this post was submitted on 29 Mar 2024
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I find that I habitually open a terminal and run an update on every boot of my system (which gets rebooted once a day). I'm curious what other people do.

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 7 months ago

Usually daily, when I boot up my PC. Unless there's whole lot of updates, then I tend to wait till the end of the day and my work is done for the day. I mean I can always roll back, but I am weary of issues creeping up over several hours.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 7 months ago

Mostly everyday when I start my computer but I will avoid updating if I have a mission critical project to work on, because arch doesn't break often but when it does it's because you were trying to update right before working on a mission critical project.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 7 months ago

Pretty much every day, it's just part of my morning routine when I put the computer on. For reboots, basically whenever something important like the kernel, systemd or pipewire updates, just to avoid weird behavior.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 7 months ago

Usually twice a day on whatever PC I’m runnnig. That is unless I am really caught up in something I am working on then only when that task is complete which is rarely more than a week.

My server about every other day, but if I am traveling I purposefully try not too since I have to be home to debug the worst kinds of situations.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 7 months ago

my desktop, about every other month? i have moved signal-desktop to a flatpak so i don't have to do a full system update whenever it demands to be updated :D

[–] [email protected] 0 points 7 months ago

Whenever I feel like it tbh. Today I recently had to do so today because of the xz backdoor and before that, the new kde plasma 6 release. Before that, I basically didn't update unless I needed to.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 7 months ago

Exactly the same. My server gets updated whenever I ssh into it, too. And as it also runs on testing repos, it actually makes sense.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 7 months ago

On desktop, once or twice a week, if I think about it.

On my home server, every few weeks or once a month.

On my HTPC :), rarely, since its kind of fragile running Arch ARM on the Radxa Rock 5B. Only when I know there is time to rebuild some required AUR packages to make graphics work again.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 7 months ago

Once a week. I have to use proprietary realtek ethernet drivers and they need to be rebuilt with each kernel upgrade. I haven't figured out a clean way to plug them into packman and rebuild on kernel updates so I just update, reboot, rebuild and install drivers when I notice I'm on WiFi instead of ethernet.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I have a script that runs when I start my graphical environment that checks for updates and sends a notification if there are updates. Which prompts me to do a full system update if I get the notification. I shut my PC off at the end of the day and boot it up in the morning, so I update at least daily, occasionally more than daily if I turn my computer on and off multiple times in the day.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I have a script that runs when I start my graphical environment that checks for updates and sends a notification if there are updates.

Would you mind sharing that script?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Literally just

#!/bin/sh

if checkupdates || yay -Qu; then
    notify-send "Package updates available" "To update, press MOD + SHIFT + U" -i "update-catppuccin-mocha"
fi

mod+shift+u was bound to spawn a terminal window running yay -Syu, obviously change the notification to say whatever you want. The icon is a custom icon, replace it with whatever icon you want for the notification or just remove the icon if you don't want one.

I've since moved to Artix so the test is now just yay -Qu as checkupdates doesn't seem to exist on Artix, but if you're on base Arch and use yay, the above should work. You can also remove the yay if you don't use yay and I think that just checks for updates from official arch repos, not from aur. (yay -Qu should check both but I have both commands in the script just in case)

[–] [email protected] 0 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

This is so cool! Very clever solution to this issue. Thank you for sharing! 😊 An interesting thing that I ran into when testing it was regarding the difference between [pacman|yay|paru] -Qu and checkupdates: checkupdates showed that an update was available, but the -Qu option did not reveal the update. It wasn't until I synced the database with -Sy that -Qu started showing the updates.

Update 2024-03-31T03:20Z: Ah, it looks like checkupdates essentially is just running pacman -Sy and pacman -Qu.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 7 months ago (2 children)

Every time I install a package, or once a month.
I use a script that shows new Arch news messages, updates the mirrorlist with the fastest mirrors in my country, updates repo packages, updates aur packages, then prints created .pacnew and .pacsave files as well as orphaned and dropped packages.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I use a script that shows new Arch news messages, updates the mirrorlist with the fastest mirrors in my country, updates repo packages, updates aur packages, then prints created .pacnew and .pacsave files as well as orphaned and dropped packages.

Would you mind sharing that script?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

It's not very sophisticated and has no error handling, but I only run it locally...

#!/bin/bash
echo -e "\n...READING NEWS...\n"
yay -Pw
echo -e "\n...UPDATING MIRRORS...\n"
sudo cp /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist.backup
sudo reflector --country Germany --latest 5 --sort rate --save /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist
echo -e "\n...UPDATING REPO PACKAGES...\n"
sudo pacman -Syu
echo -e "\n...UPDATING AUR...\n"
yay -Syu
echo -e "\n...ORPHANED PACKAGES...\n"
pacman -Qtd
echo -e "\n...PACKAGES NOT IN ARCH REPO...\n"
pacman -Qm
echo -e "\n...NEW CONFIG FILES...\n"
sudo find /etc -name *.pac*
echo "DONE 😊"

#Dependencies: yay, reflector, rsync, noto-fonts-emoji 
[–] [email protected] 0 points 7 months ago

@KISSmyOS @Kalcifer u could Just use reflector

[–] [email protected] 0 points 7 months ago

Normally when some software I use has a major update. Could be a month, could be a couple days.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 7 months ago

Once a week, usually on a Friday when I've finished work, usually with a beer

[–] [email protected] 0 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

Multiple times a day, basically whenever I'm bored. Sometimes I get so depressed when there are no updates, that I install some random package or build something from source, so I can look at some text flying across my terminal, and look at all the cool stuff happening on my PC. I also have a journalct -f and btop running all the time as it's interesting to see what's happening behind the scenes.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 7 months ago (2 children)

Can I recommend cbonsai and cmatrix?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 7 months ago

cbonsai is awesome. Whenever I open a new shell, I have it configured to first run cbonsai so that a bonsai tree is the first thing that I see when I open a terminal.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 7 months ago

Thanks for the cbonsai suggestion 😀

[–] [email protected] 0 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

I just click the litte nag icon in my taskbar whenever I notice it.

Since I'm on Debian Testing that is often daily. But it varies. If I don't look at that part of my screen that day, w/e.

I thought I turned on auto update so it would just do it on its own. But it didn't work for whatever reason. Sigh... Linux moment. There is an answer, surely, but the cost of debugging it outweighs my patience. Typing in my password an extra once(ish) a day is fine, I guess.

Edit: Just realized this is the Arch community. D'oh.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 7 months ago

Well for my laptop which I use 3-5 days a week (for a few hours at a time) I do it only when I'm at home so it doesn't get in the way when I need my machine. But I also reboot my laptop every use since with framework suspend just won't work properly (I'll look into it soon™).

My desktop I try to update every time I use it but with barely any time and my gaming now happening on my steam deck that's less and less. Also with the archzfs module I gotta wait for the right timing between module and kernel versions so these days I often miss a few updates.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 7 months ago (1 children)

In case someone doesn't know it yet:

If you update your Arch Linux system with a kernel upgrade, the kernel modules will NOT be loaded again automatically by default and things like FUSE (used in AppImages for example or other FUSE based mounts) will not work without intervention

simple rebooting is the foolproof way or setting up kernel module reload hooks: https://archlinux.org/packages/extra/any/kernel-modules-hook/

[–] [email protected] 0 points 7 months ago

And other smaller things tend to misbehave as well. For this reason I always upgrade right before shutting down my machnine anyway.

An unintended side-effect of this is that I tend to postpone upgrades because I'm just about to leave somewhere and wouldn't have to deal with any manual interventions.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 7 months ago

Every time I boot my computer and then every two hour or so. I'm fucking addicted to running topgrade.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 7 months ago

Every time I see a post like this.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 7 months ago
[–] [email protected] 0 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

Every Sunday when I do my weekly backup routine

[–] [email protected] 0 points 7 months ago

I used to run sudo pacman -Syu like every 5 minutes (bleeding edge, more like bled out edge). I'd recommend once or twice a day to stay up-to-date.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 7 months ago (1 children)

However often you do it, you should definitely do it today to cover the serious backdoor that's been discovered: https://archlinux.org/news/the-xz-package-has-been-backdoored/

[–] [email protected] 0 points 7 months ago

Thanks for the heads up! 😊

[–] [email protected] 0 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Im the same im daily checking for updates. However i do backup my system regularly too!

[–] [email protected] 0 points 7 months ago (1 children)

However i do backup my system regularly too!

What form do your backups take? For my desktop, I run Pika Backup every hour on my home directory.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 7 months ago

I use timeshift and also do weekly clonezilla images. I'll check ouy pika.