How Often Should You Update Arch Linux?

Arch Linux isn't that complex to use but it can be kind of confusing to decide how often you should update your system, once a day, once a week, once a year, let's discuss it.

==========Support The Channel==========

=========Video Platforms==========

==========Social Media==========

==========Credits==========
🎨 Channel Art:
All my art has was created by Supercozman

🎵 Ending music

#ArchLinux #Linux #RollingRelease #Manjaro #EndeavourLinux

DISCLOSURE: Wherever possible I use referral links, which means if you click one of the links in this video or description and make a purchase I may receive a small commission or other compensation.

[xzaratulx]

Compared to Windows, updating in Linux is actually nice and fun. It happens when I want it to, doesnt need hours and doesnt restart during it 😀
Once a week is fine, just never ever do selected partial updates out of conveniance/download size. (you need to follow through)

[emperorarasaka]

always update arch once your backup is done, never before

[KC_rocka]

After doing a lot of distro hopping I was previously happy with Fedora KDE but the new release (36) had some problems for me so I recently switched to EndeavourOS KDE. I was a little worried about something breaking because people say rolling release distros are unstable but I've had no problems at all, it's been rock solid for me so far and lightning fast, much snappier than anything else I've tried and gaming performance has been amazing too. I haven't had to keep adding repositories to get all the software I want and possibly breaking something on an update, because everything has either been in the official Arch repositories or the AUR, I have been updating daily because I've been installating the software I need and doing some tinkering to set it up how I want it but now I can probably update once a week. EndeavourOS has been the best Linux experience for me.

[SinfulSam]

I'll usually run pacman -Syu about 10 times a day.

[lieftheshinigami]

i use an i3block that shows me the amount of updates available for my system. I usually update my system around the time I get around 100-200 packages on average. On the event that something like a huge security flaw is discovered and patched, I'll updated immediately after I hear about said vulnerability, but typically I just wait until I find it has enough updates to warrant a system update

[xA]

I manually initiate update checks once each month, if I remember, for Artix Linux. I have never experienced an issue during the interim although the web browser (LibreWolf and Brave) are the only applications which could possibly represent a security risk; everything else is typically command-line or terminal-based applications not accessing anything outside of the internal network.

[Az]

I pretty much agree 1 a day to 1 a month seems like a reasonable range of update timings

[gamerking]

An update once every week is the best in my opinion, makes arch unbreakable imo!

[rhekman]

I've been an Arch user since about 2015. Over the years, I've settled on basically a weekly schedule.
I've turned off all the auto update notifications (gnome software, pacaur, etc), then just manually run yay -Syu and flatpak update when I have time to babysit, then reboot right away when done.
There are two exceptions to my schedule - firefox and gnome. In the case of firefox, it's on pacman's ignore list, and doesn't get updated until there's a point release on top of a major version. In the case of gnome, all updates get put on hold about a month, basically until my critical extensions are updated, sometimes until there's also a point release.

[mskiptr]

I usually update about once a week. If I'm really busy I may delay it to like a month at max.

I've settled for this time interval (for Arch) because that's about how long it takes for many mirrors to start deleting older packages. And if I can't wait+reboot right now but really need to install something that isn't available on mirrors anymore, I'll do -Sy, install, finish whatever was that important and do the proper update as soon as I can

[lostindesolation]

I update my arch system at home on a monthly basis. I used to update more frequently in the past, but realized I want some extra time in case something breaks.
At work I update weekly per company policy. It's a much leaner system than my quite bloated home system so it works out fine.
I do not automate updates, but I have reminders set.

[entelin]

If there is no distinction between security updates and general updates then practically speaking your update rate should be very high. This highlights some very fundamental issues with rolling release distros. Most windows systems will check for updates every day, but they are generally limited in scope and feature updates are pushed relatively infrequently. The same is true on the major distros. I genuinely don't think fully rolling releases are suitable for normal daily driving, and thats coming from someone that used gentoo for 8 years or so and a couple on arch. They are good for learning, but bad for stability and arch actually wipes past kernels and their modules on update which will break the running system in various ways. Updates should be automated and expected not to break your system, even if you don't reboot right away.

[MOOBBreezy]

I update about 2-3 times a day tbh lol. I have an update indicator that tells me how many updates are available every 3 hours, and when I click it, it just starts the update.

[StarlordStavanger]

I have roughly 1400 packages on my EndeavourOS Gnome install, I update twice a day, in the morning and evening. Been doing that for the last year, no major issues to really speak of aside from pac new/save files and some other things require manual intervention from time to time. Overall, this approach works best for me, I like being up to date and I also like finding any bugs to report to upstream, so for those two reasons is why I update daily.

[DMSBrian]

A nice solution is having a systemd timer that refreshes the mirrors, reinstalls keyring and updates pacman and AUR every week or month or so. The only issue with this is that there's a potential for a bad update to break your system when you're doing some very important work under time pressure. So ideally you'd actually have it ask you to update instead, basically as a reminder you can then disable or postpone, is there any package that provides this perhaps?

[yttrium_]

Wdym setting up a script to do sudo pacman -Syu every minute is too much?

[Breigner]

I'm running arch and basically I update every day.
I'm a dev so I kinda want to be able to use the latest libraries and or latest versions of my IDEs because lately the jetbrains suite gets some nice improvements.
So for me it makes sense to update once a day on my desktop but on my old laptop that I use as a server I do it ever so often and it's like around once a month.
Then for my current laptop that I don't even use that much since I work from home, well the updates are made whenever I turn it on (which can be a fairly long time) but I try to update it once month still

[eroot]

On Gentoo I tend to synchronize and update when I want to install something. Updates themselves its once in few days. More often after major profile update as at this time there might be more updates for newly found issues.

[kendarr]

I usually do it in a couple of days or a week, if I'm going to do something like install the virtual machine manager I'll update and so on, if some package seems broken I'll update, been using arch for maybe 3 weeks and had no issues.

[mfThump]

wait you should actually run pacman -Syu ? I thought neofetch was enough :)