or months🤷

I was going to ask why then again I thought to myself why not? And couldn't find a good answer. You do your thing my horny internet friend. I'm sorry for interrupting, I'll take my leave... ᕕ(ᐛ)ᕗ

Larger than my entire root partition (currently at 21GB), but that's because I made the fatal mistake to limit the partition to 25GB when I set it up. So I have to keep it trim, and I envy OP deep down.

That's like what, one and a half instances of Electron

there are a lot of things that i only used once, or that are duplicate in case something breakes lol

Akchooly it's 22.3 GiB.

lol mine is like 76GB. have been running the same install for going on 9 years now

I probably got something like that. I am not really into minimal installs, kde-applications-meta and plasma-meta is what I go with. Absolutely everything.

I just wish I could safely use KDE Discover for updates. That's probably what would work with "apply updates on reboot", which sounds like the safest option. But for some reason packagekit-qt6 which would (probably) make this possible is not recommended to use.

Preferably I'd go with something like KDE Neon or Kubuntu. I just really like KDE. But there's just no sweet spot for me. Arch gives me new packages with all the bugs. Each update feels scary, what will I discover. Based on my Timeshift notes, last point without major bugs was 31st of October. Something like Linux Mint was stable, but I was missing some newer packages, and even drivers when my laptop was new. And major version upgrades also feel scary. Although, I don't even know how they work. This is where Arch makes more sense to me. Linux as desktop OS is really just a huge bunch of packages working together, and they slowly get updated. When packaged into an entire OS, how do you even define a version?

Anytime Factorio gets an update, þe entire game downloads again, and it ain't small.

I’m fairly new to arch what does the -Scc flag do?

paccache can be configured to keep x amount of old packages and can be added as a pacman hook, so you never need to run that yourself!

Patching means rebuilding. And packagers don't really publish diffs. So it's use all your bandwidth instead!

This doesn't work too well for rolling releases, because users will quickly get several version jumps behind.

For example, let's say libbanana is currently at version 1.2.1, but then releases 1.2.2, which you ship as a distro right away, but then a few days later, they've already released 1.2.3, which you ship, too.
Now Agnes comes home at the weekend and runs package updates on her system, which is still on libbanana v1.2.1. At that point, she would need the diffs 1.2.1→1.2.2 and then 1.2.2→1.2.3 separately, which may have overlaps in which files changed.

In principle, you could additionally provide the diff 1.2.1→1.2.3, but if Greg updates only every other weekend, and libbanana celebrates the 1.3.0 release by then, then you will also need the diffs 1.2.1→1.3.0, 1.2.2→1.3.0 and 1.2.3→1.3.0. So, this strategy quickly explodes with the number of different diffs you might need.

At that point, just not bothering with diffs and making users always download the new package version in full is generally preferred.

Shouldn't it be more efficient to download only the changes and patch the existing files?

As people mentioned, that becomes problematic with a distro like arch. You could easily be jumping 5-6 versions with an update, with some more busy packages and updating less frequently. This means you need to go through the diffs in order, and you need to actually keep those diffs available.

This actually poses two issues, and the first one is that software usually isn't built for this kind of binary stability - anything compiled/autogenerated might change a lot with a small source change, and even just compressing data files will mess it up. Because of that, a diff/delta might end up not saving much space, and going through multiple of them could end up bigger than just a direct download of the files.

And the second issue is, mirrors - mirrors need to store and provide a lot of data, and they're not controlled by the distribution. Presumably to save on space, they quickly remove older package versions - and when I say older, I mean potentially less than a week old. In order for diffs/deltas to work, you'd need the mirrors to not only store the full package files they already do (for any new installs), but now also store deltas for N days back, and they'd only be useful to people who update more often than every N days.

No, that's not how compiling works. And yes, 6GB is wild. If I don't patch in a month, the download might be 2GB and the net will still be smaller.

I don't think I could get close to my Windows installation even if I installed literally every single package..