It’s Arch, there are updates literally hourly, what’s alerting helping you with exactly?

I’m using it only to tell me whenever there’s an update. Otherwise the updating itself I’m doing it manually in terminal.

i mean, there’s no real need, if every time there’s an update you need to update anyway just do
sudo pacman -Syu once every x days and you’ll be fine

of course you can do this way. But a try is not a heavy work.

And if something breaks after the update, how will I know what broke? At least that way I’ll have a pretty good idea what might have been broken and will be able to restore (from backup) and then forbid the breaking packages to update until the problem is fixed.

how can you tell if a package is going to break your system before you update?

did you use a backup utility sometime? timeshift is perfect for me. Install and use it BEFORE big/any updates. You can always come back!

Beta

oh, ok. Do a backup anyway. rsync is not a joke. Clonezilla have to be booted and you loose a bunch of time imho. Do what you prefer tho.

Before I run an update, I take a look at the waiting packages and remember them. If they’re too many to remember, I simply take a screenshot which goes to a non-system partition. That way, if something breaks after the update (and the reboot, ofc), I’ll restore from the backup and then do the update package by package until I find the culprit. At that point I’ll restore from the backup again, forbid that package to update (by adding it to pacman’s ignorepkg) and update the rest. Whenever the problem is fixed, I’ll remove that package from the ignore list. But some packages never leave the ignorepkg list. 😜

If you boot it from a CD/DVD, yes, you’ll have to wait at least 5 minutes for it to start. But when you boot it from a USB 3.0 Ventoy flash drive, it starts almost instantly in less than a minute.

Read this https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Rsync try timeshift (it uses rsync) at least once and compare. After that, you can do what you want on your system, oc! peace.

You do realize you can do the same with a terminal window, or simply read the pacman log?
Are you even using Arch?

Yes, but terminal can’t alert you whenever a new update becomes available.

It’s Arch, there are updates literally hourly, what’s alerting helping you with exactly?

A new big version of Cinnamon arrives, I don’t make a backup before updating and then it turns out the desktop is broken and not working properly. That’s why I started using a visual alert to tell whenever there’s a new update. When I see something that could break everything, like Cinnamon new version, I’ll make a backup first and then update. This saves me a lot of trouble later.

https://github.com/archlinux/archinstall/issues

This

Ideally, make a PKGBUILD and follow the conventions

yes

does it make swap faster