Updating Arch Linux

I run arch linux (btw) on my desktop computer. The arch package manager is called pacman, which generally works pretty well but has a few rough edges when it comes to doing large system updates. The pacman command for updating all packages is

This works fine for small, frequent updates, but I tend to neglect updating anything until I absolutely have to (usually when something breaks). When doing large, infrequent updates, something almost always prevents pacman from succeeding, and it's usually keychain related. When these issues occur you will see an error message about failing to verify packages, and usually a prompt asking if you want to delete corrupted packages.

For whatever reason, pacman does not sync the package keyring first, before attempting to update all other packages. You can force the correct order manually with

Sometimes even this is not sufficient to resolve key issues, in which case the nuclear option of completely resetting all the keys may be necessary.

So far these two tricks have been sufficient for resolving my problems with infrequent updates.