this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2024
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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?

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[–] superkret@feddit.org 71 points 1 year ago (4 children)

The "Arch breaks on updates" meme is about 20 years out of date.

[–] thingsiplay@beehaw.org 31 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Almost as old as the last Debian update.

[–] superkret@feddit.org 14 points 1 year ago

I run Slackware. Debian is much too unstable for my taste.

[–] Static_Rocket@lemmy.world 19 points 1 year ago

They'd update it, but they are afraid it would no longer work as well

[–] bobs_monkey@lemm.ee 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I mean, I had a mainline kernel update bork my system last month

[–] ogeist@lemmy.world 13 points 1 year ago

Is that you?, Crowdstrike?

[–] jbk@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 1 year ago

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

[–] ogeist@lemmy.world 41 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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.

[–] lord_ryvan@ttrpg.network 28 points 1 year ago (1 children)

OP, this is satire and most likely will brick your system. Just making sure you, and others, know.

[–] prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] lord_ryvan@ttrpg.network 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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.

[–] NoisyFlake@lemm.ee 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Isn’t yay just a wrapper for pacman?

[–] ogeist@lemmy.world 19 points 1 year ago

Wrapper and AUR helper.

[–] mrvictory1@lemmy.world 17 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)
[–] kitnaht@lemmy.world 11 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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.

[–] GolfNovemberUniform@lemmy.ml 10 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Get a custom kernel, a few custom repos and an AUR helper like yay. You'll be getting broken stuff quite often.

[–] thingsiplay@beehaw.org 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I use yay almost exclusively and have a few AUR stuff. And I used a custom Kernel too (Zen). Nothing broke unfortunately. I'm on EndevourOS, so very close to bare metal Archlinux. But before that I was on Manjaro and had AUR stuff too and was using Pamac (not to be confused with pacman) instead yay. And it broke something all the time.

[–] GolfNovemberUniform@lemmy.ml 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm on EndeavorOS with yay and repos break all the time.

[–] thingsiplay@beehaw.org 7 points 1 year ago

Then I'm doing something wrong.

[–] TootSweet@lemmy.world 8 points 1 year ago

Delete System32.

[–] mactan@lemmy.ml 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

every time Ive has a problem it was keyring or bootloader

[–] theshatterstone54@feddit.uk 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] bellsDoSing@lemm.ee 3 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] thingsiplay@beehaw.org 6 points 1 year ago

not once have I had a problem or anything break. What am I doing wrong?

Love it. xD

[–] BaalInvoker@lemmy.eco.br 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Try run reflector

run0 reflector -l 10 -f 5 >> /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist

[–] swab148@lemm.ee 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] BaalInvoker@lemmy.eco.br 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I was waiting for this moment 😹😹😹

But I actually am using run0

[–] swab148@lemm.ee 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I have no actual problem with it, the only reason I don't is that it's harder to type

[–] BaalInvoker@lemmy.eco.br 1 points 1 year ago

That's true... But once you get used to it, you don't even notice that you write run0

[–] dave@feddit.uk 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] BaalInvoker@lemmy.eco.br 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

[–] dave@feddit.uk 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

lol! There’s such a mix of people being genuinely helpful and people telling me the joke is past its sell-by date. But I hadn’t come across reflector before and will definitely give it a go—thanks :)

[–] Deckweiss@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

Install literally every package from the repo, then you can experience breaking OS every day.

[–] gerdesj@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] dditty@lemm.ee 2 points 1 year ago

Read the post, literally nothing ☺️