I don’t see the point in removing the un-needed firmware. Most linux distro’s have all the firmware installed for most devices. Doesn’t make any sense to me to uninstall. It takes minimal space.
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Huh? Games?! Who knew??
(clearly, not I)
Conquering OCD tendencies is half the battle! 
A never-ending struggle for me. 
And Arch Linux is a very deep well to play in for OCD types! I am just glad I never got into Gentoo or LFS.
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@eznix, @Moonbase59, @dbarronoss, @UncleSpellbinder, @thefrog I have a laptop with limited space to play with. I do not have 512GB or 1TB or higher capacity drive. I am now mentally kicking myself for not getting the NVMe and SSD combo laptop when it was on offer. Additionally my NVMe appears to be soldered to the motherboard, I cannot take it out and replace it with a higher capacity disk.
These days most of the laptops are becoming harder and harder to repair. And also next to impossible to upgrade the RAM or change the disks.
@fbodymechanic I have a laptop and not a desktop or mini computer. Due to that reason I am stuck with what has been provided to me. It would not be possible for me to add a NVidia GPU or another hardware onto the laptop.
@Stagger_Lee, @fbodymechanic, @_Six I will keep the point in mind. Either to keep the meta package installed with all its dependent packages or keep only those firmware packages as needed explicitly. Not both.
About the split in the firmware package, it is a good sign that Arch has not gone the path of Ubuntu and its derivatives which have put all the drivers and firmware in a single gargantuan package.
Thanks guys about your helpful points about partial upgrades, asexplicit and IgnorePkg option in /etc/pacman.conf. Appreciate the time you have taken to list out all the drawbacks that would come from keeping the linux-firmware meta package while blocking the unnecessary firmware packages.
p.s. Since I can only mark one post as answer, I will do that. Please do not take it mean that your response was not valid or did not contribute to the solution.
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I understand your situation, thanks for explaining. I can also only use 10–20 year old machinery here, mostly bought for cheap money on ebay and the like. These old ones are (fortunately) mostly still upgradeable, but—compared to modern—their performance and graphics suck. I’m currently running EOS on a $20 used laptop from 2014 to which I added a $15 240 GB SSD. A lucky buy.
I do agree the upgrade/repair situation has become worse every year. Especially on laptops/notebooks. A pity.
I also like Arch’s move to stay lean and mean. Gives us choices, at least, where we can’t always choose on the hardware side.
Best of luck.
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Yep, cheapest construction is common in low end laptops that are considered disposable sigh.
Or probably I should say, laptops aren’t built to be repaired or upgraded, with the exception of a very few premium tiers?
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Yeah. What is point of having a slim laptop which cannot be opened up and all of its components are soldered onto the motherboard? So if a component fails, the entire motherboard, about 25-30% of the laptop price, if not higher, has to be replaced.
It seems that the concept of modularity and ease of repair/upgrade is being overlooked. I blame Apple and Google with their fetish about slimness and making things as hard as possible to be repaired.
My laptop is less than 3 years old. It is just that I never realized the price that I would have to pay for not looking for basic things like RAM and drive not being soldered onto the motherboard. The backcover being fixed by 8-12 screws instead of being glued stuck.
Learnt my lesson, will not repeat it. But I am still stuck for the next 5 years or so.
I’m desperate for space (two OS on small SSD) but I considered the extra stuff negligible and possibly dangerous to tamper with.
It’s hard to know foresight when you buy it for all the right reasons. too much minutiae to be aware of for sure
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You definitely have the chance next time to make a more informed purchase though.
I cough have never done anything like this cough
Sounds good! I’m running EOS (i3-wm) on a mid-2011 MacBookPro latop. Runs like a charm … and way faster and cleaner than when it runs that old cloggy OSX system.
I did upgrade its memory, storage and replace the OEM battery, but such things cannot be done on my 2019 iMac desktop … on which one can’t even share its lovely high-res Retina screen with another processor. Apple was early to the game of crippling their hardware. 
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