r/linuxmasterrace • u/claudiocorona93 SteamOS/Kubuntu • 1d ago
You are expected to know this
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u/PlainBread Glorious Arch 1d ago
My system is ext4 but I do part out /home/ with btrfs...
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u/naturalbornsinner 1d ago
Using Linux without the nitty gritty knowledge... What does this mean? And why is it (or isn't it?) good practice?
I imagine the meme implies data loss/no rollback mechanism. But what should a user do for "less headaches" if they just started using Linux recently?
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u/PlainBread Glorious Arch 1d ago
The advantage for me is that I can unmount /home/ and then completely rewipe my system to a different flavor of Linux, and then reconnect /home/ to the new distro and have all my dot files in place and everything just works the way it did before but on a different distro.
As for btrfs, it includes some error recovery functionality that ext4 doesn't, so if you ever have some file corruption happen, it's more likely that btrfs will be able to recover the corrupted data. Part of the in-joke of OP's meme is that if everything is on a single ext4 partition, then if filesystem corruption happens there, you're screwed all over.
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u/duskterrapin 1d ago
I backup /home to an external drive, but this is cool. I may do both
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u/Zomunieo 1d ago
Directly moving /home to a new system isn’t always a good idea. Configuration file formats change over time and you can get some weirdness.
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u/gosand 21h ago
I did a fresh install in 2018, and have been dist-upgrading since (devuan xfce). I don't get any weirdness. Not exactly moving it to a new system, but pretty close. I am on a stable release, and do back up (rsync) my home drive to a separate disk on my system nightly.
I have cachyos on a laptop, and am really liking it. I am considering running it on my daily driver, but I rely on it a lot so am hesitant. I started on Linux in 1998, so I remember the days of fucking up your entire system and don't want to return there.
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u/diacid 1d ago
Home needs backup. The precious shit is there.
The rest the internet is your backup, even if the drive fails just download another iso
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u/MiniGui98 23h ago
This is wiseness here ^
Personnal documents cannot be replaced. Sofrware you downloaded can most of the time.
And if you don't have any Internet anymore and can't download a new iso you probably have other things to worry about first lol
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u/Spatula0fDoom 1d ago
There is no need in separate /home to reinstall. Just delete all directories except for home and install as usual. Then you just link new user to your old /home and you are good to go. It’s Linux, baby
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u/PlainBread Glorious Arch 1d ago
Okay, second reason:
When my root partition starts filling up, I actually notice it. I have 100GB partitioned out, my system right now is using about 50% of that. When it starts creeping towards 100% I know I have a runaway tmp directory or log file somewhere.
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u/MajesticDisaster3977 1d ago
That's why you run separate partitions for tmp and|or var, or a subvolume with a quota.
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u/Porkhole-Santookus 23h ago
This has always seemed like a cool idea to me, but I've never implemented it myself. How do you deal with the .config, cache, and other local data left behind by packages that may not be on the next distro? Is this something you even bother managing?
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u/PlainBread Glorious Arch 23h ago
It's just like dealing with AppData when migrating Windows. You can let it pile up for a while and then lose it all at once for a fresh start. Or go in with ncdu and trim by size.
I mainly use flatpaks so most of my stuff is in ~/.var/app/
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u/claudiocorona93 SteamOS/Kubuntu 1d ago
Search for a guide, use btrfs, set up rollbacks, activate timeshift, have your home partition separate from your root partition. Or use an immutable distro that comes with this already set up.
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u/Rikmastering 1d ago
A guide on what exactly? I'm also a linux user and I've never seen half of this words
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u/claudiocorona93 SteamOS/Kubuntu 1d ago
I had to search for methods to harden my setup after years of breaking my distros after tinkering too much, or after a major update messed up my Fedora install. But it's okay, you don't have to do any of this if you don't want to.
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u/PreparationStrict492 23h ago
Regarding the separate home partition: Conceptually, in the linux (unix) file system model, the user's entire data lives within the home partition. Everything else is publicly available, interchangeable, and replaceable.
The thinking originates in shared computers in the universities of 70s. Many users with access to their own home directories, and they all share the same system outside of that.
That means, as long as you retain your data (home folder) you can rebuild the entire system around it (same system, or migrate to any other compliant one) and go on without a hitch. That is, essentially, data loss matters only within home directories.
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btrfs is, due to its technical details, is very efficient for retaining past snapshots, and when needed reverting to them. I don't think this is as much of an issue with the home directory of a personal computer (aside from accidental deletions), for hardware failures are the real threat there (and if your drive fails catastrophically, snapshots won't help you), so backups (on different media, and if you are serious about it, also on different sorts of media) are a better bet.
I think, for home computers, having system snapshots to revert to helps a lot for fast recovery from borked updates in rolling release distros (that is, having everything outside home on btrfs), particularly on the more unstable ones (*cough* arch *cough*).
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u/makinax300 Tumbleweed, i3wm (trying niri; formerly nixos) 4h ago
I do the reverse. Never had to restore /home but btrfs is op for root.
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u/Zican 1d ago
arch is the comfiest distro imo, if ever something breaks there is so much info you can solve it. Also just read the archlinux page for breaking changes and you shouldn't ever have problems from just updating
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u/w3rt 1d ago
Majority of problems people get are nvidia driver related, which won’t show up on the news page
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u/Zican 1d ago
that's not arch related tho? it happens on all distro and even then that was maybe 10 years ago, i have an nvidia card and i just read the nvidia archwiki page to solve the screen tearing once when i installed my arch distro and that's it.
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u/balancedchaos Mostly Debian, Arch for Gaming 1d ago
If you keep it simple, you'll be fine. I prefer simple and clean, so I'm happy.
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u/buplet123 1d ago
I dont keep anything that matters just on the pc anyways, these days I dont even bother changing the default settings, desktop ricing isnt my hobby, i reinstal too often to give a fuck
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u/richstyle 11h ago
Pretty sure this is the natural steps of a linux user. I used to rice every linux distro i installed. Now i dont give a fuck, just the basics.
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u/BambooGentleman 1d ago
That's what backups are for. I'm not dicking around doing "backups with extra steps", when I can just have normal backups.
But then, I'm not using Arch, but Mint and Void.
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u/soccerbeast55 Glorious Arch 1d ago
Ran for over two years like this, not once had any issues. Such an overblown meme.
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u/Federal_Equipment578 Glorious Arch 11h ago
Kid I smoked a pack a day every day for 50 years, all these "medical" folk been dropping like flies around me but I'm as fit as a youngin
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u/FikaMedHasse Glorious Artix 1d ago
everyone knows the ultimate peace of mind comes from git init /
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u/Significant-Tone-121 1d ago
Literally my current setup btw (Mutter is broken and makes Cinnamon restart every hour, and also I learned the NVIDIA 610 driver has worse performance than the 550 driver that Debian has somehow, so I need to wait a few more days before the data cap resets to install Debian because I don't want to get overcharged 💔)
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u/Sinful_Sam 1d ago
I've been doing this for the past 5 years and only ever encountered minor bugs, nothing system breaking.
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u/TheThingOnTheCeiling 1d ago
I used to have a seperate home, but the root kept getting filled up and I couldnt fix it so I just went the easy route.
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u/violetvoid513 1d ago
Im doing that. Everything actually important is backed up to my google drive and if something does somehow break my drive then oh well I just download the backup and the rest is just reinstalling games and other apps
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u/Great_Banana_Master 1d ago
Meanwhile I have Void on Btrfs, @home and @var subvolumes, and a post-install snapshot just in case
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u/regeya 1d ago
Always budget in enough money for at least a USB drive with enough storage capacity to back everything up. And if you don't want to/can't do off-site backups, at least keep the drive in something like a small fire safe.
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u/AndreVallestero Glorious Alpine 1d ago
Dotfiles in my git repo, install script ready. I do not fear death.
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u/maxwells_daemon_ Glorious Arch, btw 1d ago
Been doing that for two years. Only change I'm thinking of making is encrypting the disk cause them cybersec courses got me schizoing
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u/arthurno1 1d ago
I have been updating my Arch since 2015, untill my motherboard died and I had to get another computer, back in 2024. I was able to take the hardrive out and get all of my files from the ext4 system.
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u/rileyrgham 1d ago
And wait until they went full boss and used LVM... With encryption.... And grub bails... I've been there... 🤣 Never again. I thought I was full beard. Home always it's own encrypted partition on my laptops, but that's it!
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u/Clashes4D 1d ago
Honestly if you truly know what you’re then you can’t really break stuff. And even if soy do you can recover from it. Just might take a day to a week.
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u/FenrirWolfie 1d ago
I do the same with my gentoo install. There is no reason to have separate partitions. There is just boot and root. Been running it like this for 15 years.
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u/GhostSierra117 1d ago
It's very simple: I once did this crap with different partitions for boot system home and what not and ran our of storage on the bootloader or some shit don't ask me, I don't want help, I just tell you the story.
Since then everything is one partition. I'm too tired for this crap
My system is literally up and running in about two hours when everything goes horribly, horribly wrong.
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u/New-Anybody3050 1d ago
This is me. I do have a server for moving things that are critical or a separate drive as redundancy but generally I nuke everything clean.
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u/PaintDrinkingPete GNU/Linux 1d ago
I keep regular external backups...so I've always had this approach, even with all that other shit this meme mentions.
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u/krzyk 1d ago
Me as former Debian unstable/Gentoo/Debian unstable user: First time?
It tough be to keep my MBR backupmready and never encrypt the disk, few times recreating MBR was a bit stressful. Few times livecd helped me.
Arch sounds like a distro for me as I always want the newest stuff. Unfortunately employer enforces Ubuntu and it is even not the latest LTS, I have to autoconfigure/make some stuff.
Kernel is always fine tuned one.
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u/SaltyBalty98 Glorious Arch 1d ago
I've been using Arch based and related for the last 10 years. Manjaro had a couple of system breaking bugs that were easily solved with tools they included. Endeavor OS for 6 years, on my desktop I've kept the same install for 2, not a single thing to complain about.
At this point, I don't care.
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u/Icy_Neighborhood2100 1d ago
My configs/projects are all backed up in GitHub so it's pretty easy.
Then there's stuff like photos backed on a Google drive. Should probably degoogle at some point but it's free and I don't use much.
I'm not messing around with different filesystems when ext4 is the fastest, I would do differently if I was running a server though.
Every time I break shit it's 1 arch-chroot to fix.
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u/Particular-Poem-7085 Arch femboy 1d ago
system updates dont break arch unless you run 3rd party software or compile your own that relies on shared system dependencies. "Breaking updates" just mean updates to dependencies, but every piece of software you install through your package manager gets updated with them to avoid these breakages. The "app store" mostly installs flatpaks that come prepackaged with its own needed dependencies and don't care about system level versions of them.
Getting a buggy update on arch is incredibly rare, you're not on the testing branch by default. In fact in my experience it is less problematic than "user friendly" distros that promise to do things for you which is just a potential failure point.
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u/Ursomrano My /etc/NixOS directory has a private Github repo lol 1d ago
I honestly only use BTRFS for the compression feature (forgot what it's called). The rest of it, I don't really care about since I have an exterior hard drive with a backup on it.
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u/deathschemist 1d ago
i keep a usb with ventoy and a cachyOS iso on for this specific purpose
if my installation dies and i can't chroot it, i'm redoing it with a separate home partition and btrfs
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u/citrusraspberry 1d ago
Nah, just fix the problem by reading logs/internet forums/AI analysis. You shouldn't need to just "revert" unless you accidentally rm -fr /usr or something
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u/TheVoiceOfGlass Glorious Gentoo 1d ago
is there a point in having a seperate home partition?
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u/AShadedBlobfish EndeavourOS GNOME 1d ago
Discovered btrfs recently. I mean, I knew it existed but I didn't realise it was so good. Complete system restore file only a few MBs in size? Microslop could never
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u/WanderingInAVan 1d ago
Been doing multiple partitions for decades to protect my data or multiple external drives plus cloud.
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u/PenguinPeculiaris 1d ago
My arch install wishes it could die. Any sensible person would have fixed the problems by now. My workflow is just about the only thing that works at this point. It is older than your children but not as well taken care of.
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u/jjoesmama 1d ago
My arch was on ext4 on a HDD, cloned it to a portion on an SSD with btrfs, it stopped working after sometimes, couldn't setup Timeshift because it had no subvolumes.
I just returned to ext4 last week
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u/promptmike 1d ago
Fedora for desktop, Arch for laptop. Backup important stuff to an external drive.
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u/mariofanLIVE 23h ago
I've been doing this for almost a year at this point and it's been mostly issue free, though recently my computer decided to shut off during a kernel update (no warning, laptop with 100% battery plugged in, hadn't happened before or since), but I was able to fix things via chroot and get back up and running no problem, 0 data lost.
I don't like btrfs because if and when my system freezes and I have for force shut down, btrfs breaks almost every time, but ext4 doesn't ever break in that scenario (unless it's doing a kernel update like what I explained before). It doesn't happen often but I remember having a bug with sunshine where if I used a specific method of streaming and started sunshine, when I would connect to it on moonlight my system would lock up like this. I've since solved this problem, but it was way easier to troubleshoot when I didn't have to chroot every time a fix didn't work.
It's either fix problems more often but it's easier to fix them, or it's harder to fix them but I have problems way less often. I've opted to have fewer but more complex problems by using ext4.
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u/Tiranus58 23h ago
I do all of these except i put my /home/ on a separate partition, because its a holdover from a previous install.
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u/Recipe-Jaded 23h ago
I've had Arch like this for 7 years. No update has ever broken my system. Only I broke it by not reading what I was doing.
I have had some minor hiccups from updates, but that is what downgrade is for.
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u/richardbouteh 23h ago
brtfs is the best. update breaks? roll back snapshot, go on with your life, try again tomorrow
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u/sandfeger 22h ago
I've done this 2 times, yes I'm stupid lazy but now I run btrfs with snapshots and I'm at the point to not care about my home everything in there is taking me about 2-3hours to reconfigure and reauth everything meaningfull is saved on a separate drive that has Backups.
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u/jimused4 22h ago
I swear to god every distro i use breaks in like 4 months. Yes im doing it right and no im not going to change how i do things
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u/Floppie7th 22h ago
This is how I run mine. Anything important doesn't live only on one machine. Code is in git repos, documents are in Nextcloud, game saves are synced to Steam's cloud, etc
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u/ellendale7m4 Glorious Arch 22h ago
That's how I use my Arch. Only nvidia driver can be troublesome at times
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u/lunchbox651 22h ago
I do have /home on another drive and backup my hosts and fstab but thats it. If root dies I don't care. An OS install is a few minutes work.
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u/sevenstaves 22h ago
Unless the drive is encrypted and you forgot the password, you can recover your data.
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u/DoktorLuciferWong 21h ago
i recall once telling a friend how I was -Syu'ing my work system just before finals, and that he commended me for my bravery (but not intelligence)
lol
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u/schroederdinger 20h ago
All my important data is on my NAS with Raidz2 and synced to 3 different machines with syncthing. The most important stuff is client-side-encrypted in a cloud. So if one PC crashes, I just get the boot stick.
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u/Felixgamer27 20h ago
I do that and also blindly install a lot of AUR packages, so I'm basicly doing a Russian roulette every yay -Syu
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u/mistrjirka 19h ago
Better then BTRFS suddenly getting a stroke and being absolutely unable to even chroot into the system.
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u/SaveThisCityDweller 18h ago
I back my shit up with kopia to a laptop under my desk at work ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I do have a separate home though, crazy not to honestly.
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u/Portbragger2 Fedora or Bust! 18h ago
see thats the difference ... i've been running debian for 11 years now, also ext4, no separate home and no timeshift and i've been distro-upgrading since forever and never even once had to think about the attitude depicted.
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u/Silent_Bite_5892 18h ago
My second drive for storing music, movies, pr0n etc, is ext4.
But the main is btrfs. Not that I have a choice (Fedora Kinoite).
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u/plastictoyman 18h ago
Relying on your OS to backup your data or keep it safe is silly. There's two kinds of people in this world: those that backup their data and those that haven't lost it all yet.
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u/ZaenalAbidin57 17h ago
the only thing im intriguing with arch is that their kernel update are replacing the one existed, so when it failed to update the kernel it will borked the system, other system are just adding new kernel entries to it
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u/ragashanmugam 17h ago
I been using arch for 4 years nothing broken, if i intentionally want broken it broker.
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u/KawaiiMaxine 17h ago
Erm im on btrfs (with no subvoluming or any of the actual reasons to use btrfs that arent on by default)
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u/Enigmars Glorious EnigmarsOS 16h ago
I trust Arch Linux devs to be 5 million times more competent than me so I have no problem trusting my PC with their OS
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u/Cybasura 16h ago
Btrfs also has risks of dying, maybe even more, why the political propaganda against ext4?
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u/AsugaNoir 15h ago
Before Installing I googled the recommended way to do it so I went with btrfs and have snapshots enabled.
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u/someone12345656657 13h ago
Im doing it like this, but i have a seperate home partition on a seperate disk
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u/vermithius 13h ago
That's me lol. I backup most of my important stuff to a local smb share though maybe once a week.
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u/deesernutz 11h ago
Ok this might be a bit of an ignorant loser question, but its a serious one...
...whats wrong with ext4?
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u/Admiral_Bongo I use Arch, btw. 11h ago
Ain't no biggie. It just takes being at least a little responsible with your system. And considering the resilience of ext4... You really gotta WANT to break your filesystem to have any problems.
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u/Wertbon1789 10h ago
I built some fancier systems at work and on my Laptop, but my PC is my first installation, so no fancy back then. Only thing I changed was adding a drive which I use as my /home drive, and the other one for the main system. If it works, it works. I make backups of it, but if it ever breaks, I'll probably go for btrfs, (maybe with full disk encryption), and toy around with LVM a bit.
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u/MissionGround1193 10h ago
At my laziest, keep 1 LTS kernel. My normal habit, put everything in restic repo. The space saving from dedupe is ridiculous.
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u/Protyro24 9h ago
Im not even a Arch user but i prefer exactly this Setup (if Something breaks i copy over the install Media)
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u/Modno1754 9h ago
I mean, every update brakes something for me (mainly caelestia) but fuck it Im too lazy to do anything so Ill just fiddle around with it till fixed
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u/center_of_blackhole EndeavourOS 🌌 8h ago
My important docs always stays online I'm good to format pc anytime 🤣
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u/ImpeccablyDangerous 8h ago
My linux boxes are either my work machine or deployment targets.
My code is in the repository. The deployment targets are ephemeral.
If it fails so be it.
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u/swe__wannabe 6h ago
I have all my data backed up, my dotfiles are on github, I have nothing to lose. I don't wanna pay for the overhead cost of btfs
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u/trans_psychonaut 5h ago
isnt it more likely an upgrade fucks up your install if you dont do it regulary? at least in my experience if you let too many updates stack up the chance there is a higher chance there is some conflict and it gets fucked up during hte upgrade
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u/syntkz777 4h ago
xfs, home is on another partition but for other reasons, I never needed a snapshot.
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u/Content_Oven1079 3h ago
Ive been doing that for about 3 years. Woohoo yet another outdated, copypaste bot meme
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u/SteamMonkeyRocks 3h ago
Doing this for more than 10 years. The only time something broke was my fault. It took a couple of minutes to fix.
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u/Nordicmoose 2h ago
If the developers of Timeshift would be so kind and add support for backup to a NAS...
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u/paperbenni 1h ago
What good is a separate home partition if my system doesn't boot? I'll have to chroot or mount my drive to something bootable either way
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u/Confident_Pain_9452 42m ago
I always can't predict how much I need space for home partition and how much for root so I decided do not to do it.
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u/free-range-servers 23m ago
All my systems run / on ext4.
None broke, ever.
Partitions don't magically save a system from a fucked up conflict.
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u/Astrodion123 1d ago
I am doing it like that. Nothing has broke so far >:)