Wish me luck in the install process. Any tips or anything I should know for system maintenance or anything else?

  • post_trains [he/him]
    ·
    4 years ago

    Read the system maintenance article on the wiki. This is not a meme - it’s a very good article.

  • AnalGettysburg [he/him]
    ·
    4 years ago

    Read the wiki. And then realize pacman -S is something way harder to remember than apt-get and just reinstall ubuntu

  • Shinji_Ikari [he/him]
    ·
    4 years ago

    Update regularly. Arch has been the most stable and reliable distro for me, and when it has broken, its by far the easiest to fix with the most up-to-date documentation and forums.

    If you don't update for a couple months you can possibly break your entire install. But even if its every couple of months, you'll be fine. Often you'll run into a small issue updating where it will error out due to a change in a package. copy and paste the exact error into your search engine and it will almost always take you to a recent arch forum or archlinux.org blog post explaining the couple commands to fix it to be on your way.

    My thinkpad has had an arch(antergos) install for almost 4 years. It outlived the antergos project.

  • colin [he/him]
    ·
    4 years ago

    I would suggest running pacman -Syyu every time you upgrade just to force pacman to update the package list. It's not necessary to run pacman -Syyu unless switching mirrors(See https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Mirrors#Force_pacman_to_refresh_the_package_lists). Other than that read wiki and news items if something goes wrong after an update.

    • lilychan [she/her]
      ·
      4 years ago

      Any reason why? I always use one -y flag. I think I heard somewhere that you should avoid -yy, but I can't seem to find it.

      • NonWonderDog [he/him]
        ·
        4 years ago

        -Syu and -Syyu are exactly the same thing if all the package servers you use are up to date with each other or you only use one mirror.

        Managing the mirror list is a pain, so I don't do it. I just installed pacman-mirrorlist instead, and let that take care of it (I can't remember if I needed any other packages to automate things).

        But that means it changes mirrors pretty regularly, as various mirrors are dropped because they didn't update as fast as other mirrors.

        Using -Syyu instead of -Syu means pacman disregards the update time advertised by the server and checks the version of every package it tracks (or something like that), instead of just checking those that could have been updated since the last time it checked. This tends to help keep things in check if you change mirrors frequently.

        I don't think there are any downsides on the client side, but it probably puts more load on the servers.

        EDIT: If you have a newer version of a package from one mirror, and then update with an older mirror, -Syu will ignore it unless it's needed by other packages. -Syyu will ask you to downgrade the package (with -Suu or -Syyuu or whatev) to make sure you stay in sync. I think. This all gets really complicated and beyond my understanding of pacman (especially if a package removes a prerequisite in a later version), and mirrors are generally pretty well kept in sync.

        • colin [he/him]
          ·
          4 years ago

          Yeah, looks like it's not advisable to run -Syyu unless switching mirrors, I'll update my original comment. https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Mirrors#Force_pacman_to_refresh_the_package_lists