• mlg@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    Sometimes I wish someone would make a an Arch box and come back to it years later to see the updates it has missed.

    But that’s assuming an Arch box would be reliable enough to stay alive that long lol.

    Always heard of 20+ year old bsd and debian machines chugging along with no issue.

    • Ephera@lemmy.ml
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      2 days ago

      It won’t rise much beyond that, since you only get one update per package. Whether it’s upgrading Firefox from version 120 to 121 or to version 130, it doesn’t change much in terms of download size, nor the number of updates.

      At least, I assume, Arch doesn’t do differential updates. On some of the slower-moving distributions, they only make you download the actual changes to the files within the packages. In that case, jumping to 121 vs. 130 would make more of a difference.

      If you do want lots of package updates, you need lots of packages. The texlive-full package is always a fun one in that regard…

      • superkret@feddit.org
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        2 days ago

        Yes, you can. You can even update Arch after a year. But you’ll have to do a few more steps than just pacman -Syu

    • Tekhne@sh.itjust.works
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      2 days ago

      I had that on a physical machine! It broke hardcore lol I had to reinstall the OS after trying to update

    • nous@programming.dev
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      1 day ago

      I have updated arch systems that had not been powered on for years before. It was fine. No issues what so ever. Arch is not some flaky distro that breaks if you look away for a minute. My main system has had had the same install for over 5 years now and I regularly forget to update it for months at a time. Again, no issues.

      • kautau@lemmy.world
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        1 day ago

        Yeah really the biggest issue I could see is pacman’s keyring being so out of date that it has to be manually refreshed with a new one