• marcie (she/her)@lemmy.mlOP
    4·
    2 days ago

    How long have you been using Linux? I’ve been using it since around 2004. About every 2 years a major upgrade would make my computer kill itself and I’d have to manually repair it over the course of a weekend. I do security software work and often to make that suite of software (some of it not niche like vpn apps) function you must alter some system files. Layering these apps over the system solves the problem.

    • ranzispa@mander.xyz
      1·
      2 days ago

      I’ve been using Linux as my main OS for about 15 years. I had my system break down in other occasions in the same way you describe. It is a nuisance, but luckily it never was a major problem. I believe once I had to reinstall the system, I was very happy to have a separate home partition.

      I’m not sure what you mean by layering apps over the system, that could be interesting. Especially because I imagine something like a VPN needs root access. Is it possible to install a binary as a service with root access if that is not available in the repositories? I do for example have to use a quite obscure VPN protocol.

      • marcie (she/her)@lemmy.mlOP
        3·
        2 days ago

        Yeah. You can layer it like a git repo fork layers it’s changes. If something breaks you can just clear that forked branch and redo it. Takes like 2 minutes to fix.

        So yeah you can alter system files in a very safe way and can easily revert changes if you don’t like the result. rpm-ostree reset is the command that clears all changes and resets to master. I’d recommend looking at the rpm-ostree docs for a full explanation of functionality