I tried updating using the pamac-manager GUI. I had several issues due to mirrrors, so I had to change my mirrors (again).
Then things started downloading well. Suddenly, the pamac-manager GUI crashed (or just disappeared. However, I noticed it was still downloading the files in the background. I left it downloading.
After a while, it finished downloading everything. I tried using my computer for basic stuff, but it was slow. Given pamac-manager had crashed, and given this system had several weeks of uptime, I decided to restart. I went to KDE→Restart to tell the system to restart.
After restarting, GRUB couldn’t find the kernel. The entry was there in the GRUB menu, but the kernel files were nowhere to be found. After searching for this (common) issue, it seems I rebooted the computer in the middle of a system software update, and this left the system unbootable. Oh no!
I used a bootable USB drive to launch a basic recovery shell, from which I chroot-ed into my system. I ran pacman -Syu and it complained about /var/lib/pacman/local/wine-10.7-1/desc not being found. Regardless of that, it continued installing a handful of extra packages. Then I had to manually use mhwd-kernel to list my kernels and ask it to reinstall the linux66 kernel. Then, just to be sure, I also ran update-grub.
I checked /boot/grub/grub.cfg and indeed the entry is in there. Time to reboot back into my main system.
Afterwards, I had to delete /var/lib/pacman/local/wine-10.7-1/ and then pacman -S --dbonly wine. Afterwards, things seem to be working fine, or fine enough.
TL;DR: pamac-manager GUI crashes, the system continues updating giving ZERO feedback to the user, and then things break.
Suggestions:
- pamac-manager should not crash.
- In case it crashes, it should recover from it.
- In case it crashes, it should probably/maybe abort the background update.
- If the user re-launches the GUI after it has crashed, it should query background processes to figure out an update is already in progress and it should give feedback to the user.
- If rebooting a machine during an update causes the system to become unbootable… Maybe the update should be more resilient and more atomic. It should survive an interruption. It is a common problem, and it shouldn’t be a problem.
Mod edit:- Example syntax corrected. It is recommended to use only one “y” in the pacman command, like so: sudo pacman -Syu, unless specifically directed otherwise.