Hello. Please critique how I’m updating / maintaining my new Arch installation so I can fix anything I’m doing wrong. This is mostly what I could gather from the Arch wiki tailored to my system. I think I know what I’m doing - but as I’ve often learned, it’s easy to misunderstand or overlook some things.

Step 1: perform an incremental full system backup so I have something to restore if the update borks anything. I’ve chosen to use the rsync command as laid out on the wiki:

sudo rsync -aAXHv --delete --exclude={"/dev/*","/proc/*","/sys/*","/tmp/*","/run/*","/mnt/*","/media/*","/lost+found"} / /media/linuxhdd/archrsyncbackup

I have a large hdd mounted as a secondary drive under /media/linuxhdd. It is configured to automatically mount from fstab using uuid. Both my root drive and that hdd are formatted ext4. I’m not using the -S option because I don’t think I’ll be using virtual machines (I have other hard drives I can make bootable). --delete is used so I maintain one current set of files for restore purposes. This keeps the copying and transfer time to a minimum. (I maintain disk images offline with a different tool - this is simply one local copy for easy restoration purposes)

Step 2: Check the Arch wiki - follow instructions for any manual steps

Step 3: once every 1-2 months, update the mirror list using reflector

sudo reflector --protocol https --verbose --latest 25 --sort rate --save /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist

This should sort the fastest 25 mirrors into mirrorlist. Remember to use the -Syyu option in step 6 if this step was done

Step 4: Clean the journal

sudo journalctl --vacuum-time=4weeks

This should keep 4 weeks of files.

Step 5: Clean the cache

sudo paccache -r

This should keep no more than 3 versions laying around. Once and a while, I can clean out all uninstalled packages with -ruk0 options instead.

Step 6: Upgrade Arch packages with pacman

sudo pacman -Syu

I need to watch for pacnew and pacsave files and deal with them (although I haven’t seen any yet)

Step 7: Review the pacman log

nano /var/log/pacman.log

This should tell me about any warnings, errors, instructions, or other things I need to deal with.

Step 8: Remove Orphans

pacman -Qtdq | sudo pacman -Rns -

This could be recursive and needs to be run more than once. Instead, I’ll just run it once every time I update. This should keep things cleaned out.

Step 9: Update AUR packages

Check the build scripts to make sure the package hasn’t been taken over and that it won’t run anything funny.

yay -Sua

This should update just the AUR packages

Step 10: Remove AUR orphans

yay -Yc

The wiki says this “removes unnecessary dependencies” which I believe means AUR-only orphan packages.

Step 11: Reboot

reboot

Step 12: Update flatpaks from the GUI (Gnome–>Software–>Updates)

Any mistakes? Suggestions?

Thanks!

  • somenonewho@feddit.de
    2·
    1 year ago

    So yeah. If I needed a 12 step process to update my system it would still run kernel 4 :D (I’m lying of course) but i really don’t do as much as you and I don’t do more than necessary manually. Basically I run 2 commands to update:

    1. update which runs the update process more below.
    2. clean which removes orphans and cleans the cache

    So update is the alias where the magic happens and it does the following:

    1. It runs sudo pacman -Syu checking with the Informant hook if there are any unread news, if so it stops the update. Otherwise it just runs through it.
    2. Then it runs pacdiff to check if any config files changed (I ran into an issue with that before where I didn’t check properly and suddenly couldn’t login anymore.
    3. Then, if flatpak is installed it will also update all flatpaks.

    So my only manual intervention is “accepting” the news if there are any. Accepting the updates. And (of necessary) merging the pacnews. This way I have kept a fresh and stable system for a couple of years now.