Huge update - 1897 packages - how come?

Support System Updates
1

The poll tells me to share what my issue was and how I fixed it, so here it is:

I did an upgrade from two stable updates ago. There were an incredible ONETHOUSANDEIGHTHUNDREDANDNINETYSEVEN updates! It took around four hours and in the meantime made pretty much the entire system unusable, I could only click in the update terminal, but the keyboard didn’t work, the title bar was gone, KDE was frozen and so on.

I could still do some stuff via KDE Connect at first, but later that lost its connection as well.

After a long time and thousands of screen pages of GCC spam (even with “-w” it’s still really bad), I got another of the way too many confirmation prompts and couldn’t press Enter, so I killed the process from the menu bar, switched to line-only mode, killed yay and pacman there (no idea why that was necessary), removed the lock file and continued updating. Another couple thousands of screen pages of GCC output later, updates were done.

I did install kwin-x11 and plasma-x11-session, but after the reboot, it still started with Wayland, without asking me. I decided to give it a try, but it only took me 18 minutes to get way too annoyed with it, so I switched back to X11 (that’s my “solution”).

Weirdly, xdotool actually seems to mostly work. I had to change a bunch of settings to make it and “copyq” work again. But even with the most lenient settings, “gazou” couldn’t register hotkeys, there was a console error about reading the screen also not working and “screenkey” couldn’t show clicks and counted as a full window.

Touchpad settings were reset. Autostart seemed completely broken.
Even after switching back, I still can’t start a script with “./temp.sh &”, only “./temp” works, very weird. I’ll debug that later.

I also can’t move KDE elements (start menu, calendar, notifications, …) with Super+drag anymore. My thin start menu icon is now square again, so there’s a bunch of unused space.

Mod edit: Formatted for better readability. :wink:

2

That is one of the reasons that housekeeping is encouraged.

My guess is that ~35% 500 of them could have been avoided.

A pristine Manjaro system full ISO contains ~1202 packages.

4 Likes
3

It’s still 42% of all my installed packages. Someone told me that it had something to do with a new “glibc” version, apparently everything that uses that got a version bump and was rebuilt. Sounds unnecessary for me, but not sure.

4

Difficult to have an opinion on - it varies greatly from member to member.

You could get enlightened by running a few commands

pamac list --orphans

And

pamac list --foreign

EDIT

Plasma Wayland comes before Plasma X11 and the filenames change so sddm will list the available sessions in alphabetic order - and since you didn’t change the session selection box - the first session is used - sddm always worked that way.

5

Sounds feasible to me. Anyone who has anything built from source on their system will be familiar with the fact that it generally needs to be rebuilt whenever a library it depends on is updated. Pretty much everything on a Linux system depends (directly or indirectly) on glibc.

2 Likes
6

It stands to reason – with so many packages being replaced/updated – that continuing to use your computer during the update process might not be such a bright idea.

When large updates are looming, it’s often suggested (and indeed preferable) to perform the update from outside the GUI; This can help avoid complications arising from upgrading components while they are still in use:

  1. Logout from the GUI
  2. Open a TTY and perform the update:
    Maintain separation between Repo and foreign sources (AUR):
    – Update from the repo first sudo pacman -Syu;
    – and then the AUR pamac update --aur;
    – followed by flatpak update (if flatpak is used).
  3. Logout and Reboot (required when system packages are updated)

As was mentioned in the respective Update Announcement, plasma-x11-session must be installed to continue using X11.

Wayland is still the new default – which infers you are not required to be asked – a default is a default, not a choice.

After installing plasma-x11-session to again use X11, you then have the choice to manually select it.

2 Likes
7

another way to mitigate the impact on usability:
start the pacman process through nice

nice -n 19 pacman -Syu

but keep in mind that literally the entire system is being changed/replaced underneath you …

2 Likes
8

I’d add
2a. Deal with pacnew files before rebooting. Just in case there’s something critical in one of them.

Though to be honest, logging off the GUI seems unnecessary to me, as long as the update’s run in a TTY. I’ve occasionally seen something fly past me on screen that I wanted to check, so I’ve gone back to my GUI screen to do that.

9

It’s happened to me before, that the GUI crashed during an update.

(taking down keyboard and mouse completely. Including CTRL ALT Fx …)

Luckily, I have SSH.

  • I was able to log in from a laptop and monitor the update process until it finished.
  • Then I used maxi to check if the computer would boot (kernels present, initramdisks present, grub.cfg present…).
  • Then I was able to restart it from the SSH session.

:face_with_peeking_eye:

3 Likes