And I hate when people take a single case and extrapolate it as a general statement.

By that argument Ubuntu is equally unstable as they have rolled out updates that broke grub resulting in unbootable systems - not during a full distro upgrade, but as Ubuntu specific patches to LTS.

In the end, we have choice, and choice is a good thing.

Arch is not harder to maintain nor is it easier to break, that’s a myth. If anything, it’s the opposite, as a rolling release stays up to date, though it relies on the user keeping it up to date. If you get lazy with updates, then yes, you are going to have problems eventually.

This is normal behavior. There is much more to the JVMs memory usage beyond what’s allocated to the heap - there are other memory regions as well. There are additional tuning options for them, but it’s a complicated subject and if you aren’t actually encountering out of memory issues you have to ask if this is worth the effort to tune it.

I use syncthing all over the place for this sort of thing. I have some sync directories that are multi way synced across multiple devices, others that are one-way drop targets to a specific device, others that are for operations like backing up photos. It’s quite excellent with a good sync algorithm that rarely results in conflicts.

Another suggestion for Darktable. It handles this case of mixed types transparently. It’s a big thing to learn, but extremely powerful and capable, and you don’t have to know all the corners of it, just enough for your workflow.

FreeCAD. It’s fantastic but takes some getting used to. I recommend the Ondsel fork - it’s still free and open source except for the cloud storage which you can ignore. Ondsel includes some newer features and some interface changes.

When I’m forced to, and not before then. X works perfectly well so there’s no reason for me to switch to something else with less features.

Reboot to the snapshot you took of the root fs before starting the update, then just rerun the upgrade. If you are using btrfs (or ZFS) make use of its features so you never have this sort of problem.

Nope, Plan9 is too old - I run Hurd.

(Yes, this is a joke)

So what do I have wrong here?

Nothing, as far as I’m concerned. I guess DEs have to constantly change or they become stale to some people. I’m an older guy than the normal demographic here too and stale is exactly what I want. I run i3 with a bunch of terminals, a browser, and sublime text when vi in a terminal isn’t enough (yes, it’s really vim, but it’ll always be vi to me), and I xsetroot the classic weave pattern for my background. That’s it. I don’t need or want menus, widgets, themes, file managers or anything else. I guess someday Wayland will win, and I’ll be forced to do something different, but until then, not changing this extremely productive and efficient environment.

I don’t use Fedora, but I have ZFS on all my Arch systems for everything (including root fs). So, I’ll make a guess - is the package you installed for ZFS a DKMS kernel module, or a binary one? That’s the first thing. If it’s a DKMS module, I don’t see anything on your output showing it was compiled, which would explain the module not loading. If it’s a binary module in that package, it must be for the exact same version of the kernel that is installed - exact same. If it mismatches then you need either a different kennel or different ZFS package. In either case, you’ll probably need to wire in a hook for your initramfs, but it looks that part might be ok from your output. Hope that helps, good luck. ZFS is incredibly good.

urxvt is the only terminal I’ll use. Every time I try something else I come back to it because of some basic thing that’s not right - usually font rendering which urxvt is one of the few that works well with scalable fonts. It’s fast and simple and does everything I need without any bloated stuff I’ll never use.

Just install arch if that’s what you want.

Otherwise, RTFM - debootstrap.

Yep, all desktop environments have this - whatever text editor is handy. :⁠-⁠)

Maybe they are, but this is the way the medium works - you don’t get to control what people post (unless you are mod). Scroll past and move on.

Nope - that’s the whole point of ZFS - you don’t need any special hardware, nor do you want that layer hiding the details since ZFS manages the drives. Plus, you probably want to use RAIDZx with spare drives to absorb failure.

rxvt-unicode - lightweight and nearly perfect, and one of the few that handles fonts well.

100% all this. Canonical has been pushing snaps for awhile, and I wonder if the 12 year LTS for Ubuntu is part of that strategy - want something newer? It’s in the snap store. snap is terrible, worse than flakpak and appimage - but just as you say, as an arch user I don’t have to care. Whatever I want is probably in the AUR if not the main repos. Rolling distros, done right (arch), are an amazing experience.

It’s a good question - I don’t know, because I haven’t used it. If it’s 100% compatible with i3 down to its configuration and features, then sure, it’s palatable.

In a word - yes - i3 is incredibly productive and customizable, but it’s not for everyone. I’ve been using i3 with no DE or DM for about a decade. Every time I try to use a full DE like KDE, Gnome, etc, it’s just so slow and bloated, and gets in the way. And there’s 100’s of extra packages that get installed, and be updated, that I don’t use. I don’t need anything but terminals (of which I have about 40 open in 12 different virtual desktops), a browser, and an editor when vim isn’t enough. So for me, it’s perfect and simple. I don’t know what will happen when Wayland finally wins, but that’s 5-10 years away before it really wins.