ARCH LINUX UPDATE WOES

Arch Linux is one of the most up-to-date Linux distributions out there, and no doubt one of the most enigmatic with all of the Snaps vs. Flatpak arguments going on in the Linux world today. Ubuntu no longer compiles Chromium to be packaged on apt repositories anymore. For this piece of software your choices are limited to a snap package. In direct opposition with this, Linux Mint have decided to not allow Snapd or Chromium to be installed on their system through apt by default, but rather give users documentation links on how to go about compiling or installing Chromium through some other means on their systems instead. While this can be annoying, there is Arch Linux which still gives users a pre-compiled and easily installable version from their repos. Arch Linux is also fast and very privacy conscious as there is no software preloaded to track users, nor is there any other software than what the user might want on his or her system. While Arch Linux isn’t for beginners, there are a ton of Arch-based distributions and scripts available to automate much of the install and build process. ArcoLinux in particular is a wonderful distribution based on Arch which incorporates it’s developer’s own repositories and also pulls in packages from the AUR. Sometimes when installing these packages, or updating in general, one might run into a series of snags upon completion of downloading the relevant packages. These such snags might include: Error message stating that a file already exists on the system which conflicts with another package being downloaded (and these are usually safe to delete because the package probably provides the same function and the file isn’t owned by any other package currently on the system anyway.), Mirrors are out of date (Which can easily be rectified by running a script called reflector, more on that in a bit.), and last but not least, out of date keys. Arch uses keyrings much in a similar way Ubuntu would use them, however, Ubuntu seems to update those when installing other system-wide updates as they are never much of a problem for new users coming to Linux. Arch Linux on the other hand, has no way of automatically syncing these keys in the background, it’s left up to the user. Arch Linux is easy to understand once you get going, but getting through these hurtles is a real hastle. Luckily, in ArcoLinux, Reflector is ran almost continuously either every day or when one boots up the machine if enabled via Systemd service. To manually sort out these issues, however, a user would have to be semi-familiar with the terminal. In my own scripts I have a plethora of commands listed which do this work for you. Unfortunately, as there are now two repositories for these scripts, one will have to know where to find them. Also, it is a bit of good practice if you are running Arch Linux, to learn more about the system for yourself. I will leave a link to my scripts on here, but even they don’t account for such errors as files that already exist on the system. To combat this, one has to be there for the initial update process. This can hinder both terminal and graphical package management, so removing the file in question is paramount to successfully updating the system. Reading terminal output is important for this step. These files usually have a dot so on the end of them and to remove them, one has to remove the entire path to the file as listed in the terminal. Once complete, the downloaded packages can then be quickly installed. If you don’t update an iso or an installed system for months, these can sometimes come in three’s. As for the key issues, Arch Linux uses step-by-step commands in order to update, refresh, and sync keys in the init. Keys are what are used to validate software in repositories. If the software in a given repository has a valid key signature, the system will automatically accept the software. Key issues aren’t just a regular repo problem, but also are important when installing AUR packages as well.

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