garbage collect. So you can rollback to it, if you want.
How often are people doing this, though? I get a machine set up pretty quickly (install list of packages, systemctl enable <foo bar baz>, reboot), and I'm set for several years.
That depends entirely on how well your state serializes to disk and restores. If nothing else, I occasionally make the mistake of getting a setup going that would just be a pain to recreate in terms of getting everything open again (too many windows open in a specific arrangement).
> Rebooting is so fast these days it isn't an issue
Rebooting still means you can't do both things at once. And even if its instant, losing all my state is annoying. Sure, a proper window manager can restore state, and a good tab manager will preserve those too, but its a freagin pain in the ass. Plus the pre-boot sequence is slower than the actual OS booting, so I still consider that a pain.
Maybe I'm petty (to each their own), but rebooting once a week would drive me nuts, nevermind once a day.
>It's not like Windows can update without reboot either.
And neither can Linux, contrary to popular belief. Anything that involves system services or god forbid the kernel requires a reboot.
Yes, if the kernel wasn't updated you could meticulously reboot each individual system service that was updated instead, but why bother when you can just reboot and be done with it?
> Also every bad pointer access will require a reboot, wouldn't it?
Hm, isn’t reboot just slightly more complicated than restarting your application? And most of the today’s apps would still require “rebooting” be it a container or a virtual machine
> Do you reboot your machine regularly as a matter of course? I do not. My desktop machine is always up -- except when I am forced to reboot by Microsoft.
I don’t either, but also the forced reboots only happen once a month for me, right after patch Tuesdays. I’ve found that setting updates to manual and proactively updating on that day gets rid of almost all forced reboots. Of course now you have an extra thing to remember, but it does generally fix the problem.
> NixOS promises stability, you just walk back to a previous version! Alas, i've had NixOS hose _all_ of my previous versions because of X server issues.
I'd love to hear more detail about this, because `nixos-rebuild switch` is not capable of causing such a problem in a permanent way.
(It can arise temporarily, though, if you switch to a new configuration without rebooting, and that configuration requires a different kernel than you are currently running. Rebooting and choosing your old configuration at the bootloader menu fixes this.)
>No. The problem remains. This just time-shifts the problem.
The time was the problem in the example, so time-shifting is a legitimate fix to the problem here. "In a rush for work, turn on computer, 30 minutes of updates." was the problem.
>Every Linux distro I use seems to have figured out how to apply and configure updates before you reboot a system, rather than during the next boot cycle.
There are tradeoffs for doing things that way. Such as when everything eats shit and you regret updating.
> There's zero reason to reboot any modern OS daily.
- I use Arch, I like to avoid accumulating too much major updates between reboots.
- For a time I was facing a bug that resulted in a black screen of death after resuming sleep.
Depends on the environment. That used to be the common approach for windows, less so for *nix systems.
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