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- cross-posted to:
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Who the fuck still uses PPA?
Do you actually need - Syyu or is - Syu fine? I have only really used the latter.
The only difference is that -Syyu forces the database to update
To explain what database means in short, it tells pacman what packages are available in different repos (e.g. core, extra). In some rare cases, the time of the database update may be incorrectly marked, and pacman would not know there are new packages/versions. -Syyu should be used in this case.
yay
yes | yay
Upgraded three systems to Debian 13 in the last few days. Went without a hitch. One Proxmox, one media server and player, one workstation.
Wayland still doesn’t work, but that’s apparently because of the noVideo drivers.
The second y in
Syyu
is almost always unneeded and just wastes time and bandwidth. Is i remember correctly, it only makes sense when for example you switch mirrorsYay
Paru team chiming in 🫡
yet another yogurt
OP hasn’t used AUR much
You don’t even have to use the aur are to have breaking changes. Most recently they changed how vlc was packaged. And broke it causing a lot of problems for users.
So THAT’S why it wasn’t working 😭😭😭😭
Oh wow? You still suffering. In case you haven’t found the solution. Uninstall VLC. Then reinstall all the VLC bits. Now instead of then all bring in one or two packages. There’s tens of then now. MKV support had is own package even.
THANK YOU I can stop using the flatpak now and free up some storage 😁😁😁
Or the Linux firmware package change that required manual intervention to resolve.
That’s pretty rare. I ran arch for years and my only issues were from AUR or trying to update extremely out of date machines.
I’ve run arch for years as well. It happens nearly yearly. I’ve had updates break completely several times. Partial updates. That required significant manual intervention. Etc Etc Etc. Meanwhile my Debian and fedora systems haven’t had a hitch in years.
I’ve moved on to gentoo. All the customization and if something breaks I can be sure it’s my fault.
I haven’t installed gentoo in 20 years. I still like arch for it’s glaring flaws. And I do like BSDs ports etc. I probably should go through a gentoo install again to see how it changed. Last time I ran it. Was on a first generation Pentium.
On a beefy machine it’s nice. Chromium takes forever.
I saw someone on ml point out that
update
should come beforeupgrade
update
pulls the metadata about your packages (to see if there are new versions, and which), whileupgrade
applies the patches.I’ve never understood why the update part isn’t included in the upgrade command, since upgrade is useless without it
Upgrade will upgrade the system to whatever is newest in your package cache. If, for example, you’ve just performed a partial upgrade and put yourself into an unsupported state, running
upgrade
without first runningupdate
will put your system back in line with itself.There probably almost never a reason for this, but its the equivalent of running
pacman -u
which under normal circumstances you will never doSee you perfectly explained why it should be an option to do this but not the default way
I thought I remembered that correctly from my time with Ubuntu like 20 years ago.
Really should keep that PPA use to a minimum. They’re potentially a source of not just instability but possible malware as you’re putting a lot of trust in whoever maintains that resource.
Especially because there is no way to limit the packages installed from a PPA AFAIK. If the PPA has a “new” version of NGINX, or of libc, or of Wayland - you get it, too!!!
Absolutely. Ideally you should have zero PPAs. There’s definitely a cost for using this feature. Most commonly it comes in the form of instability when you end up with incompatible or broken packages because the maintainer wasn’t playing an active enough role. YMMV!
You can set packages from a particular repo to a lower priority so that they are only installed when you expressly ask for them
How does one do that, Wise Zorro?
I think Fedora’s COPR carries on the torch, besides Arch’s AUR. But generally, yeah, avoid PPA’s like the plague. It’s been garbage for years now. You’d be better off actually compiling the software yourself.
When I use Debian/Ubuntu, I prefer installing missing/outdated software from Nix package manager or Flatpaks.
This way, I can keep a stable core, while being able to enjoy all the latest versions of the apps that I need.
presses the big blue ‘update’ button in GNOME Software in Fedora
Checks ‘automatic updates’ box in Discover
Break your system and it’s broken.
How unexpected!
ujust update
Isn’t that just
topgrade
I’m honestly not sure. https://github.com/ublue-os/bazzite/blob/main/system_files/desktop/shared/usr/share/ublue-os/just/10-update.just
The bazzite motd says use
ujust
I find debian more stable than arch, especially when updating.
nix flake update nixos-rebuild --switch --flake . # Just to keep an update history git add flake.lock git commit -m "update"
This may seem like too much work, but it guarantees an all-or-nothing procedure. If some package is broken, the entire upgrade process is canceled, and the system remains in the state that it was.
I have had a couple of partial upgrade cases on Arch. It was not fun live booting to repair it, every time this happened.
I’ve had updates fail on NixOS. A kernel update didn’t generate the initramfs and the system wouldn’t boot. Booting to a previous generation and reapplying the update fixed it.
This is very rare, though, and unlike Arch can be fixed without a Live USB.
A kernel update didn’t generate the initramfs
This sounds like a bug on Nix configuration, or the kernel build process.
If NixOS had caught the error, you wouldn’t have gotten a faulty generation at all. This is different from pacman/apt/dnf, which will happily continue the upgrade, resulting in a broken system with no easy way to fix it.
paru