MX Linux Forum

Silent Observer wrote: Thu Dec 24, 2020 10:24 pmBottom line, though, there's no way around installing fresh within the next few months, if I want to keep on a supported OS (and I do -- security updates are good). What's the support horizon for MX 19.3? Five years? Longer? Canonical's been saying Ubuntu 20.04 would be supported with security updates for something like eight or nine years -- but security updates aren't any help if you can't do work you want/need to do because the software you use isn't available for your "supported" platform in a version with the new feature you need. Any clue when KDE will next update Plasma enough to break stuff?

asqwerth wrote: Thu Dec 24, 2020 10:39 pm MX is not rolling.

BitJam wrote: Fri Dec 25, 2020 12:28 am @JayM, Both are true.

Does anyone here have suggestions for making the re-install less painful for people like Silent Observer who are inclined to use a rolling release?

Personally, I use Gentoo which is truly a rolling distro but I will re-install every 3 - 5 years anyway, often when I'm updating hardware, in order to get rid of cruft and clutter. Gentoo has a "world file" which records everything installed on the system so getting the distro back to where it was is pretty easy just by copying that one file. For me the tricky part is all the custom software I add.

sudo apt install [list of all apps and packages separated by a space between each item]

Silent Observer wrote: Thu Dec 24, 2020 10:24 pm Okay, let's check that: what's the current repo version of GIMP? I've been running it from a Snap for a good while, because the version in the repos compatible with Ubuntu 16.04 was ancient. I was just playing with the KDE version of MX Live, and it's gotten back most of what I recall liking about the Plasma desktop .....

So now, every time I look for a solution to a problem, the answer is "install Ubuntu 20.04 and see if that fixes it." Problem is, I'm really, REALLY tired of installing fresh, and to a large extent learning a new system, ever two to five years (and yes, I'd have had the same problem with Windows -- since I jumped on Linux, there have been four versions of Windows with three significant changes in interface).

What I'm looking for is a system in which uprades are a more gradual process. "Rolling" seems like what I want -- but the only rolling systems in Debian are bleeding-edge, based on Testing or Unstable repos, and this isn't a hobby system; it's my production machine (and my laptop, which will get the same OS as the desktop, doesn't get used a huge number of hours in a year).

I was just referred here from the Antix forums, where I'd gone because I read that Antix was rolling-Stable (it's not, and never has been; instead, it had, more than a decade ago, an upgrade script that probably never worked any better than Ubuntu's -- which starts, as its very first operation, by disabling all third-part repos and ppas). The suggestion was that I ask here about reducing the pain of version upgrades.

All I really want is to not have to spend a weekend fighting with my computer unless I'm making a major hardware rebuild (and my hardware is mostly fine -- video card is a little out of date, but I'm not a heavy gamer). Should I switch to MX?

Procedure to save and restore to a different machine

1. save all non /home/yourself changes in a directory structure ~/changes-hostname-yymmdd with each file in the relative folder underneath where it was added or change with all the attributes it had as well. if the file is literally machine dependent, make a 2nd copy of the file suffixed by the hostname so you don’t forget
2. don’t load things that are difficult to reload, at minimum, if no .deb, forget it if possible
3. limit what you put in /home. put downloaded data file stuff somewhere else and back it up/restore it separately
4. run the packagecomp #1 modified pc script (pkgs1.mod.sh) on the modified machine being saved to make a list of what was installed
5. get the aptik .debs and install them to do the saves. save to a place outside of your own /home because you want it to backup your /home. I just save users, groups, cron and /home with it. I take the folder and copy it to the live-usb folder on a freshly made and tested antiX flashdrive, as well as the aptik .deb files and packagecomp folder
6. load the new machine, connect to the net, install antiX saving live changes. make sure you have all the live usb stuff copied off the flashdrive to somewhere outside of your /home, and then you can reboot into the stock antiX system and make sure its ok before loading all your changes.
7. run the packagecomp #2 standard pc script (pkgs2.std.sh) on the freshly installed machine to find out what packages need to be added. When the editor comes up, remove things you don’t need. The script will make a list for you of what you decided to skip, just in case.
8. run the apt-get update and apt-get install with command line provided, you can go back and redo #7 as many times as you like, each time it comes up with a list of what is still missing
9. use apt to install the aptik .debs
10. run aptik-gtk from the run box as root
11. restore only the things saved above
12. overlay the changes from your ~/changes-hostname-yymmdd which got restored by aptik
13. update-grub
14. reboot, and hopefully welcome to a totally familiar system with everything just as you left it, but running on a shiny new system (LOL, or old clunker for the kids)

It took about 3 hours to do, not bad for a modified system.

NickStone wrote: Sun Jan 03, 2021 1:33 pm After reading this thread I would like to suggest the OP try PCLinuxOS. It's a rolling release distro but not like Arch (or any Arch based distros). All packages (apps) are in the RPM format but they've amended the Debian APT package manager (and Synaptic) to work with RPM's. It comes with desktops (KDE; Mate and XFCE) with a few more community spins with different desktops / WM's.

Hope this helps.

asqwerth wrote: Sun Jan 03, 2021 2:38 pm It's very gently rolling, and I do all my updates via Synaptic without issue.

It's ok generally, but I believe that they have a smaller pool of packages and they aren't currently taking package requests. There have been times when an existing package is no longer maintained and disappears from the repos. For instance I used to have compiz running as WM for my MATE desktop but it's no longer available.

For Libreoffice and Virtualbox respectively, they provide a separate software manager. You run them after your normal apt-get/Synaptic updates, to check if there are LO/VB updates and if yes, to install them.

The basic software (or at least their version of certain applications) should be covered.