18 points

You see, this is why atomic desktops aren’t a bad idea.

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12 points

This has nothing to do with immutable desktops.

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6 points

Well in an immutable distro, there is little to no chance for the system to end up in an unusable state (I guess it is the same for distros which apply the updates atomically). Traditional distros are far more likely to bork when so much shit is updated at once

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4 points

It’s arch. There’ll be no issue here.

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1 point

I have yet to break anything doing release upgrades on Debian since… 7? Or 6?

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2 points

As an anecdote (and not statistics) I have distro upgraded OpenSUSE with 5000 packages to install (thanks TeXlive LaTeX). It was fine.

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8 points

I don’t think this is true. The package manager is there for a reason to prevent that. If you have more updates to install at a time, then the chances are the same as if you would have installed the problematic update one at a time. Just read the manual intervention information from Arch and see if there is something to do, then it won’t bork. If people don’t know what they are doing and do not read the additional information (that is required to do so on Arch), well yes, then you could end up borking your machine. But not because so many updates are installed at a time. The package manager and operating system and their maintainer designed it in a way that you can install ton of updates at a time without borking. This is fine.

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19 points

Sometimes I wish someone would make a an Arch box and come back to it years later to see the updates it has missed.

But that’s assuming an Arch box would be reliable enough to stay alive that long lol.

Always heard of 20+ year old bsd and debian machines chugging along with no issue.

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-7 points

Pretty sure you can’t leave Arch lying around for even two months.

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14 points

Yes, you can. You can even update Arch after a year. But you’ll have to do a few more steps than just pacman -Syu

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11 points

I have updated arch systems that had not been powered on for years before. It was fine. No issues what so ever. Arch is not some flaky distro that breaks if you look away for a minute. My main system has had had the same install for over 5 years now and I regularly forget to update it for months at a time. Again, no issues.

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5 points

Yeah really the biggest issue I could see is pacman’s keyring being so out of date that it has to be manually refreshed with a new one

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12 points

It won’t rise much beyond that, since you only get one update per package. Whether it’s upgrading Firefox from version 120 to 121 or to version 130, it doesn’t change much in terms of download size, nor the number of updates.

At least, I assume, Arch doesn’t do differential updates. On some of the slower-moving distributions, they only make you download the actual changes to the files within the packages. In that case, jumping to 121 vs. 130 would make more of a difference.

If you do want lots of package updates, you need lots of packages. The texlive-full package is always a fun one in that regard…

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6 points

I had that on a physical machine! It broke hardcore lol I had to reinstall the OS after trying to update

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10 points

My arch install has been going strong for about 5 years now

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8 points

This is why I Dont use rolling release Distros on Pcs i wont use often.

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-5 points

Because you get updates and have an up to date system?

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3 points

Because you get a update once a update for a package comes out, If you dont update for a very long time you need to download a very large update.

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-3 points

Sure, and that’s exactly what you want if you are on a rolling release, isn’t it? If you neglect the rolling release for a month, what did you expect would happen? Also if you have more apps and packages, the more updates will come out. Rolling releases are for people who maintain the system and care about the updates.

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4 points

I used to care but with recovery tools being what they are and most apps being containers… my base systems tend to be a little more disposable.

That said, I haven’t had problems, even if I am at risk for more of them. I have my snapshots and my backups.

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1 point

I’d guess the updates would be about the same on a stable distro, this was a very cluttered install.

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-2 points

I hope you auditted all of these for backdoors before installing them

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2 points

Sorry, where is the backdoor? This is all official arch repos, and nothing even appears sketchy.

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-1 points

Well they are volunteers, something could have slipped up

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1 point

Highly unlikely, I assume you are nervous after the xz backdoor, but that is almost one of a kind. I couldn’t find any other examples of something like that happening.

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6 points

welp, looks like you don’t use python virtualenvs… well i guess jokes on you all your shit is probably broken now (and as a bonus, that’s probably a big part of the donwload size as well) :p

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4 points

Probably should, but this machine is already cluttered terribly. A good bit of the download size is likely Pytorch files.

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