Linux @lemmy.ml dave @feddit.uk 4mo ago

Problems with Arch upgrade

I’ve been using Arch for just over a year on my older Dell laptop, and have been regularly running sudo pacman -Syu but not once have I had a problem or anything break. What am I doing wrong?

39 comments

The "Arch breaks on updates" meme is about 20 years out of date.
- They'd update it, but they are afraid it would no longer work as well
- I mean, I had a mainline kernel update bork my system last month
  
  Is that you?, Crowdstrike?
- jokes on you one of my not so much into linux friends had it and his setup kept breaking, now he's about to install fedora
Bro, install a custom kernel from the AUR and switch all your software to the git versions, just add -git at the end of each package. Do not use pacman, what are you? afraid of life?, use yay like everyone else.

^I ^use ^arch, ^btw.
- OP, this is satire and most likely will brick your system. Just making sure you, and others, know.
  
  Been on endeavourOS for a little over a year now, and consider myself a quick study... But how would this brick your system?
  
  I'm guessing the issue would come from getting a random custom kernel off AUR?
  
  Because the rest of it seems fine to me, no? Is there an issue with getting the "-git" version of a program from yay/pacman over the regular or "-bin" versions? I usually tend to go for the bin when it's there, but I don't think the git versions have ever caused me trouble.
  
  I usually just use "yay" to update my system, but I have done "pacman -Syyu" (or -Syu) and it seemed to work just fine.
- Isn’t yay just a wrapper for pacman?
  
  Wrapper and AUR helper.
You didn't specify which problem or which thing that broke. However (and based on my previous experiences on that matter), one could face a problem regarding package PGP/GPG signatures upon trying to update. This is because archlinux-keyring is not being updated before the signature checking. That said, a better approach is to always update archlinux-keyring (sudo pacman -S --needed archlinux-keyring) before anything else (sudo pacman -Syu). This way, you guarantee to be up-to-date with developer signatures, needed for pacman to check the validity for every package to be updated/installed. There's also a pacman-key command, but I never had to use that.
- If you want problems do the exact opposite of this OP. That should solve your lack of problems.
  
  Thanks—will give this a try.
You do not use AUR enough
- How would using the AUR help with stability?
  
  (unless you're being sarcastic, in which case an /s might make things clearer)
  
  I think they said that because OP wrote "not once have I had a problem or anything break. What am I doing wrong?" making it sound like the problem is that they haven't experienced anything break yet.
  
  AUR packages tend to break more often compared to repos ie. anything on AUR that utilizes python needs to be rebuilt if system python is updated.
I mean, it was less than 20 years ago that this used to happen to me, but it was usually a matter of going to archlinux.org, and usually right on the front page, they'd have a "You need to run this command to fix it".

They even have one for July 1st right on the home page. So it absolutely does happen from time to time.
Get a custom kernel, a few custom repos and an AUR helper like yay. You'll be getting broken stuff quite often.
every time Ive has a problem it was keyring or bootloader
- Same. Except that one time I forgot to charge my laptop and my battery decided it will go to 0% during a kernel update. Charge, Reboot into live iso, arch-chroot, do update. Reboot into normal system, all good. A 5 minute job, but it's the most serious issue I've had to deal with, alongside the keyring issues once which were solved by an Erik Dubois video, a 15-minute fix incuding the video runtime.
  
  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.
Delete System32.
Try run reflector

run0 reflector -l 10 -f 5 >> /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist
- run0 😤
  
  I was waiting for this moment 😹😹😹
  
  But I actually am using run0
- Thanks—I am running the zen kernel because I didn’t really understand the question during archinstall, and have added an AUR helper but still no lack of joy.
  
  I’ll definitely give this a go—probably on Friday afternoon.
  
  I misunderstood your post. This command I told you is to make things better, not worse haha
  
  If you really wanna make your Arch unstable, you may wanna install every single package with pacman -Sy <packagename>
  
  Also maybe you wanna install everything from AUR
Install literally every package from the repo, then you can experience breaking OS every day.
What on earth went wrong?

Arch is just as safe as any other distro, sometimes more so. Being a rolling jobbie, smaller bits tend to break at a time. If you want to live life on the edge then Gentoo is your man but even Gentoo is becoming pretty safe. You might lose your windowing system for a while but you still have links2 to get to a search engine.
- Read the post, literally nothing ☺️

39 comments