I’ll give the whole story if anyone wants it

  • swab148@startrek.websiteOP
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    4 months ago

    Okay, so here’s the recap:

    I woke up this morning and decided my main drive (just a 500GB SSD) was too full, at about 85%, so I decided to do something about that. I go through the usual: pacman -Sc, paccache -rk0, and pacman -Qqtd | pacman -Rns - (which I’ve aliased to “orphankiller” because that’s too much typing for me). None of that did anything though, as I’m usually pretty up on this, and I expected it, so my next step was to find other ways of deleting unnecessary files floating around, and that meant a trip to the usually very helpful Arch wiki.

    On the page “pacman Tips and Tricks”, I find 1.7: Detecting More Unneeded Packages. “Perfect!” I thought, “That’s exactly what I’m looking for!” I enthusiastically type in the command pacman -Qqd | pacman -Rns -, and then quickly go check how much space I just saved. Nada. Or at least not enough to move the percentage point. “Oh well, keep looking,” I think and I go back to Firefox to click some more links in hopes that one of them will be the space saving ultra-script that I need. The first one I click, I get an error from my trusty browser, I don’t remember exactly what it was but it was something about not being able to verify the page. “Weird, let’s try another one.” Nope, same thing.

    Well, being that I had just deleted something, I figured I should go see what exactly it was that I did. It was a good thing I’d left the terminal window open, because after just a few scrolls I saw it: ca_certificates, which Firefox absolutely needs. “Great, I’ll just reinstall.” Nope! I just deleted my pacman cache, and pacman also needs those certificates to download from the Arch repo’s mirrors! “Fantastic,” I grumbled while I tried to think of how I could get this pesky package back on my machine.

    Then it occurred to me: I’ve been keeping up with my btrfs snapshots (for once, lol)! I can just backup to yesterday and forget this whole mess! So I bring up Timeshift, and we’re on our way back to a functioning system! Or so I thought. See, I don’t have a separate /home partition, but I do have a separate @home subvolume, so when Timeshift asked me if I wanted to restore that too, I clicked the check mark. Only thing is, I don’t think I actually have a separate @home subvolume, which brings us to the error in the meme. /home wouldn’t mount, and that meant I was borked.

    Fortunately, our story has a happy ending! I DDG’d the error on my phone, and found a post from like seven years ago, about someone who had this same set of circumstances, and the one reply was my fix: just go into /etc/fstab and delete the “subvolid” part of whatever partition that’s giving you grief. Did that, reboot, and we’re finally fixed! And now, forevermore, I shall check what I’m deleting before I hit the enter button!

    The post-script is bittersweet though, because after all this trouble, and then the rest of the afternoon working on the original problem, I am down to… 81%. Oh well.

  • swab148@startrek.websiteOP
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    4 months ago

    Just an update: following the very helpful suggestions in this thread has gotten my drive usage down to 16%! Super happy about that, y’all rock!

  • Possibly linux@lemmy.zip
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    4 months ago

    I don’t understand why people use Arch. It takes all kinds I suppose. For me I automate everything and use preconfigured stuff when I can.

    • swab148@startrek.websiteOP
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      4 months ago

      I like to tinker, plus I can be absolutely assured that every problem with my system is 100% my fault, which actually makes it easier to track down any problems. But the main reasons people use Arch is probably the rolling release model and the AUR.

      • vpklotar@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        Yup, only reason I can’t move on is because of the AUR and the rolling release, though, having said that I’m thinking of trying NixOS but not quite sure it’s for me as it isn’t posix. It seems some software doesn’t really like that although I’ve heard it’s pretty awesome as a server OS.

        • swab148@startrek.websiteOP
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          4 months ago

          Yeah, I could see it being a good server OS, but otherwise NixOS seems like it’s on the “immutable” thing that’s popular right now. I’ve tried a few immutable distros, and they’re not for me, I end up layering everything anyways lol

      • Possibly linux@lemmy.zip
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        4 months ago

        It isn’t necessarily your fault as it is unstable software. It is going to break and fall apart. I feel like having a homelab is a much more productive way to tinker.

        • swab148@startrek.websiteOP
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          4 months ago

          Arch isn’t unstable, I just keep breaking things in my ignorance. The only thing in this scenario I could pin on Arch is that the “ca-certificates” package should have been marked as a dependency for pacman, but I guess it’s not strictly a dependency, as you can use pacman to install stuff from a local repo. Definitely for Firefox, though, as you can not browse the internet without the certs.

  • blackstrat@lemmy.fwgx.uk
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    4 months ago

    I’ve been burned by btrfs before. Never again. It’s not a good file system, especially for multi disk systems.

    • swab148@startrek.websiteOP
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      4 months ago

      Idk about all that, it’s been fine for me, just a little misconfiguration here. The compression just saved me a bunch of storage space, so I’m kinda in btrfs’ corner right now lol