Somewhat recently I caused a failed kernel update by accident:

Ran system update in tmux session (local session on desktop). But problem was that tmux itself got also updated, which crashed the tmux session and as a result crashed the kernel update. Only realized it upon the following reboot (which no longer worked).

Your described solution re “live ISO, chroot, run system update once more, reboot” was also what got me out of that situation. So certainly something worth learning for “general troubleshooting” purposes re system updates.

Have a ZOWIE EC2 for quite a while now:

• gaming mouse, 5 buttons
• USB compliant
• no special vendor drivers needed to use all mouse features (has buttons on bottom side for settings)

Works well on all OS.

I went through setting up netdata for a sraging (in progression for a production) server not too long ago.

The netdata docs were quite clear on that fact that the default configuration is a “showcase configuration”, not a “production ready configuration”!

It’s really meant to show off all features to new users, who then can pick what they actually want. Great thing about disabling unimportant things is that one gets a lot more “history” for the same amount of storage need, cause there are simply less data points to track. Similar with adjusting the rate which it takes data points. For instance, going down from default 1s internal to 2s basically halfs the CPU requirement, even more so if one also disables the machine learning stuff.

The one thing I have to admit though is that “optimizing netdata configs” really isn’t that quickly done. There’s just a lot of stuff it provides, lots of docs reading to be done until one roughly gets a feel for configuring it (i.e. knowing what all could be disabled and how much of a difference it actually makes). Of course, there’s always a potential need for optimizations later on when one sees the actual server load in prod.

Same here! Been using manjaro for more than 5 years by now on all my dev machines and I really like not being overrun by updates.

Once you form the habit of checking latest “stable update” forum thread (the eqivalent of checking the arch frontpage before an upgrade) and check for potential “manual interventions” (if any), then it gives you suprisingly good stability. But it’s still rolling release and “pretty current”.

And stability simply becomes more of a factor once your metaphorical “plate” becomes choke full and the last thing you want from your underlying OS is to act up on its own due to an update.