Hold the kernel! Thoughts on stopping updates

[Stagger_Lee]

@Archie1

I was under the impression that if updates are done more than a week apart then it might lead to the system getting bricked or mucked up. I did not know that it could be avoided for a month or for a fortnight.

I have several laptops (running Arch) that I rarely use, so they get updated rarely. Sometimes 3 or 4 months go by without updating them. No problems.

Then there’s this:

Arch installation updated after 3 years of neglect

While updating an SSD that used to be my daily driver (the Debian-base SolydXK), but was replaced a few years ago, I found that I still had an old Virtualbox Arch installation on it. I had not updated it since June 27, 2020 (OK, so not 3 years, but 2 years 11 months, close enough). It was running on kernel 5.7, and as you can see, the last activity in /var/log/pacman.log was 2020: [update_01] There have been a lot of changes in the last 3 years…let’s get this party started. First off, we have…

I’m certainly not recommending postponing updates for prolonged periods of time, but the risk of breakage is small.