The "Arch breaks on updates" meme is about 20 years out of date.
this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2024
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Almost as old as the last Debian update.
I run Slackware. Debian is much too unstable for my taste.
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.
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Your distro's repos might not have everything and be a bit out of date at times, but they are scanned and usually better tested and maintained.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.
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.
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.
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.
Oh, ok... That makes more sense.
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.
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.
I'm on EndeavorOS with yay and repos break all the time.
Then I'm doing something wrong.
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.
not once have I had a problem or anything break. What am I doing wrong?
Love it. xD
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
I have no actual problem with it, the only reason I don't is that it's harder to type
That's true... But once you get used to it, you don't even notice that you write 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
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 :)
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.
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 ☺️
Install literally every package from the repo, then you can experience breaking OS every day.