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#!/usr/bin/env bash
if [ -z "$TMUX" ]; then
printf >&2 "✗ pacman must be run inside tmux\n"
exit 1
fi
exec /usr/bin/pacman "$@"
Now that I've begun migrating away from ubuntu for servers and am now using Arch/Artix for server I'm going to be using pacman more over ssh.
It is very easy to break a system if pacman gets interrupted. To fix it usually you need to chroot from an instillation disk to patch the kernel and initramfs.
That's not always easy to do on cheap VPS's. Plus even if it was easy the down time on a server is unacceptable anyway.
I theory this is a good thing to be doing with apt as well. Pacman just breaks a system more frequently when interupted than apt does. Maybe it's just because Arch/Artix is constantly updating the kernel to the lastest because it's cool like that. On Arch you only run new software. It leads to less version hell when there is less field of time to consider.
But to use this with apt, which is not a bad idea, just swap the command.
Arch for servers... Don't you think that's a bit insane? Like, on a server you don't even want to be updating all the time, but Arch forces you to and if you update after a long time it stops functioning. It doesn't even promise to remain functional if you use it normally, you should expect things to break. I'm sure you have your reasoning but why use Arch over Gentoo for this purpose?
I used to. But Ubuntu has pissed me off that much and I've been running Arch-like distros at home for long enough I realize it gives me fewer problems than my servers do when I want to install new and unfamiliar software. Fighting the system (actually) to get some software installed on Ubuntu means either giving up early or doing things that risk breaking it. On Arch it just installs.
So that's when I realized that not only is there major time savings in not dealing with this bull-poop, but actually less risk, as long as exploring new software is a given. If you are devops and just deploying set things then sure Ubuntu server works. But if you are doing dev arch makes more sense, and it makes sense to deploy to the same kind of system one uses for dev.
BTW Ubuntu wants to be updated constantly. Neither system breaks if you fail to update it, but both should be updated daily.
Honestly I've never run Gentoo. I've gotten half way through building it. I've done Linux for Scratch before and manual installs of Arch. I've gotten my fill of manually building Linux. I can't even imagine what doing that on a VPS would look like.
So yeah, Arch on Server is insane. But what Ubuntu does is insane. Sometime the insanities associated with the standard way of doing things tips the scales so the non-standard way becomes less insane. Some people can be first to see it. Others only adapt when they see others do it first. I'm not the second category.
Noobuntu releases once every 6 months and LTS once every 18. So long as you stay within your release there is no risk of breaking it in my experience, while upgrading to a new release comes with risk. (Not entirely true but the other risk is related to updating grub or switching to a different desktop environment.)
You can get a VPS preinstalled with Gentoo. It's rolling release but stable rather than bleeding edge, that's what makes it so fit for production. There is some maintenance to be done but it's overseeable. Like the default branch is stable and then there's a testing branch, but there's never an upgrade to a newer release. Well, it looks like Arch works for you but if you get the chance, do try Gentoo I think you'll like it.
Another alternative is Hyperbola, which is a stable distro that also uses pacman. I never installed that because they're switching to a BSD base, but that seems to be stuck in development hell or something, it's taking so long that at this point it seems like you can just use their GNU+linsucks distro for a while, although I'm not sure if that's even updated anymore. And then there's Slackware, which I didn't mention before because it's the opposite approach to what you seem to like: it has releases that approach RHEL releases in lifetime, they stay supported for 7 years by average. But if you want newer software there's also Slackware current which is their rolling release. Slackware truly is rock solid, it's my distro of choice.
I guess one issue I have with Gentoo, but maybe there is an exception, is that it is typical to compile your packages instead of download binaries. On a server that's not a great idea to have significantly more load every now and again.
I've used FreeBSD before. It was pretty ok. I'd run it. IDK why but compile times for it were so fast compared to Gentoo.
FreeBSD provides binary versions of all their ports packages using the
pkgcommand and since a few years Gentoo provides binaries as well although I'm not familiar with those. Calculate Linux is a Gentoo-based distro that also provides binaries, that's been around for over a decade.