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?

  • superkret
    742·
    2 months ago

    The “Arch breaks on updates” meme is about 20 years out of date.

  • ogeist@lemmy.world
    487·
    2 months 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!@ttrpg.network
      282·
      2 months ago

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

      • prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone
        2·
        2 months 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!@ttrpg.network
          2·
          2 months 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          Your distro’s repos might not have everything and be a bit out of date at times, but they are scanned and usually better tested and maintained.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.

          • prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone
            1·
            2 months 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.

  • Daemon Silverstein@thelemmy.clubEnglish
    223·
    2 months 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.

    • thingsiplay@beehaw.org
      5·
      2 months ago

      I think it’s just sarcasm for the memes from the OP, asking why nothing breaks and what is he doing wrong. The expected behavior is to break.

    • bkuri@lemm.ee
      2·
      2 months 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]@pawb.socialEnglish
        4·
        2 months 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@lemmy.world
        1·
        2 months 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@lemmy.world
    10·
    2 months 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
    123·
    2 months ago

    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·
      2 months ago

      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.

    • theshatterstone54@feddit.uk
      6·
      2 months 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.

      • bellsDoSing@lemm.ee
        3·
        2 months 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.

    • dave@feddit.ukOPEnglish
      3·
      2 months 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.

      • BaalInvoker@lemmy.eco.br
        2·
        2 months 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

        • dave@feddit.ukOPEnglish
          1·
          2 months 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 :)

          • bkuri@lemm.ee
            2·
            2 months 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.

  • gerdesj@lemmy.mlEnglish
    2·
    2 months 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.