“Important announcement on the Archlinux mailing list:
With 20250613.12fe085f-5, we split our firmware into several vendor-focused packages. linux-firmware is now an empty package depending on our default set of firmware.
Unfortunately, this coincided with upstream reorganizing the symlink layout of the NVIDIA firmware, resulting in a situation that Pacman cannot handle. When attempting to upgrade from 20250508.788aadc8-2 or earlier, you will see the following errors:
linux-firmware-nvidia: /usr/lib/firmware/nvidia/ad103 exists in filesystem
linux-firmware-nvidia: /usr/lib/firmware/nvidia/ad104 exists in filesystem
linux-firmware-nvidia: /usr/lib/firmware/nvidia/ad106 exists in filesystem
linux-firmware-nvidia: /usr/lib/firmware/nvidia/ad107 exists in filesystem
To progress with the system upgrade, first remove linux-firmware, then reinstall it as part of the upgrade:
I wonder what “Update with care!” means in this context? Is it a lack of care by the user during updates that causes all these nvidia related issues? I went back to Manjaro on one of my machines and the waters are calm. It might be the timing of the clean-install though, rather that the distro variation. Trying to get to a predictable, rolling release environment and Arch has been good. The Manjaro clean install was after the total blackout nvidia/EOS issue. The other machine on EOS never had the blackout issue, but now throws this error during update. I have not tried the steps yet. Does the “manual intervention” fall withing “Update with care!”?
you have not understand :
the fact that this firmware was already and present installed , means that if your computer have a nvidia card , your kernel are using it ( at the time of meta for firmware )
that why theses two command was provided in order to update
they are two cases :
no change kernel or nvidia driver , you have to rebuild in this cases ( dracut or mkinitcpio ) , because it may change in your vmlinux
if any change kernel and nvida appears , it will always with hooks redo a build with dracut or mkinitcpio to update your vmlinux
I don’t see that mentioned anywhere, but if it does mention it elsewhere then it most likely means don’t blindly update with this update, be sure to to als do the manual interventions as well because skipping those will cause problems for your system.
I see where it’s from now, it’s from here.
So in that context it’s meant as the person who posted it to be aware of having to a manual intervention as stated by the Arch Linux news feed. So “Update with Care!” was not said by the Arch Linux news feed but by an EndeavourOS forum moderator.