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Comment by ogogmad | Hacker News Reader

You might know this, but unfortunately, if you leave an Arch install unused for enough time, and then run an update, you might not be able to boot into a working desktop.

[EDIT]

Oh, and I had a lot of problems installing Kalpa (from the submission) - all which I got fixed by using ChatGPT.

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I left an Arch install sitting for a few months and came back and had trouble getting the updates to properly install. Seems the advice around it is basically just don't go that long without updating.

I've left it for a long time and also run it daily sometimes, still no issues. My understanding is brick level changes usually are fixed quickly.

brick level changes will render the device unusable. You dismiss it like it was no big deal to brick a device.

Eh I misspoke, I don't think you can actually brick anything with this, its just it might not boot properly, you can still format over it, or fix it if you run a LIVE Linux disk to rollback. You also always have an option to run previous system configuration.

The more I think about it, I don't even use Pacman, I just use the other tool that comes with Endeavuor, which is a face to Pacman and probably shields me from doing doofus things. Pacman is easy to screw up an update with.

EOSupdate is basically just a yay and pacman script, as I understand it.

How long is a long time? I left mine for 2 years.

Bollocks. This can happen for any distro or OS. Stick to distro packages and this isn't notably more true for Arch than for most other distros or OSs.

If you build and install packages from AUR, or use dodgy repos like Manjaro, then risk of update woes will increase significantly.

> Bollocks. This can happen for any distro or OS

I've never had this happen with Windows or Mac.

> this isn't notably more true for Arch than for most other distros

Agreed. Welcome to Linux.

I don't have key problems on Debian or Fedora, but I do on Arch, even without AUR packages.

It's possible that you won't anymore if you preceed full upgrades with a `pacman -Sy archlinux-keyring`.

If I have to solve it by applying a manual fix it's still a problem, right?

Also at least up until 2 years ago (I have since stopped using arch) that did not solve it.

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