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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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/
Thanks for the heads up! 😊
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/
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.
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 -fandbtoprunning all the time as it’s interesting to see what’s happening behind the scenes.Can I recommend cbonsai and cmatrix?
Thanks for the cbonsai suggestion 😀
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.
Every Sunday when I do my weekly backup routine
Im the same im daily checking for updates. However i do backup my system regularly too!
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.
I use timeshift and also do weekly clonezilla images. I’ll check ouy pika.
I’ll check ouy pika.
Timeshift and Pika are similar — both are deduplicating backup solutions; Timeshift uses Rsync, and Pika uses Borg.
[…] and also do weekly clonezilla images.
I currently don’t have any system in place to create system images. It’s defintiely something I should look into, though. It would be nice to have a full restore point.
How many images do you keep at a time? Just one? Images can take up a huge amount of space, so I would imagine that having mulitple saved at a time is rather expensive.
Edit 2024-03-31T02:36Z:
Timeshift and Pika are similar — both are deduplicating backup solutions; Timeshift uses Rsync, and Pika uses Borg.
I looked into Timeshift a bit more to double check my statement, and it looks like timeshift does have a snapshot option that uses BTRFS.
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.
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?
Literally just
#!/bin/sh if checkupdates || yay -Qu; then notify-send "Package updates available" "To update, press MOD + SHIFT + U" -i "update-catppuccin-mocha" fimod+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 -Quascheckupdatesdoesn’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 -Qushould check both but I have both commands in the script just in case)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
[] -Quandcheckupdates:checkupdatesshowed that an update was available, but the-Quoption did not reveal the update. It wasn’t until I synced the database with-Sythat-Qustarted showing the updates.Update (2024-03-31T03:20Z): Ah, it looks like
checkupdatesessentially is just runningpacman -Syandpacman -Qu.
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.
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.
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.
I used to run
sudo pacman -Syulike every 5 minutes (bleeding edge, more like bled out edge). I’d recommend once or twice a day to stay up-to-date.Every time I boot my computer and then every two hour or so. I’m fucking addicted to running topgrade.
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.
Everyday
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
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 to since I have to be home to debug the worst kinds of situations.
