I did have to go through with a clean install, in the end. I got the task bar up and running and the desktop environment set up properly, but my second display kept glitching. Rather than check every package and dependency, a clean reinstall got my OS up and running right away, and it took a couple hours at most to get it set up 90% of the way I had it before, if not better.
I set up a proper snapshot using the Snapper GUI (at least I believe I have, will have to test it out at some point). So I should be set if anything happens, and I’m now saving extra snapshots on a timeline automatically (though how much space these take up seems negligible, I have it set to only take a snapshot of the default folders it includes, I hope that’s good enough - most of the tutorials for it ran off the terminal rather than the GUI so it was a little hard for me to parse).
I’ll be trying this out later today to see if this gets vlc set up properly. Just to verify, I should run a
sudo pacman -Syu vlc vlc-plugins-all
To make sure I install vlc and all it’s plugins after a full system upgrade, correct?
This command will properly sync/refresh/upgrade as well as install the listed packages. pacman -Syu is the recommended way to update and install new packages.
Can I use the tool arch-update safely? It’s been upgrading things for me for a short while and my OS is still going strong. Tried to overwrite some Cachy mirrorlists incorrectly with blank pacnew files at first, but Grok was able to restore them. I’ve since reinstalled to try different boot loaders and skipped using the mirrorlist pacnew files. Aside from that, it doesn’t really prompt me about any pacnew files.
Winded way of saying I still don’t really understand how arch-update (or Arch in general) works.
CachyOS won’t bloat your system. It is up to you to explore “CachyOS Hello” app and install / activate it from there. Even the routine is kida broken because “Cachy update activated” shows itself unticked, even you ticked it before. But you should see / have the program in your task bar if you activated it.
I don’t see any benefit in enabling this tool; it’s more of a nuisance than anything else. We all know that practically every day there’s at least one update released for some software or system tool. If I want to check for updates, I simply type checkupdates in the terminal. And if I need to install something, I’ll just run an update anyway, either with sudo pacman -Syu or by using the paru command (it is a wrapper for pacman and AUR).
Thanks for the info! I do like that about Cachy tbh, never seen cleaner net logs. But as a retired long time Windows user, I still prefer some level of convenience. I can work with the terminal and all, but prefer not to for repetitive tasks. Cachy-update has been running pretty good for me so far, so I’ll stick with it for now. If my system implodes, I’ll regroup and try your approach for a startup script or something.
It’s all a matter of taste. However, I didn’t mention scripts at all. But maybe you mean the scripts in the ChachyOS Hello app. The beauty of Linux, but often confusing for newbies, is that almost everything is selectable. Starting with the choice of boot-loader and file systems, nothing is really fixed.
I mean like writing those commands into a shell script so I don’t have to rewrite them, I’m lazy lol. I could add the script to autostart after that and open it with the terminal on startup.
And I love and hate that about Linux. It’s too much choice sometimes, but once everything is together just the way I want it, definitely a bit of pride. Pacnew files annoy me the most with that though, like just update the damn program, lol.
Funnily enough, my install of CachyOS came with Haruna and it’s been working just fine!
Also, funny but makes me feel foolish: turns out that I was just trying to read the videos off my NTFS drive that I manage with my Windows 10 install I keep on my dual booot setup, and I didn’t have the right permissions. So now I’ve set up an exFat disk that I’ve been using to ferry data back and forth through the OSs and it’s been working without a hitch.
I love that Linux works without a hitch when set-up right, but getting that set up is a learning experience, lol. I’m also 100% sure there’s an easier way to do this than my setup, or at least just to get the NTFS disk to mount without compatibility issues, but this just seemed simpler to me. So, yay, Linux.