Hi, brand new linux noob and am having issues right off the bat.
I’ve just installed Garuda Dr460nized edition on my Legion laptop, fresh install (no dual boot), run the updater, installed a few apps and first thing I see is a little warning that tells me I need to merge pacdiff files and the file affected is mirrorlist.pacnew.
Do a little reading, get the general gist of what I’m supposed to do, then use the distro bundled software (Kompare) to merge all differences, save, reboot. BUT, the warning it still there, and now, when I go back into kompare, it tells me the two files are identical, plus there seem to be a bunch a graphical bugs now that weren’t there before I merged the files.
Very confused as to why this file, which just seems to be a list of various website mirrors, would cause graphical issues but like I said, I’m brand new to this, but determined to learn from my mistakes.
Can anyone explain what I’ve done wrong? I can’t seem to undo the changes now.
“I’m brand new to Linux, so I went straight to Arch.”
For the most part Garuda has a GUI for everything. It’s Arch on easy mode and it’s most excellent for new and seasoned users alike.
I tried it only because I wanted to give Linux gaming a try and I struggled to get any other distribution to work with my graphics card - I liked it so much I switched to it permanently for my work desktop as well.
Nothing wrong with it, did it the same way. Never regretted it after I saw what apk and dpkg can do to a system and what a hassle it is to upgrade major versions in debian.
sudo pacdiff.
If you leave the pacnew files there you will always get this message. Use pacdiff to review the differences and what to do about the files.
Omg. It was that easy! Thank you.
I know nothing about Garuda specifics but it seems you have forgot to delete the pacnew file after doing the mods to the mirror list, hence still getting a warning that a pacnew is present. The graphical bugs are probably unrelated to the pacnew issue.
Arch is a nightmare for this kind of thing. It basically assumes you have a graduate level understanding of unix-like operating systems.
I tell people Arch was made to harden Rsync because people only make backups they never actually use on all other distros.
Fedora is nice. The main noob distros are Mint and Fedora Workstation. Mint is based on Ubuntu which is based on Debian. So, Debian is where a lot of hardware support is done for the kernel. This is where drivers and new hardware are added. Debian has several versions for different purposes but the main thing it is known for are the long term support kernels. These are a kernel that is frozen where all supporting software is kept the same and mostly only security patches are added to these old kernels. These are supported for several years. This means you can write high level scripts cobbling a bunch of stuff together, put it online, and it will be safe in terms of any CVEs that come up against the kernel you’re running. This Long Term Support LTS is great for hacking around with hardware or running a server without requiring constant manual intervention. This server aspect is the reason for Ubuntu. They specialize in server LTS type stuff.
Fedora on the other hand is upstream of Red Hat. RH is like the second (IIRC) ever Linux distro. Much of the actual Linux kernel code is written and maintained by RH and many working on Fedora are also working for RH. RHEL is also handling much of the networking stuff. Fedora is basically like the beta branch for RHEL. It is not exactly 1:1, but much of what you can do on RHEL also works on Fedora. However, Fedora is usually on the bleeding edge with many firsts ahead of anywhere else and always updating packages that might break compatibility. Arch is like this too, or at least the edge options are available. The main difference is that Fedora is preconfigured with sane defaults. Arch is like Debian in that is is bare bones. I hated Arch. If you really want to configure stuff, Gentoo is far better about sane defaults and actually useful documentation including tutorial content. Arch is great for the kind of person that is capable of fully understanding and installing Gentoo, but needs a faster way than custom compiling most of the OS. Nothing about Arch is made for teaching you what you do not know. Arch does not do tutorial content. The wiki is a great resource, but reason it to learn in a tutorial way will end in frustration.
Nothing about distros in Linux is about teams or branding. Every distro exists for a reason. If you want true god-mode you run Linux From Scratch so that you are the distro. LFS rules them all.
Gentoo, for my first time install took 3 weeks. Just be aware. This is low average typical. Fedora takes 5 minutes and even comes with SELinux installed but set permissive by default. The Anaconda system (outside the kernel/bootloader) works on nearly any hardware. On any Debian based distro, most included packages in the distro package manager will be outdated to various degrees depending on how obscure the the thing is. You’ll need to manually add ppa’s that update the packages to the latest versions. With Fedora, you’ll break stuff from time to time. If you’re a dev that runs ancient stuff that no one supports, you run NIX as a distro, but that is another can of worms.
The mirrorlist is a configuration file listing servers that updates can get pulled in from.
When a package update is installed that contains a configuration file, it will not overwrite the old file but be installed with a pacnew extension so that you can merge the files (like you did). It will keep complaining at you until you remove the pacnew file, which is fine to do after you have merged successfully.
The graphical issues are probably due to something else that happened during the update.
