I’ve checked the man page from pacman. Are you talking about this --asexplicit Upgrade option? Would that mean I have to execute
sudo pacman -S --asexplicit gdm
Or better:
sudo pacman -D --asexplicit gdm
Both of these aren’t installed yet and I don’t want to throw in another package manager in the mix when I have a big update for the next lsb-release outstanding.
Thanks for the tip though.
I see. Thanks. I’m still a bit shocked something like this is even necessary and pacman is bricking GNOME.
Will I, by marking ‘gdm’ as ‘explicitly installed’, somehow run into problems later when GNOME gets updated to version 46.1?
I recommend to check every single package that you want to remove with this command:
pacman -Qi “Package name”
if:
(Required By : None)
(Optional For : None)
They are fine to remove.
Use a Timeshift snapshot before you removing packages.
Btw. it makes more sense to remove the Orphan Packages after the big update and not before you update.
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When I try that for gdm right now it reports:
pacman -Qi gdm ✔
Name : gdm
Version : 45.0.1-1
Description : Display manager and login screen
Architecture : x86_64
URL : https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/GDM
Licenses : GPL
Groups : gnome
Provides : None
Depends On : gnome-session gnome-shell libcanberra libxdmcp systemd upower xorg-server xorg-xhost xorg-xrdb libgdm
Optional Deps : fprintd: fingerprint authentication [installed]
Required By : None
Optional For : None
Conflicts With : None
Replaces : None
Installed Size : 4,73 MiB
Packager : Jan Alexander Steffens (heftig) <heftig@archlinux.org>
Build Date : So 01 Okt 2023 14:37:29 CEST
Install Date : Di 07 Nov 2023 04:07:44 CET
Install Reason : Installed as a dependency for another package
Install Script : Yes
Validated By : Signature
It’s neither “Required” nor “Optional” for anything, yet @Zesko warns, I need it to run GNOME and the package itself says it’s the “Display manager and login screen”.
Timeshift will save your ass, so even if something goes wrong you can rollback with a Life Boot on a USB Drive and rollback your system with the Timeshift GUI and a already created snapshot.
Its easy… i did it 3 days ago again on my Laptop… just for fun 
If you unsure, just buy another external HDD and backup your files additional. So you will have less fear in future and not worrie so much of something goes wrong.
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It isn’t. I deliberatly chose to remove orphans before the big upgrade (that’s at least what I initially thought) because I read somewhere about big downloads because of rebuilding electron.
When I checked for orphans on my system, I noticed an old version 19 and thought it might be a good idea to get rid of that before the update.
Makes total sense, the problem is when you remove your Ophans and update instant after it, without using all program’s and all possible features around them.
You will probably never know if the program’s don’t work after, because of the update or because you removed orphans.
I’m already running a Timeshift backup on an external hdd before every update and save all my personal files with Borg via Vorta GUI. I haven’t tested the waters though which means I don’t know exactly how to restore the Timeshift backup especially without a running window manager. I thought that’s a bridge I cross when needed.
But maybe I really should read up on this realizing how quickly I can run into problems with pacman.
That’s why I have decided to wait with removing the orphans after the update now. 
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Was gdm explicitly installed by default after installing Manjaro Gnome? Or did you accidentally mark it as a dependency?
I tried playing a new Manjaro Gnome ISO on KVM/QEMU and see that gdm is explicitly installed by default:
Install Reason : Explicitly installed
I haven’t made any significant changes to my GNOME system since I installed it back in February '23. I’ve investigated the issue in the forum though and found a post by @deemon back in August '23:
I can tell you, that using Timeshift GUI is really really userfriendly atleast on a EXT4 Filesystem with RSync. It tells you exactly what is going to replaced, all the Partitions that will replaced with a good overview (like boot,swap,root) (even home if you manually added it in the rules, but per default it is skipped, so its not get mirrored/restored) and you just press a few times okay, to accept everything, then comes the filecheck window and after that the last agree and its going automatic in tty for you and you just lean back and be surprised how relieable timeshift really is.
It love this GUI and its total userfriendly. But i heard bad stuff about BTRFS and BTRFS Snapshots… but rsync should be fine (at least that what i heard), so my own experience going only around ext4+rsync.
Here some good points from me, how to update:
Because nothing depends on it except gnome-initial-setup. Arch assumes a user would install GNOME during installation with sudo pacman -S gnome which installs all the gnome group packages explicitly.
However, on Manjaro, gdm is installed explicitly so it never should be an orphan. As @linux-aarhus mentioned, you should mark it as explicitly installed.
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No, you will not.
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That’s encouraging because I also use the combination ext4 + rsync. According to your description it seems to be an easy task restoring my Timeshift snapshots. 
I’ve read your comment days ago because I religiously 
read all the 400+ comments in the Stable Update 13.05 announcement and continue monitoring the 18.05 one for potential upcoming difficulties.
Mine was as you can see by the pacman -Qi output above. I assume it’s because of the removed ‘meta-packages’ @deemon describes in the other discussion.
Nevertheless, I’ve marked gdm as ‘explicitly installed’ now with
sudo pacman -D --asexplicit gdm
Now I’m asking myself though if there are more system packages in my pacman -Qdt list in the first post which have been orphaned because of this ‘meta-packages’ thing. Packages like xorg-server-xvfb and wayland-protocols read as if they could be system packages. Let’s see if these are still orphaned once I’ve done the upgrade.
Thanks for confirming. I marked ‘gdm’ as explicitily installed (mentioned above) once I’ve read that.
Off topic
Just FYI, there is a worse case: Timeshift (with rsync tool) cannot save you if you or a malicious program accidentally delete or modify data on your system recursively while another backup disk is mounted. Backup and (rsync) snapshots could be gone.
From my understanding the orphan list must be seen with a grain of salt… it shows packages that you may not need, but i wouldn’t count on it.
Even Steam is under orphan’s listed on my system… but i use it daily.
I just go in pamac>install>orphans and show them by size and remove only the biggest packages, after investigation if i need them and ignore the rest.
I mean, who cares if there are small orphan’s on your drive, its more a handicap if they have bigger size because of the next update, ssd wear and ssd freespace because a ssd with a lot freespace is much faster than ssd which is filled to the rim.
When there is another handicap around orphan’s and why they should be removed, i would love to know more about it… my information’s are still limited around this topic.
I’m not sure if i understand your example… with recursively you talking about a repeated process? You mean like a filechange, while you created the timeshift snapshot? I always was thinking about this, thats why i don’t do anything around my system while the Snapshot created… it takes 1-2min anyways. Do you mean this?
Im actually create my Timeshift Snapshot’s on a external usb drive and switched it between my PC and Laptop with 2 seperated timeshift ext4 partitions.
Can you specify, what you mean with it? From my understanding,
timeshift just shows me which partitions are gonna be restored.
A third drive/disk would always be ignored if its not exactly included in the backup progress (which needs manual specific intervention anyways).
Atleast this was my experience specially on my PC with additional HDD’s/SSD’s connected and never showed up in the Timeshift restore progress (never listed for replacement). My mounted NVMe EXT4 (game drive) or my HDD EXT4 (Temp/Download Partition), was always excluded around the Timeshift process.
I never saw that my rsync snapshots are gone, but maybe i miss your exact point how this situation can be trigger. 
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