I really had no idea GPT was such an anomaly still.  Everything I read was like "just do it!".  Not.

First time I dealt with GPT was a laptop my work had gotten me, which was an asus that had good resolution and dual ssd I could raid.  It was otherwise a basketcase, acpi bugs galore, no legacy boot, and forced into EFI booting otherwise quite annoying - I'm now pretty much F-Asus for anything.  I stayed using my old HP Folio that I thought was bad until that, but somewhat worked until I quit.  I really developed quite the aversion to EFI there as yet another microsoft abortion.  GPT I figured was an evolution of MBR, but seems more of another unwanted upsell forced upon people during EFI/Windoze migrations too.

I think I'll stay with mbr until we have 3tb and higher SSD's to deal with at a price point that makes them rational, and hopefully bios vendors make not-difficult by then.  Mine are only 512gb, and GPT seems just another unnecessary (microsoft) evil until I'm forced to boot off 3tb disks or higher.

-mb

On Mon, Dec 19, 2016 at 6:44 PM, Stephen Partington <cryptworks@gmail.com> wrote:
Good information, however "GPT as far as I can tell simply doesn't work outside EFI" this is kind of the norm.

On Mon, Dec 19, 2016 at 6:30 PM, Michael Butash <michael@butash.net> wrote:
I figured if I'm going to anything, I'd prefer to go to something I can control more, which always seems to bring me back to Arch, and more than a few of you seem to use it too.  I attempted before and failed, but this weekend I got there, got stable, and then found more or less all the same desktop bugs and more, particularly with KDE, with far more pain than I'm used to with Ubuntu or other debian derivatives.  Figured I would share some of the experiences for better and worse even if TL:DR, but HTH someone too.

I like certain things about Arch, but found getting it working to be a dismal process, and one that kept teaching me just how different (or broken) every distribution's process can be.  I simply can't imagine most people using Arch that aren't simply diehard sysadmins, primarily even getting it to work outside of the most basic installations.

Biggest things that totally screwed me up were my want to use GPT, these new-fangled nvme disks that aren't still fully baked into linux, adapting my disk/volume setup to all of this, and finding it really didn't like me making /usr a separate partition.  

GPT as far as I can tell simply doesn't work outside EFI, especially as a legacy bios thing that has been MBR-based for eons.  Usage of GPT seems to ass-u-me/implies it is being paired with EFI which knows these things.  Trying everything with this intel board, it simply would never boot off it, and apparently most legacy bios are cranky about booting gpt, particularly intel boards.  I wasted thanksgiving long weekend attempting last time, even without raid or anything else on a standard non-nvme ssd, and never worked.  I give up as I didn't really need GPT, but more curiosity to keep alignment proper for ssd geometry.

I got a pair of Samsung NVME-based 950 Pro M.2 disks as my end-goal, as their attachment to the pci-bus direct seems to be the future.  Unfortunately the tech is still new, most tools like udev still aren't baked to detect them, and even when rigging it with rules to do so, fails because of other things around udev not baked in either.  This includes thins like hdparm, smart tools, any monitoring apps looking for drives at only sd[a-z]*, zfs libs (because udev won't build /dev/disk/by-* links off them), and most anything else looking for disks !=sd*.  Even samsung's own firmware utility "magician" doesn't know what they are under linux.

Adapting my disk formula was actually fairly easy giving up on GPT and ZFS already, combining MBR+ traditional linux fs tools, mdadm, luks/cryptsetup, and lvm2 didn't so much care.  What last broke my booting linux was combinations of mdadm and luks, and my typical habit of building /usr as a separate partition.  I found out the hard way mdraid builds different from initrd or a fully-booted kernel, and arch didn't seem to want to work via UUID with grub, as it unlocks luks volumes differently in initrd than ubuntu does (poorly in arch, imho).  Once I created a static mdadm.conf for it, pointed grub to unlock it, it would work.  Then die on not finding /usr to init systemd.

The usr problem was far more annoying, and took some digging, where all recommendations I found simply didn't work.  Arch devs just never presumed anyone would want to do that, and really have no good method of supporting it.  Quick fix was relenting and keeping /usr on root anyways, though annoying it wasn't so obvious with boot dying because of not getting /sbin/init to work (really a symlink to /usr/lib/systemd/systemd or like).

After everything, I have mdraided nvme disks, luks encryption, lvm, and ext4 atop that, so I'm at least no worse off.  ZFS was my first choice, but linux tools not understanding nvme drives broke that as viable.  BTRFS didn't seem to get me much with chicken and egg issues around encryption that it would be simpler, but would have at least offered lzo compression, if not brokenness like ZFS+udev with nvme.

Once at a desktop again, KDE with latest packages ala neon are still a clusterfsck though, still getting my taskbar flipping around with displays coming/going, but not Arch's fault, and at least I'm stable off of Ubuntu so far otherwise.  I probably need to try cinnamon or mate again, something the developers have tested more than a single monitor and video card with.

I cannot say it's been terribly worth it so far moving to Arch, but this is only really my second full day of just simply "using it".  The fact it really is so minimal has been a bit painful, as it requires literally anything you might actually need to be installed, even with full desktop meta packages.  Actually need a terminal app with kde - need to add konsole.  Want screenshots with spectacle or music with banshee?  Need to figure out AUR, or yaourt as I did.  

Thankfully I've already learned their stupid app names for linux software to even begin to find most (like baobab, my favorite disk space utility with the most horrid name), but I don't expect most would/could but the most diehard linux users to get a moderately complete desktop back.  At least versus kubuntu giving you an adequate base to start with that I'm more used to.

Any windoze person would have run away screaming long ago, and I think even most moderately skilled linux folks - it really shouldn't be this hard, yet here I am too.  Neither debian or ubuntu are good long-term with upgrades obliterating my system, so here's to hoping change is worth it in the long run for rolling releases and adding a new distribution to achievements earned.

-mb

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