well, today i (partially) realized why my basic drivers don’t work: the preinstalled packages amdgpu and amdgpu-dkms seem to not work due to amdgpu-dkms being unconfigured. tried configuring it and got the same error. around about there my system stopped using even the iGPU and i had to uninstall some other drivers (thanks @[email protected] )
-S means sync, or to install/update a package
y means to update the local package db, so which packages are available and especially which version is newest
u means update the packages themselves
So -Sy would just get which newest packages are available, and then install eg. mesa version 6.9. However, mesa version 6.9 may depend on ligmalib 3.2. However, because you didn’t specify -u, ligmalib 3.1 is not updated to 3.2. And then you have a partial update.
Arch’s package system basically relies on all packages in all single points in time being compatible with each other. So if you look at the db now, all packages should have the correct versions of dependencies available. But if you mix different states, eg. update a few packages at 2:00 and some others at 17:00, that’s not given anymore