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I'm not sure what happened but the pacman update on ZSH gave a warning about conflicting permissions. I exited the shell after the update and ended up with a system freeze and garbled graphics on the screen. I rebooted with an older kernel but my main drive kept unmounting when I was trying to back up data which crashed the system. So, update or hardware issue? I'll need to investigate. But I like the feel of MX Linux so far...
Probably an update issue. Did you put MX on a new drive? Were you able to retain your /home?
Thankfully I managed to copy some of my /home files to the other drive but since I had to install Linux on that other drive(which had most of my files), I backed up those files on USB drives. But the pain was tangible. :(
Yes, I installed MX on a different drive. I was never able to format the hard drive that my previous install was on. I tried wiping it clean and writing a partition table on it but nothing seems to happen whether it's writing a partition table or a file system. It just stalls at 11% progress. It's a 7 year old SSD and might have some bad blocks on it but I can't say for sure.
The only alternative space I had were two 128G USB flash drives. I think I managed to save all the documents and music files I had but the transfer speeds were dismal. I'd get off work and try to archive as much crap as I could but 500K-20M/S transfer speeds meant that it took a few days to transfer about 250G of data. Anyway, I'm doing the opposite right now(USB to SDD data transfer) and my computer is really starting to show its age. Would you believe that some of those music files are more than twenty years old?
Yep. Sounds like a bad SSD. Happened to my father. I still don't use SSD for my important data for that reason to this day. You can schedule a utility to do a health check on it and alert you. But it is very easy to skip doing that step on an install, so I stick to disk to be safe.
The few things that actually need SSD can be put on a secondary drive and symlinked into place. Really only video games benefit significantly. Maybe a few other niche things.
I'd check the SMART data and report back but sadly, Gparted doesn't have that feature. Maybe it's a KDE utility but I'm using XFCE right now. But a drive failure seems likely.
This is why I don't like Arch. An OS should render the hardware usable. It should, at the very least, be reliable at staying bootable no matter what happens, even after an update. GNU / #linsux still fails at this in 2026 although steps are being made to address this with immutable distros. Or if you like a simpler setup, just pick a stable distro.
@JasonCarswell Manjaro is based on Arch just like Artix and if you install that distro, this is a preview of what to expect. MX Linux is the one I recommended you in chat. Then you'll be using the same system as Optimus85. It's almost as easy to use as Mint but, as stated, not dependent on systemd.
@WinstonSmith congrats. I was happy with it as well from briefly testing it. I'm distrohopping again. I'm using Qubes currently but I don't feel in control of this system. I don't like all these layers of complexity. One of the distros I'm looking at is postmarketOS which is based on Alpine. There's a desktop variant available. Alpine and thus pmOS use musl and no systemd. A lot of stuff is missing from the official repos but Flatpak works out of the box and you can make it compatible with Appimages. You can also setup a chroot and install a glibc compatibility layer, and then everything inside a Debian / Gentoo / whatever chroot including graphical applications. Instructions here. Oh yeah, and there is a nix package so you have access to their extensive repos.
I really like this idea. This is basically what I'm doing on Slackware. I mainly use Slackbuilds but I have deb2tgz, nix, flatpak, appimages and a Debian chroot to fall back on. There's also Homebrew lol. Install all the packages! But Slackware isn't secure by default. I like that I can basically do the same on Alpine and have much better security, and pmOS (which I mean to install instead) will give me a desktop out of the box. And with musl, upgrading to a new release isn't going to cause as many problems as with other distros. People report upgrading without hassle and if things do go wrong, you're even able to downgrade to a previous release. You can also convert your system to edge which is their rolling release. What do you think of this setup?
I installed the XFCE version of MX. I like Plasma but XFCE feels snappier on my aging computer. I might install a flatpak just for the heck of it... But everything runs great so far and I'm glad I gave MX a chance. You can tell a lot of work went into that distro.