Proper update method?

[Snowarch]

i saw thered 2 ways to update endevour os via the welcome menu. running the eos update aur fails, but running the system update -yay is downloading a ton of mirrors and eating thropugh my hard drive space.

whats the proper one to update my system?

[danny]

Running yay is a oretty standard way for a lot of folks. There are some good posts that can help you when starting out.

A Complete Idiot's Guide To Endeavour OS Maintenance / Update / Upgrade

I’m a complete idiot - so here’s my guide for you! It has been asked a lot, and fairly frequently recently it seems, especially by new Endeavour/new to Linux users. It was recently asked that I post how I update - so here it is. “How do I maintain / update / upgrade my system?!? Help!!” This is my maintenance plan. I have been using the same install for almost 2 years now without any major issue. I’m VERY aware there’s more than one way to do this. And most importantly - Many of these c…

How to run a stress-free EndeavourOS

I have spent a lot of time over the last 8 years helping people fix their broken systems and seeing people constantly describe how much trouble it is to keep their Arch-based systems running. Meanwhile, even though I run many systems with different configs, I never actually have these problems myself.1 I have helped people with so many obscure issues that if I ever did have issues with systems failing after an update I could fix them myself without too much trouble in most cases. However, I d…

[Bink]

@Snowarch

running the eos update aur fails

Could you please copy and paste the full output of this command:

eos-update --yay

@Snowarch

yay is downloading a ton of mirrors and eating thropugh my hard drive space

Perhaps just a terminology hurdle, but yay isn’t responsible for downloading “mirrors”. Updating your mirrors though is a good idea if having issues. Run these two commands (referenced from here) :

reflector --protocol https --verbose --latest 25 --sort rate --save /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist

eos-rankmirrors --verbose

[Snowarch]

its been updating over an hour, got a lot of warnings, and its ate over 10gb of my hard drive space and is still going…when it says “replace with” i just hit enter

[Bink]

When was the last time you ran a full update?

Have you installed many applications from the AUR? If so, were these -git versions, or non-bin versions of open source applications? If so, it will be downloading source code and compiling those, which will consume time and resources.

[Bink]

If you don’t mind sharing what AUR packages you have installed, we could help confirm this. This will list installed AUR packages:

pacman -Qm

[Snowarch]

@Bink

eos-update --yay

the update command worked. fixed yay. but i think past failed updates are eating my system memory. is there a way to check? also my amd drivers, do those update with yay update or do i need to manually find the pieces from the yay command again?

[Bink]

@Snowarch

but i think past failed updates are eating my system memory. is there a way to check?

Output size of pacman cache:

du -hs /var/cache/pacman/pkg

Output size of yay cache:

du -hs ~/.cache/yay

[Snowarch]

yep yay cache is 96gb. can i safely delete it?

[Bink]

@Snowarch

also my amd drivers, do those update with yay update or do i need to manually find the pieces from the yay command again?

This command would perform all updates from both official repos, and AUR, therefore including your AMD drivers. It also does a couple other things, which is why I recommend it over just yay.

eos-update --yay

@Snowarch

yep yay cache is 96gb. can i safely delete it?

I believe so (and have done so myself from time to time).

[Snowarch]

alright thanks between the two caches its 117gb

[Bink]

Look here for how to manage the pacman cache:

• ArchWiki > pacman > 1.5 Cleaning the package cache

Also, you might run the remove orphans command, to remove any dependencies that no longer have their parent packages installed.

yay -Yc

[Bink]

Just of note @Snowarch, if your system is running moderately capable hardware, and a half decent internet connection, a full system update typically shouldn’t take longer than minutes.

Where it would take potentially much longer, is if you’re compiling AUR packages from source. A web-browser for example, compiling from source could take quite a long time, and is prone to compilation errors (you mentioned errors).

If you’re not aware, installing the -bin (binary) version of these packages downloads the pre-compiled version, skipping that time consuming and resource hungry step.

[rabcor]

If you want to update your system along with any AUR packages (can only be installed through yay), use yay.

If you want to update your system but only official repo packages (can be installed through yay or pacman) use pacman -Syu.

If you didn’t install any AUR packages, it doesn’t matter what you use, same end result.

Official repo packages are cached by pacman and yay at /var/cache/pacman/pkg/

AUR packages are cached by yay at ~/.cache/yay

It is generally speaking safe to clean out both caches, the only reason you want the cache, especially the pacman one (there isn’t much reason to keep aur packages cached since it’s relatively trivial to downgrade those packages without relying on cached packages) is if you update your system and something breaks, then you can downgrade whatever broke to see if that will fix it.

This is very rare but it does happen, if you don’t have the package cache your options are to reinstall a different version from aur or wait for another update (which typically isn’t very long for cases like these since both arch and eos devs try their best to keep their distros working as well as possible).

yay -Scc clears all caches.

it can be fun to run df -h / to check available space before and after running the command, it’s often kinda comical how much space it frees up.