I read a post on the Reddit Garuda sub a few days ago about someone having issues updating after not using their computer for 6 months, and having to do a pretty severe backwards dive through the repos in order to sort things out to get back to normal. This worried me a bit, since I’ll be disassembling my desktop in a couple weeks to put into long term storage as I’m moving abroad at the end of the month and most of my stuff will be in storage until I get settled and can arrange international movers, which may be as short as two months or as long as six.
Is there something I can do preemptively to make updating smoother once I get back up and running?
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There were many changes in KDE, other DE were not affected. This could cause problems.
Unfortunately I am not a clairvoyant and KDE expert, time will tell how much work you have to do, with luck you will only have an update with a few GB of data.
Save your important data, also save all important things in .config, .local.
Remove the CMOS battery if the computer is older.
Since you have not yet posted a garuda-inxi here in the forum and your profile says “other OS”, we don’t know anything about your system. Do you really want to spend the time until the move playing?
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We cannot possibly predict if updating far down the road will be extremely problematic. A system that is 3 months out of date is usually not that difficult to update, but by the time half a year has passed you could encounter some major stumbling blocks.
Sometimes there are significant system changes that require hands on corrective action by the user before updating is possible. The more experienced an Arch user you are, the easier it will be to work around major road blocks to updating. Inexperienced users may not understand how to overcome these obstacles. The competency of of the system administrator (you), is the most important deciding factor of if updating is possible.
If you use the proprietary Nvidia driver, I would recommend switching to the free Nvidia driver before mothballing your computer to limit potential graphic driver issues.
Good luck.
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I don’t have too much Arch experience, but have been a Debian guy for a few years now and previously a Mandriva derivative. I tried Manjaro for a bit but found it to be messy and break often.
Fortunately I’m running AMD gfx so I should be good there. Thank you for the insight.
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I hadn’t thought to pull the CMOS battery, will do that when I pack up. Before breaking this box down I plan on running Clonezilla backups for my Debian (the other os) and Garuda installs and taking it in my luggage.
Since you have not yet posted a garuda-inxi here in the forum and your profile says “other OS”, we don’t know anything about your system.
Pardon my ignorance, I didn’t see a place in the profile for that. I’ll take another look.
Do you really want to spend the time until the move playing?
Maybe just a bit here and there. Mostly I just wanted to get familiar with it and how it differed from Debian so I’ve been everyday-driving it more and more since installing a couple months ago.
Not in your profile, just copy it from your terminal and paste it here.
From the template, if you open a new thread.
- After rebooting, post the FULL output of
garuda-inxiin the body of the post (not linked externally, or collapsed with the “hide details” feature)
- Format terminal output (including your
garuda-inxi) as a code block by clicking the preformatted text button (</>) , or put three tildes (~) above and below the text
or use garuda-assistant - ‘system infos’
I waited 6 months on a computer just to see what would happen if I didn’t update Arch. And other than sorting pacnew/save files, a permission change and rebuilding yay, I was back up and running in like 15-20 min
Just make backups of important stuff. And if you can’t fix it. Just pave it and be done with it.
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I have updated 6 months + out of date a few times before as well. It’s really the major show stopping system changes that throw a monkey wrench into the works. The last major deal breaker I can recall was the pacman version update a while back. There’s been a fair number over the years that have caused major problems, but fortunately they don’t come around that often.
It’s just a matter of the odds dramatically increasing that you’ll hit a major snag if you’re extremely out of date.
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If you do not update for a long time, at a certain point, reinstalling the system becomes less work than updating. However, I can’t tell you where that point is, because I have no reached it in practice.
I have successfully updated Arch systems that haven’t been updated in more than a year (14+ months). Yes, such updates typically require some manual intervention, even beyond updating keyrings, but I wouldn’t call them problematic at all. I am not afraid of leaving my laptop unused for many months, I’ve never encountered any major problems with Arch caused by delaying updates, that I couldn’t fix.
It is far more dangerous to continue to use an outdated system, if it is connected to the internet. An outdated web browser can be a major security issue. But if a computer is not being used, not updating it for many months is not a problem. Just expect your first update after many months to be less smooth than usually. In most cases you will have to update keyrings before running a full update. There might be some conflicting packages, some new dependencies, lots of unused packages that you can clean up later. It worse cases, you might have to manually download a new version of Pacman. Pay attention to what’s going on, note any problems and fix them. Not a big deal. If you have a problem you don’t know how to fix, ask about it here.
So my advice is, for what it is worth: don’t worry about it. Solve potential update issues when they arise, and do not panic ahead of time. In the worst case, you can always reinstall, though I’m fairly certain that you won’t have to.
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Thanks everyone for chiming in; it sounds like it’s less of an issue than was made out to be.
The thought of being without my main box for so long had less and less appeal the more I thought about it, so I reached out to the folks hosting the AirBnB we’re staying in while we look for permanent housing asking if I could ship some things via Fedex or whatever and they’re totally fine with it. The wife also wants to ship some housewares such as her knife set and a couple pans, so this works out: I’ll just box and ship these sorts of things and I’ll only be without it for a couple weeks, so there should be no issue. I have an 8TB backup drive that I’ll be making clones of my installs onto as the date gets closer, and that I’ll be taking with me on the plane.
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