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?

    • @Static_Rocket
      link
      English
      1917 days ago

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

      • @ogeist
        link
        1317 days ago

        Is that you?, Crowdstrike?

    • @[email protected]
      link
      fedilink
      116 days 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
    link
    4117 days ago

    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.

    • Fonzie!
      link
      fedilink
      2817 days ago

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

      • @[email protected]
        link
        fedilink
        2
        edit-2
        16 days ago

        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.

        • Fonzie!
          link
          fedilink
          215 days ago

          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          Your distro’s repos might not have everything and be a bit out of date at times, but they are scanned and usually better tested and maintained.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.

          • @[email protected]
            link
            fedilink
            1
            edit-2
            15 days 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.

      • @ogeist
        link
        1917 days ago

        Wrapper and AUR helper.

  • Daemon Silverstein
    link
    fedilink
    English
    1917 days ago

    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.

  • @mrvictory1
    link
    17
    edit-2
    16 days ago

    You do not use AUR enough

    • @[email protected]
      link
      fedilink
      2
      edit-2
      16 days ago

      How would using the AUR help with stability?

      (unless you’re being sarcastic, in which case an /s might make things clearer)

      • callyral [he/they]
        link
        fedilink
        English
        4
        edit-2
        16 days ago

        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.

      • @mrvictory1
        link
        116 days ago

        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.

  • @kitnaht
    link
    10
    edit-2
    17 days 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.

  • @[email protected]
    link
    fedilink
    9
    edit-2
    17 days ago

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

  • Mactan
    link
    fedilink
    817 days ago

    every time Ive has a problem it was keyring or bootloader

    • @[email protected]
      link
      fedilink
      616 days ago

      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.

      • @[email protected]
        link
        fedilink
        316 days 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.

    • @[email protected]OP
      link
      fedilink
      English
      317 days ago

      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.

      • Responsabilidade
        link
        fedilink
        217 days ago

        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

        • @[email protected]OP
          link
          fedilink
          English
          116 days ago

          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 :)

          • @[email protected]
            link
            fedilink
            216 days ago

            Please don’t run arbitrary commands just because someone on the Internet told you to use them.

            The arch wiki will tell you all you need to know and more.

        • swab148
          link
          fedilink
          217 days ago

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

          • Responsabilidade
            link
            fedilink
            117 days ago

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

  • @[email protected]
    link
    fedilink
    English
    217 days ago

    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.

    • ditty
      link
      fedilink
      English
      216 days ago

      Read the post, literally nothing ☺️

  • @Deckweiss
    link
    216 days ago

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