God damn it, Lesson learned

Issues & Assistance
1

I just discovered that CachyOS has its own tuned and tuned-ppd versions, so I switched to them because I believe they integrate sched-ext for better battery life. I decided to overwrite the default package versions with the CachyOS ones, and then I ended up doing the same for all the other .pacnew files as well.

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TL;DR: I overwrote the config files with the newer versions. I haven’t finished setting up Limine or GRUB for easy rollback yet, but I do have a snapshot available in case I need to roll back.

18 │ pre  │   │ Fri 08 May 2026 12:51:12 AM GMT │ root │ number  │ pacman --sync -- cachyos/tuned-cachy      
19 │ post │18 │ Fri 08 May 2026 12:51:13 AM GMT │ root │ number  │ tuned tuned-cachy                         
20 │ pre  │   │ Fri 08 May 2026 12:51:45 AM GMT │ root │ number  │ pacman --sync -- cachyos/tuned-cachy-ppd  
21 │ post │20 │ Fri 08 May 2026 12:51:46 AM GMT │ root │ number  │ tuned-cachy-ppd tuned-ppd

P.S.: I’m currently trying to use systemd-boot as the main bootloader and Limine only for rollbacks. The main issue I have with Limine is that, unlike systemd-boot, setting the timeout to 0 doesn’t allow interruption to access the Limine boot menu.

PS2: Can I rollback without rebooting ?

2

Pacnew files are for manually reviewing and merging by hand ([v]iew).

That is its very rare that you either blindly overwrite with or blindly delete them.

And beyond that sudo pacdiff is also not how we run pacdiff.

pacdiff -s

And if you have not set DIFFPROG anywhere and want it to be something other than vim -d, ex;

DIFFPROG=meld pacdiff -s
3

Overwriting /etc/pacman.conf with the pacnew will 100% break things. The others are likely equally ill-advised. If it was safe to blindly overwrite these files, pacnew would not exist, and installing/updating packages would simply replace them without asking.

You can find previous versions of these files in your snapshots, e.g.:
/.snapshots/ID/snapshot/etc/pacman.conf

Where ID is the first column in that snapper list output you posted. So 18, for example.

Rather than rolling back the whole system, you could just replace the files you overwrote with their previous snapshot versions, assuming nothing else is broken.

4

while one shouldn’t blindly delete them it’s far more often a reasonable choice than overwriting them…

If a new user is in learning mode “if in doubt, throw it out” is a better baseline than the opposite even if it’s still not correct.

When merging .pacnews one must understand what any changes are supposed to do before merging them.

5

… Too late. that snapshot has been deleted :frowning: I was trying setup limine and with snap-pac doing its thing, ended up replacing the snapshots.