But also I thought Linux distros normally keep the old Kernel around after an update so stuff like this doesn’t cause a boot failure?

Arch has no concept of “previous package”, so it doesn’t do this.

You could install linux-lts (or one of the other alternative kernels) side by side with the linux package, so you always have a bootable fallback, but like most things on Arch it’s not enforced.

Power outages do happen, and I’m pretty sure 90% of the people on this community are not using an UPS.

Given enough users and enough time, it’s inevitable that a power outage will happen to some people at an inopportune moment, like while updating an important package like the kernel.

Blaming the user for this is not fair, it’s just dumb bad luck.

That said, OP could have done a bit more to fix the issue instead of being an angry man yelling at the cloud. When you’re using Arch, the expectation is that you are able to fix relatively simple problems like this, or that you’re at least willing to learn it. If you find yourself getting angry when Arch doesn’t hold your hand, you probably shouldn’t have chosen Arch.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Chroot

+

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Mkinitcpio

• Boot to usb
• Mount your root filesystem
• arch-chroot your mounted root filesystem
• mount /boot
• mkinitcpio -p linux

Steps 1,2 and 3 are the entry way to solve all “unbootable Arch” problems by the way, presuming you know what needs to be changed to fix it of course.

I know what it theoretically is for, I still think it’s a bad implementation.

1. It often doesn’t tell you clearly what it is waiting for.
2. It doesn’t allow you to checkout what’s going on with the process that isn’t responding, because logins are already disabled
3. It doesn’t allow you to cancel the wait and terminate the process anyway. 9/10 when I get it, it has been because of something stupid like a stale NFS mount or a bug in a unit file.
4. If it is actually something important, like your Redis example, it doesn’t allow you to cancel the shutdown, or to give it more time. Who’s to say that your Redis instance will be able to persist its state to disk within 90 seconds, or any arbitrary time?

Finally, I think that well written applications should be resilient to being terminated unexpectedly. If, like in your Redis example, you put data in memory without it being backed by persistent storage, you should expect to lose it. After all, power outages and crashes do happen as well.

That’s what systemd’s dreaded “a stop job is running” is

The worst part of that is that you can’t quickly login to check what it is (so maybe you can prevent it in the future?), or kill it anyway because it’s likely to be something stupid and unimportant. And if it actually was important, well… it’s gonna be shot in the head in a minute anyway, and there’s nothing you can do to prevent it, so what’s the point of delaying?

Even worse if you clicked “Update and restart”

X thing you want isn’t the devs job

Well, it is if they decide it is, and it isn’t if they decide it isn’t.

That said, I do appreciate devs who put up native deb or rpm repos for the most common distros.

Yeah and Flatpaks also exist.

Flatpaks are probably the best generic solution for using an LTS release like Debian Stable on a desktop system. You get the best of both worlds: up to date desktop packages and a stable base.

Where did I say that censorship does not happen?

You didn’t, I got your comment mixed up with what someone else said on another comment chain, and I apologize.

I am one of the victims of the censorship you say doesn’t happen, so I am banned on lemmy.ml for making a comment about the Tiananmen Square massacre.

replied to the wrong comment

Those communities should be urged to move away from lemmy.ml.

Removed by mod

People have choices. If they want to keep using the Lemmy.ml community, that’s their freedom. The alternatives exist, if they want to switch, they can.

Because network effect is a thing, it’s really the illusion of choice. When a lemmy.ml community has 50k subscribers and the equivalent lemmy.world or programming.dev community has just a tenth of that, it’s not really a choice. People will always gravitate towards ml and the smaller community will never gain critical mass unless some strong enough outside force influences that decision.

Which brings me to …

Intrigued by your name change, you are really pushing for this.

I think defederation from lemmy.ml together with raising awareness about ml should be the outside force to move communities off lemmy.ml.

It’s not even about which view is right or neutral. On .world posts and comments critical of the US aren’t mass censored like .ml does with posts critical of China, Russia or the former USSR.

The thing is, as far as users and communities go lemmy.ml is pretty much a general purpose instance like lemmy.world, but it is controlled by political extremists who are using their admin position to put their thumb on the scale to push discussion in a certain direction.

The way that I see it, the issue with lemmy ml’s administration and moderation is not quite political in origin. It’s about transparency

Well it’s really both. The issue is the combination of a number of factors which on their own would be fairly easy to deal with, but put together they are very problematic:

1. The admins are political extremists
2. lemmy.ml has a very prominent position in the lemmyverse, because they were first and got a headstart
3. The admins are actively using their position to heavily police discussion according to their extremist political views. The fact that they’re not being transparent about it is aggravating, but not the root problem.

This prominent position of lemmy.ml is the fundamental difference with the hexbear or lemmygrad situation. Those instances can easily be contained at the user level: most people can just block and ignore them entirely because nothing interesting happens on those instances for non-extremists. Not so with lemmy.ml, which hosts a number of large bona-fide communities.

So I think it’s necessary to make a concerted effort to reduce lemmy.ml’s prominence in the fediverse, so that political extremists can’t put their thumb on the scale to nudge discussion in a certain direction. Part of that effort is raising awareness about lemmy.ml’s nature, which is what this PSA does, but that likely won’t be enough due to network effect. It will take more to get people to move their communities to other instances. If other large instances, like lemmy.world, would block lemmy.ml that would provide a real stimulus for a large amount of people to move away from lemmy.ml.

With that out of the way, most of your suggestions boil down to “use lemmy.world instead”. I don’t have anything against LW’s administration, but I think that it’s foolish to concentrate people and activity there even further

I agree that spreading out more would be desirable, but on the other hand “just use lemmy.world instead of lemmy.ml” is a very simple and practical suggestion to move away from ml.

When presented with a choice, people usually pick the community that is the most active and already has the most subs.

But I am definitely giving it a shot.

Hey I applaud your effort, yesterday the top post was several days old and top day was empty on one of the subs, so this is already better.

I’m a bit skeptical if that will be enough though. Active discussion is the meat and the potatoes for me when I go to a tech community, and for that you need more subscribers.

I think the problem is not so much that “communities don’t exist”, but that they are far less popular and active than the lemmy.ml ones, and when presented with a choice new users will typically choose the community that is more active and has the most subs. You can’t simply solve that by creating another community on another instance. A concerted effort would be needed to get people to move and to get them to pick the alternative community over the lemmy.ml one. Raising awareness and defederation by bigger instances (like lemmy.world) would help immensely.

For me the big ones are [email protected] and [email protected] btw, which do exist elsewhere but the alternatives are stale.