Awesome thank you. I thought I had read somewhere that it didn’t run under wine well at all. Glad to hear otherwise - I’ll give it a shot.

Eh Arch being “hard” is overblown. I’ve honestly spent just as much time troubleshooting windows crap or other distro crap. You just have to learn all the little tricks and whatnot that are specific to arch. It happens over time naturally.

Nice thing about arch is the community. Great documentation and if you find something that doesn’t work - somebody motivated will make it work and share. Example: protonvpn decided “nah we’re not supporting arch”. No big deal, someone in the community has packaged it up and maintains it for us.

Arch users rule

Pathetic.

This is honestly such a pile of shit from Microsoft. Right…. Grandma is going to resize her partitions with those ridiculously cryptic instructions. She’s totally going to figure out which partition we’re talking about, she’s totally going to open a command line interface as admin, heck she totally even knows to find those instructions. Its hard enough for people to distinguish between “ya that’s windows update, click that button” vs “no that’s a phishing attack, never click that button”

Now the rest of us who know what we’re doing have to fix everyone’s PCs in the family. Keep pushing everyone to iPads and Linux Microsoft…

I like separating backups and snapshots as timeshift recommends. Backups are better handled by a different process copying your files to a remote location (pc failure, house fire, etc.). Lastly, backups are personal, so you gotta do what works for you - whatever makes them happen is good enough in my opinion ;)

My setup (not perfect, but it works for me). I keep one snapshot only - but it is the entire drive including the home folder. It’s really close to a disk image minus the mount folders. This is done to a second local disk via rsync. The arch wiki entry on rsync has the full rsync command for this operation called out. I run this right before a system update.

Backups go to my NAS. Synology in my case. They have a cloud software package like iCloud, OneDrive, etc, except I run it on the NAS and I’m only limited on storage by what drives I throw into it. That software scoops up my user folders on all my PCs and I set it to keep the 10 latest versions.

Then since my NAS is inside my house, I back the entire NAS up to an external hdd and sneaker net it to work and keep it in my office drawer. This protects me from fires and whatnot. I do this monthly. This is a completely manual process.

Some people have accused me of insanity-but it’s really not that hard. I don’t worry about losing pictures of my kids, and it’s aged well with my family (for example, my daughter doesn’t worry about losing stuff while she’s in college - if she writes a paper, 10 copies are kept here at home on the NAS automatically). And none of it was hard to set up, maybe just a bit pricey for the NAS (but it’s got a lot of other super useful things going for it)

So ya, I’d recommend letting timeshift do its thing for snapshots, and I’d rethink what you’re trying to do for backups. I strongly believe they are two different things.

I’m pretty sure there are lots of options that work great. I personally just use rsync-but I know the command line is scary for a lot of people making the transition. There are lots of options like timeshift that basically put a gui wrapper around rsync. I’ve seen a lot of love for borg as well - maybe try one of those two.

I feel backups are personal and it’s hard to get a “just do this instruction”. You’ll probably have to pick a product, and then do some homework to see if it can do what you want. This is further complicated by the distro you use - or more specifically if your distro uses btrfs. Some people use a backup as a sort of snapshot, and btrfs is more full featured than ext in that regard.

Good luck!

Sigh, my condolences. I’m shouting right beside you. I first learned about linux in 1993 in college. I got it working on a shiny new 486 with super vga graphics. We were allowed access to the college’s aix mainframes and thus the internet via a slip connection - but only through Unix like systems. Linux was amazing, I couldn’t believe we had x going, and loading up cad, matlab, maple, ftp, fsp, irc, nettrek, and everything else possible in the computer centers - but over a telephone line from our apartment.

Magical.

Funny how it really only became my daily driver three ish years ago - despite using it forever. Cuz games - glad that’s changed finally.

This is the way. My advice is to add a second hard drive to your pc and install linux on that. Distro hop, install arch and break it horribly, swear at your printer, learn. Then when you screw up, you’ve lost nothing, you can switch back to your “‘ol faithful” and get the job done. What will eventually happen is you’ll find yourself spending more time in linux than windows until you almost never boot it up.

If you do it this way, there’s really only two things to worry about. 1) if you’re using mbr or want to still use mbr with uefi, you’ll have trouble dual booting cleanly and will probably want to reinstall windows. You can’t break anything, but you can’t dual boot from both methods (or at least I’m pretty sure I’ve never owned a motherboard that can). 2) when installing linux, learn and be careful about what drive contains windows - don’t ever pick that drive when formatting and partitioning. Bonus points if it’s a different brand and size - makes it almost impossible to pick the wrong drive. When using a single drive for dual booting, there’s much more opportunity to make a mistake and break your windows install if you’re not familiar with partitioning and boot loaders.

I literally can’t think of a way to break windows if you keep the above in mind, and then you can “make the switch” gradually.

Good for you, welcome aboard!

The boot order is uefi hdd (which I can then pick the hard drive’s boot order in a sub menu), then uefi usb, then uefi optical drive, then network. I don’t think that’s the issue - it should always find something to boot before the optical drive.

I’m going to try the one drive at a time in that first port thing and add/move the rest around. I haven’t been as deliberate with the troubleshooting here as I should have (I immediately went towards a software issue - fstab or something similar). I could have a port / mobo problem. Need to separate software from hardware issue better. Luckily I have three installed operating systems on three drives and plenty of bootable isos to play with. ;)

Thanks for all the help! Lots of good suggestions in this thread I can try for further troubleshooting. Most importantly, you all confirmed I should be able to unplug an optical drive, put in a new unformatted ssd, and generally move drives around - and linux should still boot. I did not think things would behave that way, so when I had issues I figured it’s of course pilot error. Also explains why I was having such a hard time finding information on the arch wiki ;)

Now I know something ain’t right, and my guess is its some user configuration (because it does boot, it just hangs later). This has now turned into a side project (what the heck did I break), I’ll update the thread if I figure it out. It’s a pretty clean install, very few AUR packages (mostly flatpaks), and has been otherwise pretty stable-it’ll be interesting to see how it actually broke.

Thanks for the suggestions!

Hmm lots of suspicion at the new drive. I wasn’t as deliberate as you described, but that new ssd now has arch on it and boots fine.

I guess maybe I’ll ask this question. Should I be able to just unplug an optical drive, and plug in anything else into that sata port without linux hanging? I wouldn’t expect the new drive to DO anything until it’s partitioned/formatted/mounted etc. but can I just swap components and expect to be able to boot?

Oh ya, forgot to mention that. It boots fine if I just unplug the optical drive. It’s when I plug in a new ssd into the same sata motherboard port - that’s when it hangs. It’s funny - it actually makes it to the login screen, it hangs only after trying to log in. I can’t even break out to another tty terminal.

Edit - the motherboard and chip and ram and video card are all new. It’s the old stuff I’m resuing-case, power supply, old hdds, ect

I went back to the office on my own. A long time ago. It should be noted that I like my bosses, peers, and my job in general (I mean it’s called work, not fun - but it isn’t miserable)

1. ability to build better relationships with everyone - it’s too easy to sling shit over email. Whole different experience actually talking to somebody - especially when one of you needs something difficult.
2. separation between work and home - I don’t like home feeling like the workplace.
3. remote work people are heading towards a future of being Bangalore’d. If your job is currently being split up into the part that needs to be local and a remote part - you’re only a few years away from watching someone overseas do it for 1/10th the cost. Be needed in person people!

I thought I’d love remote work, but I hated it.

I’ve been running it for a few years. I’ve learned the hard way to not use the AUR. Manjaro breaks AUR software installs with its delayed release schedule. I’m running it now with pretty much all flatpaks and it’s MUCH more stable. So if you do run it, stay away from native AUR and opt for flatpaks instead.

The next time it breaks I’ll finally get motivated, nuke the drive, and install arch again (I liked arch better).

I think I have the skills now to keep an arch box alive, if you don’t have those skills then manjaro won’t really solve that problem either imo. Just go mint or something similar.