Keeping Garuda up to date with it's new releases? (without reinstalling)

Issues & Assistance
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Hello,

First and foremost, let me express a big THANK YOU to all folks involved in making of Garuda. I'm using it for pretty much a year now, and for the whole time, I've been enjoyng the ride greatly! Garuda just brought an end to my previous, never ending, distro-hopping :slight_smile:

With that being said, there's a question, that boggles me, lately:

Is there a (hopefully convenient) way, how to "sync" my older Garuda install with it's most recent release (Harpy Eagle, at this point, but generally any future one too)?

Let me explain my primary motivation behind the question.

Recently, I found a bug in my system, where KDE doesn't run under Wayland (Switching to Wayland: Failed to open drm device at "/dev/dri/card0")

Me and @UltraBlack teamed up, and tried to debug the issue, but even after several days of playing with manually compiled KWin, and some other things, we were not able to get to the cause of the problem.

However, by running the latest Live ISO, we have found, that in Harpy Eagle, this issue doesn't exist anymore. And while this one specifically is not essential for me (X11 works perfectly fine, and I have no problem sticking with it for the time being), I was thinking, that it would be generally a nice option to have, if we could just update our system to the latest release. Not only to correct issues like this (that were somehow fixed down the line), but also to enjoy all the advances, that are added to Garuda, as time passes.

I was searching the forum for the answer, and closest to one I've got here: How to update garuda - #3 by solted

And from what I understand, it seems, like currently there is no easy way, how to achieve that, without reinstalling the system. And while that certainly can be done, it (at least partially) defeats the purpose of a rolling release distribution, in my opinion, at least for reasons I've tried to list above...

So, that's why I'm asking - has such a "scenario" already been considered? And if so ... is there some practical way, how this could be achieved?

Thanks in advance to anybody for any potential answers, either positive, or negative :slight_smile:

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Trying to avoid the usual explanations about the essence of a rolling release and its updates, the point for me is just to stay in line with the new packages in the new releases.
Personally I prefer to keep up to date via the forum, and choose what to add, but I remember this suggestion with interest:

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Ahh, I haven't found that :man_facepalming:

Well, that's certainly something.
I will backup my data, and give that a try. (What could possibly go wrong?) :smiley:

Thanks a lot :+1: :+1:

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Maybe, before launching it, redirect the grep to a file and check if the list is correct...

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Yes, that could be a good thing :blush:

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So, I've tried that, and even though it didn't fixed the mentioned wayland issue, it otherwise did what I wanted to achieve - to bring my system in line with the current Garuda release (without bricking it along the way - yaaay! :slight_smile:)

So, yeah, it fits the bill, I guess.

It's not a silver bullet, and to fix that wayland thing, I'll probably still have to do a fresh install, if I need to, but that's probably still ok, as that seems to be just a one-off thing, not something anyone should face on a regular basis. Apart from that, this really is a good enough, practical answer I was looking for.

So thank you, once more. I really appreciate it :+1:

For anybody, who might come with the similar question in the future, this is exactly what I did to sucessfully upgrade my system:

curl https://iso.builds.garudalinux.org/iso/garuda/dr460nized/211229/garuda-dr460nized-linux-zen-211229.pkgs.txt | grep -Eo '^[^ ]+' > upgrade.txt

It is essential to replace the curl path to the desired version !! Use your browser to choose the one you want!!!

Then I checked the contents of the upgrade.txt file for any potential problems (it was ok in my case)

And after that, I ran:

cat upgrade.txt | paru -Syu --needed -

Mind the trailing dash - it doesn't work without it!

Then paru asks several questions, if it's ok to replace legacy packages with their newer counterparts (all the proposed replacements were looking good in my case, so I chose "Yes" to alls), and after that, it's just done, quickly and effortlessly.

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So, I generally think of Arch without a past or future. It’s not old or new, Arch always just is. So when you install your system you’re building your Arch with whatever is available at that moment. After that, you only really “keep things current.” More like an oil change. Occasionally a part will get fixed due to a bug.

If you want to change something, you either need a new install completely, or you need to go in and physically change it yourself.

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Derek, you've pretty much outlined the definition of user-centric and that's well and good with Arch. Garuda--as well as most "canned" releases--is distribution-centric. Nothing wrong with that either.

You can eat your own dogfood or eat somebody else's. That's the way I look at it, and Garuda is the best Arch-based dog chow I've run across since ArchBang came on the scene a ways back.

What I really, really like about that script being referenced by @filo and @dejv78, and @SameExpert shared (from various Reddit posts), is how it injects a user-centric script into distribution-centric Garuda.

Applications in the Linux world come about because they scratch some programmers itch. The source gets shared and built upon and on, and on it goes. It may even turn into a distribution, should that fulfill another (or several) coders itch.

That script, which brings in all of the normally unaccounted for changes from release-to-release such as theming, for an example, is something that could be used not only for Garuda, but easily modified to work with many distributions. It could even be packaged. :wink:

Anyway, the problem is already solved. I just wanted to point out to newcomers to Garuda or Linux what a remarkable thing this thread led to.

Linux in a nutshell.

:smiley:

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I think the one factor you've failed to take into consideration in your update vs reinstall scenario is how config files are updated.

With an Arch based system the user is the one expected to make the decisions on how the system is configured. An update doesn't automatically change the systems configuration files for components that have been changed/updated. The user as the system administrator is expected to make the decisions as to configuration changes. The user is expected to update/merge recent config file changes themselves manually.

That could perhaps be one reason why an updated system doesn't perform exactly the same as a newly installed system (where all the changes are already integrated).

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Agreed. My apologies. I do need to remember to check my forum location/analogies better. I use Arch/EOS the vast majority of the time. I did a barebones install the other day though which I thought was quite interesting - especially the post install pop up thing.

You are correct - and I forget that this is much more distribution-centric than I’m used to. (sorry all)

Pave away on the updates! As with all things Linux - if that’s not something you want - there’s always somewhere else that may scratch your itch.

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An update doesn’t automatically change the systems configuration files for components that have been changed/updated

Yes, even though I don’t understand much, how this really works, I was somehow intuitively expecting it to behave that way, and I am aware, that this is probably the reason, why that wayland issue hasn’t been fixed.

I would say, that this is in fact the right way, to do it. I probably wouldn’t want it to “reset” my already configured system to defaults automatically, without even asking.

I was planning to take a look inside the “Themes and Settings” repo, if there’s something, I could use to fix that wayland thing.

But if there are any alternative ways, how to handle configurations (like some kind of way how to reset them into distribution defaults, either globally or selectively), I’d certainly like to hear about that :wink: At least in context of this topic, it would help to complete the picture.

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All the go-fast juice injected into Garuda makes it a bit different from what you’re used to in EOS or plain ol’ Arch.
:slight_smile:

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I'm old. KDE, x11, on lts and ext4. . . . I party like it's 2009.

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I kinda hear you. I don't really need all the bells 'n' whistles 'n' buckles 'n' bows 'n' belts 'n' suspenders, mainly 'cause my systems and application needs are simple and/or generic. I have a few conf files I drop into modprobe.d or udev or systctl.d but that's the bulk of my customization. The rest are just vanilla applications or window dressing, along with a few AUR pkgs I've used for a long time.

I, too, tend to keep my data in Ext4.

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