always read the news before updates. There was one that said manual intervention was needed, and gave you the exact command you needed to run
I only read it when I get error like this to know what I shouldn’t do. Is that acceptable? Always checking the news seems superfluous because most times it goes smoothly, and packman will fail and let you know if it can’t do something.
You can just subscribe to the announcement mailing list: https://lists.archlinux.org/mailman3/lists/arch-announce.lists.archlinux.org/
This way you get notified immediately and there are also very few messages being sent on the list.
I’ve learnt to check the endeavouros forum before a kernel update (normal updates are fine), it can save you from having to chroot and tweak stuff… It takes 5 minutes to check against 2 hours to fix
Interesting. I’ve never had anything serious than updating keyring and removing before reinstalling packages. Pacman hasn’t failed me enough to need more than
- error msg is obvious (like keyring), conflicts, fix it
- if not check archlinux.org, follow fix from there,
- new problem I need to search, mostly happens because I haven’t learned about it. Like first time I came across keyring problem.
There were lots of issues with Wayland becoming default and nvidia being nvidia during those times, in fact I’ll add nvidia updates to the things you should check the forums for before intalling. Now the main issues have been ironed out, but for example there was another issue recently which required uninstalling a package before updating
https://archlinux.org/news/linux-firmware-2025061312fe085f-5-upgrade-requires-manual-intervention/
I use this approach and there’s never been an unrecoverable situation over the decade plus I’ve used Arch Linux.
to be fair this didn’t break thne system either. It refused to update until you followed all 1 instructions
