Thanks for the tip! Marked it down. I also found a command to update the system with pacman and yay all in one.
sudo pacman -Syu && yay -Sua
Or this, which does that and also updates keyrings:
eos-update --yay
yay should also not be run as sudo. And lastly, when updating via yay, just “yay” is sufficient. The -Sua is redundant.
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Yes, I do use yay because it combines “sudo pacman”.
I always try to set up procedures such that forgetting is excluded. You can use reminders or visual markers as an alert, and your suggestion is a useful way to avoid forgetting to update before installing.
Many thanks.
yay makes some quality of life assumptions. If no argument is specified, it’ll perform a system update:
yay
pacman on the other hand, will not:
$ pacman
error: no operation specified (use -h for help)
yay is an optional AUR helper that is not installed by default with Arch, but it is installed with EndeavourOS. The creator took some liberties to make it largely intercahngeable in terms of commands, but a bit more user friendly I guess.
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Arch is a rolling release. I update the system every single day. It’s just one of those things. You are much less likely to see issues updating regularly.
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Installing using yay -Syu packageName will perform an update and install. It’s a habit I’m trying to get into.
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I don’t think that necessarily applies. If there is a bug that crept into a package, you are guaranteed to find that bug in your system, whereas if you don’t update every day, chances are that the Endeavour team, seeing how quickly they react, are more than likely to have cleared the bug by the time I update.
That may be true but if you update let’s say weekly, you will have the problem around for at least a week. And in the case of the TS it might even result in not being able to install something.
Everyone is free to maintain their system as they please. Success (and failure) is ultimately their own. All we can do is anecdotally recommend what we feel are best practices.
I know my own use case differs from many others, but it does seem to me that if something breaks/misbehaves, it’s easier to narrow it down if you had 5 packages updated today than if you had 30-40 once a week.
If one chooses not to listen, then I can choose not to hear. (just saying)
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Again, not necessarily so. I do not need to stick dogmatically to 1x/week. If my weekly update shows there is a problem then I can look for solutions and re-update later that day or the next day.
What is TS?
It is not AT ALL a question of choosing not to hear. Dalto
recommends updating at least once per month, but does it 2x/month himself.
Endeavour is extremely stable, and when there is a problem (I was hit by the Grub issue a few years ago) the devs react amazingly quickly to fix it.
Now, I am not a highly experienced Linux user by any stretch of the imagination, more like perhaps an advanced beginner, so I take advice from an experienced person like him seriously. However, I try to find a sweet spot between too little, thus getting loads of stuff to update, and frantically updating every day. Hence my 1x/week.
Updating daily can also lead to a discussion about how often: 1x/24 hours, 2x/day, or even every 5 minutes.
Topic Starter
Well call me a lazy person, but that is why I have the notifier enabled and set it to notify me every hour. When a notifier pops up you can choose to click on the pop up to get the updates or choose to ignore it, the pop up fades away and you can update when it is more convenient, but at least you know there are updates available. Furthermore it is not like you get a lot of notifications every minute or 5 minutes. There are times you get a lot of notifications but most of the time it will be not as bad as that. Also you can set it to notify you every day, week or month.
Do you feel you have benefited a lot from daily updates rather than less frequent ones?
Let me put it this way the problem you had with installing things was solved by an update.
Problems caused by not doing updates on a regurlar basis appear a lot on this forum .
So if someone starts a topic about not being able to install something, I try to install it myself and a lot of times I can install that without a problem. Not always ofcourse because there can be some problem with the package itself. The way I see it is, I choose EOS because it is a rolling distro, and always will have cutting edge, or bleeding edge (whatever you want to call it) software available. So grab it as fast as you can. But that’s just me ofcourse.
The benefits are simple:
- If there is a serious problem caused by an update and I have to roll back to a snapshot, there is less rolled back if I update daily.
- If there is a minor problem caused by an update, it is easier to troubleshoot if I update daily because less has changed.
- If you update when installing software (
yay -Syu packageName) you won’t get your system into a partial update state. This may not cause a problem but it could cause a big one.
EndeavourOS is a rolling, bleeding edge operating system and you may as well surf that wave.
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Running system update commands like
sudo pacman -Syusudo pacman -Syyu # especially this!yayparu
frequently (i.e. many times a day) is causing unnecessarily much network traffic.
That’s why program eos-update has option --fast which does much less work when checking for available updates:
eos-update --fast # native package updates only
eos-update --fast --aur # also AUR updates
Tip: add the following aliases to ~/.bashrc:
alias u='eos-update --fast'
alias ua='eos-update --fast --aur'
Then, mostly use commands u or ua for updating your system.
And see how quick and easy checking available updates can be. 
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There are ways to surf: every 5 mins., every day, every week, every month, etc. I don’t think you can argue that updating every week is not like staying away from bleeding edge.
BTW, when installing a package I’ll use @I0F’s suggestion: yay packagename. It is shorter and forgetting to update, which is what caused this thread is not possible anymore. That is over and above my weekly update with the Arch-Update app.
So what you are actually saying is typing in one (or more) of the mentioned first 4 commands e.g. every hour can create more unnecessarily network traffic, than waiting for a update that becomes available (which will trigger the notifier pop up , if enabled) and update. The last four hours I was notified of a update (very small ones) only 2 times that’s why I’m asking.
There is no “correct” frequency for updating as long as you don’t take it to extremes.
There are pros and cons to updating more frequently and less frequently.
No matter how often you update, you should still always update the system before installing software from the repos.
If you feel the need to compulsively update your system as soon as each update is available that is fine. If you want update your system once per week that is also fine.
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