I use Manjaro Linux with the Cinnamon desktop and sometimes run into system-level issues, but I have no idea how to properly debug them. It doesn’t feel as straightforward as debugging a normal program. What’s the best way or resource to learn system debugging on Linux?

  • Sophienomenal@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    6·
    2 days ago

    Generally, it depends on the issue. The first thing I’d check is journalctl, and if there are any errors, I usually look up “[pasted error] [distro name]” and go from there. if I’m unable to find errors, then my next bet is to look up “[description of issue] [distro name]”. Unless I am directly familiar with the component that is having an issue, I try to see if I can find a solution online first. Of course, I never recommend running commands you read online that you don’t understand, so take it as a learning experience and pull up some man pages to see what everything is doing. By doing that, you can even begin to learn how to debug and fix these issues by yourself. Even just finding issues other people have and proving it isn’t your issue helps narrow it down.

    What I will never under any circumstances recommend is using an LLM. Please, just use a normal search engine (I prefer DDG), and find forum posts from real people. Those people are generally capable of understanding what they’re saying, so they won’t give completely made up information based on generation of the most likely next word from the data an LLM model was trained on. Besides, chances are that the LLMs are trained on the data you would find by searching anyway, so why not go straight to the source?

    I do find myself having to troubleshoot issues entirely on my own sometimes, but usually those are of my own doing, and I can likely figure out what I did wrong (I host my own server and tinker with it quite often). Of course, since switching to atomic distros on my desktop, I haven’t had any system issues to troubleshoot with it in years. Running Manjaro is practically a guarantee that you’ll have system issues, though. I’ve never had a worse experience with my system than when I ran it, and I’m not alone in that.

    Otherwise, if you find yourself unable to find an easy solution, backups are a wonderful thing. My server recently had part of its boot corrupted, and it was just a case of recovering from a backup to restore it. Remember, with backups: 2 is 1 and 1 is none. Data can (and will) get corrupted eventually.