I’ve been a super-happy user of EndeavourOS for the last two years, and I can safely say that this is the best and stablest distro I’ve tried in my long (20-year-plus) journey distro-hopping with Linux.
With that said, the only thing that annoys me is the volume and size of updates presented many times a week (my newest update today is around 850 Mbs) as I’m on a metered wifi connection.
Yes, I know it’s a bleeding-edge distro built on Arch, and I accept that and I’m very fine with it.
Yet, is there a way I am not aware of to stop, for example, the linux kernel and the nvdia-utils to keep updating (I am currently on the latest kernel)? Would choosing the LTS kernel version from akm and removing the stable version help?
Update less often. This will use less data as you will skip some updates that are superseded by later ones.
Yes, it would help a little.
However, overall you need to decide whether a rolling distro is right for you with your metered connection. You would have the same issue with any other rolling distro.
There’s also a way of “emulating” classical distros in Arch / , by downloading full Arch repo + aur packages that you really need (let’s say you have a friend or access for super-fast internet elsewhere) once per month, 2 month, half a year or whatever…
Just bring it back home on some flash-drive or small hard disk, update system from local repo copy and install software only from that local copy, whole repo is not as big as you might think…something like 30 Gb.
The only downside of that, and skipping updates the way mentioned by @r0ckhopper is that you will skip security updates as well, until doing full system update which is not optimal…
@Bojo FWIW, I suspect the reason you’ve found EOS to be the best and most stable distro is because of its approach to Arch/EOS updates. Tempering downloads due to bandwidth is certainly understandable. In the end, though, doing so may have consequences. It’s a balance.
IMHO, you would not have any real difference on the monthly download weight.
During those frequent updates, not everything is updated, but parts/bunches of packages. In the end, the same weight would have to be downloaded, after all.
Delaying updates will just make them bigger. You might save a little bit on download on those packages that have been updated multiple times since your last update, but usually those are the packages you want to update often, due to security fixes.
If you delay the updates for several months, it’s going to get a bit more difficult to update, and the downloads will be huge, several gigabytes.
If you are on a really tight download budget, you might want to consider a more stable distro which is on a fixed release cycle. That’s one of the disadvantages of EndeavourOS, and there is really no elegant way around that.
After 1-2 months the size of updates == size of iso. I mean if EOS ever offered e.g. an ISO od KDE Plasma (and not just online installer) like other distros, its size would be ~2.5GB which is usually the size of updates.
So in effect you are reinstalling your OS from scratch every few months.
Which is something I really don’t like about Linux. Win/Mac don’t have this problem. Linux does because there are very few shared dependencies and everything is compiled separately.
pacman used to have delta updates but they never really worked.
A lot of good points here, but I throw in another point.
I use EOS and Artix. The second has long periods (months) between updates to the ISO, so very often there are 400, 600, 800 updates to install after the initial install. I have never had any issue with those big “catch-ups”.
So I don’t think there is anything to fear with updating every few weeks, say. (Also, on the rare occasion when there is an error, it will very likely have been fixed and the fix will supersede the error; that won’t happen when you’re updating every hour).
Also, when you do upgrade between Debian versions every couple of years, the upgrade “just works”. (It is a big one-off download of packages but, in my experience, it is solid).
, by downloading full Arch repo + aur packages that you really need (let’s say you have a friend or access for super-fast internet elsewhere) once per month, 2 month, half a year or whatever…
Not even MacOS is that polished.