> Haven't used yay or other aur helpers so far.
> Have used Yaourt on Arch in the far past,
Yaourt is an aur helper?
> Maybe that's why my systems run so stable?
Sorry?
>>> I know my ways around Arch
Forgive me, you said this earlier and I think I misunderstood. What does this mean exactly? How long have you been using Arch? Or rather, have you used Arch the actual distro or only Arch based distros?
I guess I'm asking, have you installed the vanilla distro? Are you familiar with things like systemd-boot, partitioning, arch-chroot, mkinitcpio, and all that?
I have used plain Arch in the past, for several years, no derivatives.
At that time there existed an AUR-helper called Yaourt, which I made heavy use of. But often in haste, sloppy. Which lead to many unnecessary clean-up actions, but no loss of system. Meanwhile I had to use other stuff, so no Arch for a while. When the need for using other stuff was gone I considered several options, like Gentoo, but naa, I don't wanna compile anymore!1!! (Yes, Yes, I know they serve binpkgs now, but would they have my preferred USE-flags?) Maybe Debian, which can be fucking fast when run in RAM like Antix, but I had that for a while, and while it's usable, Debian as such is bizarre.
Anything Redhat? No thanks. SuSe? Same. So I came across CachyOS, and continued to use that, from the first "test-installation" running to this day, because it works for me, like I wrote before. Like a dream come true.
Remembering my experiences with Yaourt I abstained from using the AUR. And that worked very well for me, so far. Also the Gentoo-like 'ricing' comes for free with their heavily optimized binary packages, without compromising stability.
> I guess I'm asking, have you installed the vanilla distro? Are you familiar with things like systemd-boot, partitioning, arch-chroot, mkinitcpio, and all that?
Yes.
Are we clear now?
Edit: I'm so overconfident I'm even considering disabling the pacman-hooks into BTRFS-snapshots, because I never needed them.
No rollback necessary, ever, so far. Same goes for pacman cache.
After every -Syu follows an immediate -Scc.
I've used Yaourt too. Things are a lot better these days. Yay is the standard. But I think the biggest help of helpers is updating.
Yes, we're clear now, but are you surprised by my hesitation? Because having that experience would imply you've had a lot of experience compiling things the long way. Running makepkg -si isn't that complicated. It's as easy as it gets. There's no make, no configure, no cmake, no determining the dependencies yourself and installing those yourself too. I don't get the issue. Take too long? Not happen automatically?
> I'm so overconfident I'm even considering disabling the pacman-hooks into BTRFS-snapshots, because I never needed them.
lol yeah I'm sure they're not needed. Not hard to recover usually and yeah I agree, things are stable these days. I can't remember the last time I needed to chroot (other than an nspawn). I only snapshot data I care about these days and it's usually backed up remotely too. I've learned my lesson the hard way too many times lol.
# /etc/systemd/system/pacman_auto_update.timer
[Unit]
Description=Update automatically because ain't nobody got time for that
Documentation=man:pacman(8)
[Timer]
OnCalendar=weekly
Persistent=true
# Optionally wake system up to upgrade
#WakeSystem=true
[Install]
WantedBy=timers.target
After=network-online.target
# /etc/systemd/system/pacman_auto_update.service
[Unit]
Description=Update automatically because ain't nobody got time for that
Documentation=man:pacman(8)
[Service]
Type=simple
ExecStart=/usr/bin/pacman -Syu --noconfirm
Joking aside, I do use a version of this except I just run -Sy and I do it daily. I find it does help speed things up.
> Gimme binaries
Definitely not going to happen on Arch and this runs completely counter to what you claimed to like about CachyOS. Distributing binaries is not going to result in a very optimal system... Which is what caused those red flags to be raised in the first place
>>> After every -Syu follows an immediate -Scc
Btw, I don't suggest doing this. If an update breaks your system then you don't have the versions cached to roll back to. I mean you can download again but your cache gives you a good hint at what did in fact work.
I'm perfectly at ease with initiating them manually, as I see fit.
For me that means automatically tracking dependencies of things like USE-flags in Gentoo's Portage, or Exherbo's Paludis.
And the possibly resulting conflicts. Arch and its makepkg and the stuff in the AUR has simply no provisions(that I'm aware of) for that. It's all manual, IMO. AUR-helper, or not.
> Definitely not going to happen on Arch and this runs completely counter to what you claimed to like about CachyOS. Distributing binaries is not going to result in a very optimal system... Which is what caused those red flags to be raised in the first place
Says you. I counter that with my years long experience(on CachyOS), limited to the stuff they DO deliver as binary. Obviously carefully tested by people who really know what they do, on much faster systems than I have, before delivery to the general public.
> Btw, I don't suggest doing this. If an update breaks your system then you don't have the versions cached to roll back to. I mean you can download again but your cache gives you a good hint at what did in fact work.
Never needed it, neither on plain Arch in the far past, nor the two years of CachyOS now. Should something bad happen I can boot some rescue-image from whereever, and fix it that way. It's just a waste of space.
Edit: Please don't suggest Nix(OS) or Guix. They give a shit about optimization in the name of 'reproducible builds', and go for the lowest common denominator because of that. Which is understandable, given their goals. But they are unaligned with mine.
Ho-hum, so I gave this yay-thing a try, as a binary, out of CachyOS repos, and let it run an outstanding update of 77 packages, mostly new Plasma/KDE to 6.5.4 from 6.5.3. It even discovered some things which I must have installed manually via makepkg from the AUR, mainly i7z(probably during discovery, when the system(s) were 'new' to me), some microsoft fonts, and even Hexchat, which I've forgotten about, because I switched to KVirc when Hexchat began to crash. It doesn't do that anymore, at least not during autoconnect to EFNET & Libera Chat. Didn't test further. Did reboot with the usual insane brazenness of kill -9ing Firefox from within htop beforehand, to have it reliably restart my session, with all its windows and tabs in there. Yay -Scc, erasing all btrfs-snapshots, and so on.
Closing all other apps, terms, filemanagers. Klicking restart. Hands off. Very quiet and fast boot. Sddm appears. Login. Plasma is there. FF reloads as it should. Everything else works. Still ultra-smooth.
So Yay!?
(Squeekily screaming: *Oh my gawd!1!! Nao my (almost) pristine binary system iz tainted!1!!*)
Edit: Hrrm. When Hexchat began to crash... So I've told shit about no app ever crashing. But that was a general problem on Distros which updated the underlying substrate faster than others, IIRC.
It was just 'bitrotten'.
Very annoying at the time because I've been used to it since a long time, and had it heavily customized and themed, but (binary!) KVirc came to the rescue, so I've forgotten about that. Sorry.
Yes, exactly :-)
Haven't used yay or other aur helpers so far. Maybe that's why my systems run so stable?
Should maybe look into it.
Have used Yaourt on Arch in the far past, with...errm...varying success ;->