NaevaTheRat [she/her]

Yeah black screen with mouse cursor is the thing. If I check the logs it’ll complain about errors trying to get display foo. Can switch to a TTY session and kill shit and get display back if I restart X.

nfi why the mouse cursor still works.

Fair, that’s defs breakage that would trip up a novice computer user.

I’ve been around enough to know that everyone ignores “have backups”. Although I think pacman can do rollbacks because it keeps a cache by default? I’ve never had to and I use snapshots so /shrug.

Still a novice computer user would probably not feel comfortable reading manual pages, and even an expert would be annoyed if this happened.

I tried to run linux on a mac once (work supplied) and it was very annoying compared to a think pad. I can’t remember specifically why, maybe the touchpad had low level drag scrolling I couldn’t overrule or something like that. How do you find it?

Yeah, I would say broken if it wont boot to a normal userspace. Like if you need to insert a recovery tool, or even just login as root and unfuck something before you can get your X/Wayland session up, or if applications start crashing because toolFoo has some critical bug.

But the last time that happened was on Debian when I tried to write a fstab file manually without reading the manual. Also this was the era of CD drives and no multi PC households. Learned a valuable lesson on the ride back from the library, printed documentation in hand haha.

I think people might be saying their system broke when a specific, non critical, application doesn’t work after an update based on an interaction here.

That does become more common if you start installing third party software and/or use less common/recommended tools. Personally I wouldn’t consider that breaking, but I guess to a casual person it might not be clear that rolling upgrade systems have this risk and the weirder your system gets the more familiar you should be with backups and rollbacks.

Because vegan bashing and arch bashing have in common having broadly stupid opinions ;)

https://archlinux.org/packages/extra/any/proton-vpn-gtk-app/ doesn’t list a particular version of python in deps.

Seems like the proton team made a mistake /shrug. Not exactly a system breaking though, it’s a third party piece of software not being kept up to date.

just roll back till they maintain it. Normal enough procedure

Is the protonVPN package maintained by the arch team? Or did you install it on your own?

If the latter you can’t rely in pacman to know about dependencies you never told it about or took steps to ensure were met.

What are people doing that breaks their computers? I have used arch for like 15 years now and nothing ever goes wrong?

The closest would be on my desktop sometimes nvidia drivers are in a state that breaks display reinit on wake from sleep but my thinkpad is always fine.

Seriously who are you weird computer vandals going around and breaking everything all the time? What do you do?