Arda Sevinç

Generalist Software Developer, Engineering Student

Feb 22, 2023

Awesome post, sid!

I'd like to comment on a few things:

In the beginning of Install Arch section, there are two problems with executing pacman -Sy

pacstrap already downloads the repo files, so this is not needed.
Partial updates are not supported in arch. What this means is you should either run pacman -Syu or pacman -S <package>. When you run pacman -Sy you refresh the package list but don't update, this can break things later on. For more information about why partial updates are not supported, please refer to this archwiki page

There are also some other places where I've seen the usage of pacman -Sy, like when you're installing discord and other packages.

Also for getting screenshots of the arch install right from the ISO, you can use a hypervisor like qemu, virtualbox or any other virt solution.

Siddhant Khisty

Product Executive @ Devtron

Feb 22, 2023

Thanks for mentioning these Arda. I was under the impression that pacman -Sy without specifying a package, only grabbed the most up-to-date version of the repositories, and the upgrade is done only if the -u flag was included in it.

And yea, I did see the Arch page you mentioned, sadly I got into the habit of using -Sy which is why the -S and -Sy is used inconsistently in this blog. Need to break that habit.

Siddhant Khisty

pacman -Sy only does grab the most recent version of the package list as you said. The problem is that if you grab the most recent package list and then not perform a system update immediately after, the packages can break because of various dependency and incompatibility issues. Since Arch is a rolling release system, the maintainers always assume that all of the system is updated.

In this context, partial update means installing packages right after repo sync (pacman -Sy). If it happens that you install a package that depends on a new version of some other package in your system, then things will break. That's why.

Good luck and welcome to Arch! :D

I'm planning to write a similar guide to yours btw including a tiling window manager setup with awesomewm. Currently in the setup (suffering) phase...

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