• RootAccess@lemmynsfw.com
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    3 months ago

    Out of curiosity: Which operating system(s) can you shutdown while the kernel is being overwritten? I wouldn’t imagine that as a limitation of Arch Linux specifically.

      • TxzK@lemmy.zip
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        3 months ago

        Also Fedora ships 3 kernels by default. If one breaks, maybe the others will keep working.

            • RootAccess@lemmynsfw.com
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              3 months ago

              Yes. I have it set up this way. I forgot it wasn’t the default. For the amount of headache it would solve, I wonder if the Arch team has a specific reason for not keeping a number of previous kernels by default.

      • jonne@infosec.pub
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        3 months ago

        Ubuntu (and probably Debian too) will keep an old kernel in your grub list so you can boot off that one if needed.

    • palordrolap@kbin.run
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      3 months ago

      Mint definitely keeps a couple of previous kernels around, so that might be a Debian and Ubuntu thing too.

      That said, there’s always going to be a critical point of failure that a power loss could cause things to break, no matter your OS or distro.

      Writing the bootloader or updating a partition table for example.

    • themoonisacheese@sh.itjust.works
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      3 months ago

      Anything running on a copy-on-write filesystem can trivially rollback changes using a rescue partition.

      I also expect most immutable distros would be able to be especially good at tanking this.

    • leftzero@lemmynsfw.com
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      3 months ago

      I assume NixOs would just let you load a previous working configuration if the current one got corrupted (though in this case it probably could simply rebuild the current one).

      • RootAccess@lemmynsfw.com
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        3 months ago

        I haven’t used Windows since Win7 - Is it possible nowadays to immediately cancel a kernel-level upgrade (say, Win7 to Win8) and have it gracefully stop and then boot into the pre-upgrade environment? If so, then Windows has come a long way. We use to be careful breathing-too-loudly around Windows computers during the upgrade process. Microsoft must be getting better.