Time Machine for Arch Linux


I’ve been using Arch Linux for some years, and it’s still my favorite Linux distribution. The feature that distinguished Arch from others is its rolling release which means there’s no such a thing called version in Arch. Using latest packages in Arch is the norm.

However living on the edge means it’s not quite safe. After I installed a bunch of updates including Gnome Shell 3.28, my XPS 15 laptop had trouble to bring up external monitor. It even froze when I plug the HDMI in hot.

I tried to revert some packages like

sudo pacman -U /var/cache/packman/pkg/some-package-1.0.xx.pkg.tar.xz

But it didn’t solve the problem because there were hundreds of packages in last update.

Almost going to panic, I found this instruction to revert all packages to a snapshot in time. And it actually worked wonders for me.

Only surprise is when downgrading packages, I saw errors like

 package-name: /path/to/package-file exists in filesystem

Guess it’s a safe guarding mechanism of pacman but since I know what I was doing so I simply deleted those files. The final command is

sudo pacman -Syyuu

which will bring Arch Linux back to a point of time and the issue has been fixed 🙂

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