on Linux, is there a way to switch off "Tamagotchi Mode"? specifically i mean the thing where you set up linux exactly how you want, and every 2 weeks you run package updates and some obscure part of your system which you didn't even know existed now no longer works the way you set it up, and you have to spend 90 minutes fixing it, and it's always a different thing, and this happens every 2 weeks, forever. how do you switch that off? (ideally in a way where it won't switch back on after 2 weeks)
@jk Oh, definitely.
Don't run package updates every 2 weeks.
I run package updates when I'm forced to, at gunpoint, by Linus Torvalds personally.
I guess I appreciate that he cares, he had to fly all that way after all.
(Seriously though, the package distribution model is to create a set of interrelated dependencies that are all supposed to work with each other in arbitrary configurations, and I'm fairly certain that's not actually a tractable problem given the sheer scale of the package repositories these days).
@mark
Adding to the vast software repositories is the vast variety of hardware people try running Linux on. I am sure the set of laptops any Linux distro runs well on keeps changing with "the volunteers who spend thousands of hours to mess with my system for free" (great phrasing by @jk BTW).
Maybe we need a dataset of laptop component combinations, and a link to bug trackers so that bug tickets on laptops show up in searches for laptops with similar components.
