When a new configuration file gets installed, it won’t overwrite yours. It installs it beside it as filename.pacnew. You have to manually bring over the changes, making sure they don’t conflict with your own.
The good news is, this can be very easy to do with tools out there meant for this.
This is the quick run down of what most people just need to know:
Meld is a program just to compare two files.
(I’ve always just used
vim -d/vimdiff, which is the Arch default. But I would not recommend this!) So many people use the GUI program:meld.
As this is new for you, just install meld: sudo -S meld. Try it out. Don’t even use sudo pacdiff until you understand exactly what meld is and does.
Except you can run:
pacdiff -o
pacdiff --output
This shows you what pacnew files you need to deal with.
No sudo needed, this will list all the pacnew files you need to deal with, you will have a lot.
But you could copy one of the files from above, say:
/etc/default/grub.pacnew
Your actual config is without the .pacnew at the end:
/etc/default/grub
If you copied these two files to your Documents, you could load them both in Meld to see how it works.
After dealing with the changes, copying that file back to /etc/default, and deleting the original pacnew file is one manual way to deal with that particular pacnew.
Once you are comfortable there, pacdiff has ways to make this quicker.