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Each time the Arch update breaks, I'll eat a snack.
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this post was submitted on 27 Apr 2026
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I'd have 2 snacks, over 10 years....
:( and that was my fault both times because I didn't read the announcement of required actions before I ran the update
Read the what now?
Arch has a news feed where it describes things that require manual intervention when upgrading: https://archlinux.org/ (You are informed at arch install that you have to read it before upgrading.)
What an awesome and amazing and definitely not annoying system. Automating that to show you only what you need based on the packages you have installed when you do the update would be so ridiculous. I’m glad it’s just a blog.
Arch isn't for normal people.
we dont talk about normies here
You're not the first to be annoyed by that: https://github.com/bradford-smith94/informant
Welcome to Gentoo.
Notes with recommended user actions are provided per package after every update. Mostly to let you know about optional packages and tell you how to enable optional auto start for some things.
For things that need even more attention, there is a system that tracks read/unread news that also only show up when your system needs it.
There are messages with generic recommendations and post upgrade/post install scripts. They are rarely used because it goes against arch's principles to run some (maybe fragile) script on your system. Reading news once a week/month before upgrade isn't that inconvenient.
It's actually helpful that it's not filtered, because otherwise, I would only see a new post maybe once every 2 years, and would therefore not know if it still works, and feel lonely.
the announcement of required actions. it's the update news you get when you update.
The homepage of archlinux.org hosts announcements for required manual interventions
meanwhile I update NixOS like once a month and it always seems some maintainer has pushed a broken dependency for something and thus borks my entire rebuild. Last month it was some dependency for Krita, This month it's some dependency for Lutris.
I need to get off NixOS. while it makes doing hard things easy, it's infuriating when the easy things break and break often. But It's like some abusive relationship, I want to leave NixOS but i'm so god damn addicted/in love with it and I always end up going back.
I've been using arch (Cachyos) for almost a year and the single time I had to roll back was because I didn't read the notes, just ran the update. Totally my fault. Used the btrfs snapshot roll back and everything was fine.
Additionally, A update can ship a new stock version of a config that has fancy new options and some deleted ones, and your modifications to it in
/etccan conflict.Arch can either backup your version as
.pacsaveor install the updated file as.pacnew. It's your task to merge your modifications to the updated configs, and these files can slowly pile-up over time until something breaks.