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?
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.
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.
First off, the packages and libraries on the AUR are not scanned, and not all packages and libraries are well tested or maintained there, especially when building from their source yourself instead of relying on their releases. The more you install that way and the more depends on it, the more points in your system are likely to fail.
Your distro's repos might not have everything and be a bit out of date at times, but they are scanned and usually better tested and maintained. Usually, not always.
Yes, which is why I said that was the only part that I could think of that was wrong with it. If you removed "AUR" from the comment, it would be completely fine and nobody would be bricking anything.
Generally, I don't get too much from the AUR, and when I do, I make sure it's got a whole lot of '+'s so it's usually well maintained.