How often should I update?

[wintervoid]

Just want to figure out when I should generally do a deep update. I'm on kde plasma and i use binaries when possible so it can take anywhere between 15 minutes and a few hours for a full update. I'm mostly used to arch based distros where I could just update daily because pacman is fast but with compiling everything I'm not sure what the rule of thumb for updating is

[pingtoo]

I don't believe frequent update.

IMHO, it does not necessary bring much of good compare to what possibility of a update gone wrong that will cost you to fix it.

so do you usually examine each update what it will bring into your computer? using a dry run method.

Gentoo changes almost hourly (I am not saying you intent to do hourly update) so everyday perform an update would could be lots of thing.

IMO, check update with dry run (-pv) and only perform update when you know the change will benefit you. (mean, if you don't know why then don't update)

[grknight]

I would recommend at least monthly, with more frequently being fine, really up to you.

Longer than that, it can become difficult the more you wait depending on how things change.
As years go by, some conflicts may become nearly impossible to fathom for all but the most seasoned users.

[equaeghe]

I update daily, before I go to bed, so I can let things compile overnight if need be (firefox, qtwebengine,…). It doesn't cost much time (for me, all the work is done in the background by the machine). Just typing (well, Ctrl-R, typing a substring and then completion does the rest) the following:

Code: Select all

# eix-sync && emerge -DUvu @world
# etc-update
# emerge -c
# eix-test-obsolete
# portpeek -arq

and then acting on anything non-standard works well.

In make.conf I have

Code: Select all

EMERGE_DEFAULT_OPTS="\
        --ask \
        --keep-going
        --quiet-build \
        --misspell-suggestions=n \
        --with-bdeps=y \
        --autounmask=y \
        --autounmask-unrestricted-atoms=y
"
PORTAGE_NICENESS="15"

I never update if I need to get work done by some nearby deadline, but for the rest, I've noticed that small updates are way less of a hassle than larger ones. If anything happens (blockers, failed emerges, etc.) I just postpone until the weekend if I do not know how to deal with it from experience. Config file updates are something that I need to pay attention to, because over the years, a good deal have become customized, so frequent updates also help me avoid getting a bunch of those all at once.

I have a backup machine from 2011 that I keep updated just in case. I update that one every three weeks. More, and it becomes painful in terms of compile time and potential problems.

[pietinger]

Just want to figure out when I should generally do a deep update. [...] where I could just update daily [...]

First of all:

Welcome to Gentoo Forums!

I strongly agree with our developer @grknight that a world update should be performed at least once a month. Once a week is, of course, even better, and I’ve explained the reason for that here - IT security:
https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/User:Pieti ... ith_Gentoo ->
-> https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/User:Pieti ... mmendation

(See also: https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/User:Pieti ... protection )

Yes, anyone who really wants to update daily is welcome to do so, because it certainly won’t compromise security. So you could say: Anything from daily to once a month is recommended.

[Goverp]

My guess is that updating weekly or monthly results in the same total amount of work - most packages update cycles are longer than a month, so all that happens is you do 25% of the work 4 times or 100% of the work once. OK, it won't be exactly 25%, but the percentages will sum to 100. There is some extra overhead for running portage's analysis of the world tree to find updates, but that's usually fairly small compared to all the compilations resulting.

I guess if you go for a longer update period, you should watch for GLSA security fixes. I don't bother, as I update weekly, and hope that's often enough.

A long time ago, I updated monthly, but sometimes several problems that needed tweaks to USE flags, masking or package.env files would appear at once, making the update a pain. Doing it weekly means such issues are more likely to arrive separately, which makes it easier to sort them out. That may be down to me liking to take some of the more obscure options and leading-edge packages, such as Clang and LTO (almost) everywhere, mold linker, and so forth.

[NeddySeagoon]

wintervoid,

Between weekly and monthly is good.
If you have bleeding edge hardware, you may want to update the kernel almost every minor release to get the latest support for your hardware.

When you let it go for 6 months, it may get difficult.
After a year, you can learn things about gentoo you will learn no other way.

[pietinger]

wintervoid,

If you're curious to understand this comment:

[...] After a year, you can learn things about gentoo you will learn no other way.

... then check out this thread (and notice how many pages long it is):
viewtopic-t-1144020-highlight-.html

[jankom]

I do it once in every 2 - 3 months, and it is a long process. It gives me a chance to clean up my system, understand what is happening, check configuration changes, and do a full back up.
Yes, the January update gave me a big headache due to dovecot major change, but have learned a lot. Linux is one of my hobbies, and this forum is a friendly resource.

jankom

[figueroa]

I update the computer I use daily every morning. Doing so makes updates relatively small, and usually trouble free. This also keeps up with security updates almost as they occur, some of them being very important.

"emerge --sync" runs in the very early morning and I get a report of it along with the results of an "emerge -uDUp @world" by email which I see along with my first cup of coffee.

Once I sit down at the computer, it's a simple matter of running "emerge -uDUa @world" then double check the output, and if OK, let it run in the background till it's done as I go about my business. There is no need to watch it, so it doesn't mater if it runs for 10 minutes or 10 hours. Takes less than 5 minutes of my time and well worth it.

[Stefan999]

I have approximately 2000 packages, and I don't want to deal with the system regularly. I last performed a full update in January 2026, and another one just a few days ago (May 2026). It involved about 700 packages, roughly 30 hours of compiling, and no binaries. After some manual work, I'm now compiling 30 packages a second time.

Finally, I run `emerge --depclean` and then use this system again for several months. So far, this has always worked well. I sync several times a week and use glsa-check to uncover vulnerabilities. About once a month I have to update (or sometimes uninstall) a package.

[flexibeast]

I update the computer I use daily every morning. Doing so makes updates relatively small, and usually trouble free. This also keeps up with security updates almost as they occur, some of them being very important.

Likewise - i update daily, via a Bash function i've created for that purpose (although i've made changes to that function since i last updated that page).

This function tries to make sure i read News items, since they might be relevant to my setup. 'Big' packages, which in this context i define as those that take considerable resources and time to compile, get deferred to being done via an overnight cron job. (i use binary versions of browsers, so i get security updates for those without compilation.) And in make.conf, i've set PORTAGE_SCHEDULING_POLICY to idle so that compilation is done almost unnoticeably in the background while i'm doing other stuff. (Noting that "other stuff" usually doesn't include running things that tax memory and CPU usage, e.g. certain types of games.)

[dmpogo]

It kind of depends on what your machine is for

On my laptop, I update daily because I am kind of curious what's going on, and it is like taking a break from what I am doing. That is if I am not travelling, where I cannot take a risk to end
up with something broken.

On a server, I update once every half a year. It does not have much of fast paced developed user-level software, I cannot reboot it more frequently than once in a half a year at most, and cannot risk
doing something with system libraries that may make users code to fail compiling or not running (like, say, updating gcc, glibc, or python can).

Saying that I noticed some rules. For instance quite often updates that cause recompilation will be followed rather soon by update to that other package which will have to be compiled again.

For instance if I see an update to kde-frameworks/ , (that causes recompilation of some in kde-plasma) it is invariably that in few days there will be an update to kde-plasma, so I wait.
Similar frequent pairing - seeing icu wants to recompile libreoffice, I wait few days, skipping that.

[pjp]

I update daily for multiple reasons.

First, I have old hardware and don't want to wait for long periods of time for updates to finish.

Second, I also build binaries in a chroot on a daily basis that are only updated on the client on a weekly basis. If I didn't do that, updating the client would be more difficult to do with consistent (for convenience) timing.

Third, when I have previously waited a week or more, the updating experience (felt?) more time consuming and frustrating. Reviewing the output of what would be updated took more time because there was more to review. If there was something "inconvenient" in the output, I had to look into what it was and how to block it. The more things being updated at one time at least seemed to cause more work to resolve those conflicts / concerns. This was further amplified by my first issue regarding old hardware.

Fourth, I don't like surprises that force my attention *now*. Whether a news item warns me about an upcoming change, or I simply have a concern about something that would be updated if I allowed it, doing daily syncs buys me some time to address the concern. This is major factor that is closely related to the previous point.

One thing that has helped is having moved toward using as many Gentoo provided binaries and other -bin packages as I can. There are still some "big" packages that take a long time to build, but the number has reduced noticeably.

If I had newer / more capable hardware*, I could probably update once or twice per week, or maybe even every couple of weeks. That said, even if I didn't update over a 2 week period, I'd probably download a snapshot at the middle point of those two weeks; more if needed.

* Part of me would like to switch to a Pi or similar instead of a laptop, so I'd still have to resolve building binary packages. Or I'd have to throw in the towel and go with a common enough setup to not have to build anything "big."

[penguinomicon]

On any rolling release distro, the more often you update, the more stable it becomes. If only four packages updated, and something goes wrong, you can easily pinpoint the problem. If a hundred packages update, there are more likely to be interactions amongst them, which makes problems both more likely and less easy to isolate.

Also, if you're not in the habit of regular updates, then I guess it would be easy to just not have a habit at all. There's not much difference between "every few months" and "a few times per year" and then it feels like a fraught and tiresome chore instead of regular hygiene.

My habit is update at the end of the work week. If something goes wrong, I've got the weekend to fix it.

[Goverp]

FWIW, I installed openSUSE Tumbleweed on an aged desktop machine, and it updated a month ago.
This month's "rolling" updates: 2,000+ packages, 5.3 GB. Some roll.

[pjp]

FWIW, I installed openSUSE Tumbleweed on an aged desktop machine, and it updated a month ago.
This month's "rolling" updates: 2,000+ packages, 5.3 GB. Some roll.

Yikes. I've considered switching to one of the major binary distros. I wonder how much Gentoo would differ using only provided binaries.

[lyallp]

I update nightly, I have a cronjob script that does all the needful.
For those that don't update often, I have noticed 3 releases of kernel sources in 3 days, recently.
I assume AI Bug hunting has become quite productive.

In previous years, I had a VM of Gentoo which did not get any love for quite some time, it ended up not being updatable because ebuilds that bridged between what the VM was up to and what was Current in Gentoo, where no longer available.

In this scenario, a link to 'Olde Distfiles' was provided, which I also host at http://olde-distfiles.is.remotely-helpful.info/

[Hu]

In previous years, I had a VM of Gentoo which did not get any love for quite some time, it ended up not being updatable because ebuilds that bridged between what the VM was up to and what was Current in Gentoo, where no longer available.

In that situation, the git repository of Portage ebuilds can be used to retrieve the missing ebuilds. However, any system that is far enough behind to need that will likely need quite a bit of handholding, so it is not a trivial project, especially for someone not accustomed to making big jumps. I recommend users try to avoid getting that far behind.

[bstaletic]

I've tried daily updates as well as "can't be bothered" approach that lead to ~6 months periods of no updates.
Lucky for me, this past year was pretty uneventful regarding gentoo updates, or I might have ended up on the "help me" side of one of those long threads.
I do have a fairly slow CPU, so that overdue update ended up taking... approximately 2 days and now I am recompiling libreoffice again because of the python 3.14 migration.

Shorter update intervals => fewer minutes/hours spent with gentoo holding your CPU hostage,
Yes, you can tell portage not to take up all of your CPU resources.

FWIW, I installed openSUSE Tumbleweed on an aged desktop machine, and it updated a month ago.
This month's "rolling" updates: 2,000+ packages, 5.3 GB. Some roll.

I have not been following openSUSE in forever, but last time I checked people used to say that Tumbleweed "doesn't roll as much as it tumbles".
It used to (and, judging by your comment, still does) keep package versions stable, like a non-rolling distro, but when the "normal" openSUSE releases a new point release Tumbleweed dumps the repo contents and loads it up with new packages.

[Goverp]

It's possible I hit Tumbleweed at a bad time - the wave of AI-found security bugs means there's been a lot of churn, and things like KDE applications fix bugs in a complete refresh rather than a few localised updates.

[Asch]

Many countries have agencies responsible for issues related to cybersecurity. According to the Security Handbook, Australia is one of them and they have recommendations on when to update the system. If I understood correctly, Australian Cybersecurity Centre recommends updating no more than 48 hours after a critical CVE issue affecting one of your software components is found.


I'm not a lawyer, but agencies are giving more and more attention to cybersec, and there might come a time when such recommendations are not quite recommendations, but guidelines. Especially if we take into account the many data protection laws out there. Again, I'm not a lawyer, but I think not updating frequently could constitute negligence in a production server.

And it is much more difficult to update and manage servers, in contrast to desktops.



From my personal experience with experimental setups on my desktop, issues are infinitely more manageable if you update frequently (i.e., daily). This way you usually experience one issue at a time, can pinpoint more easily the cause and could mask a package or postpone its update until the issue is solved.

[pjp]

And it is much more difficult to update and manage servers, in contrast to desktops.

Most servers also are likely to benefit from not being exposed publicly. So that probably affords some response time flexibility. At least on IPv4 *rim shot*

[Spanik]

I try to do an -uvUD @world every 2 weeks. This gives something between 100 and 700 updates/rebuilds taking most of the night (Epyc 24 cores, 64GB). Mostly this goes fine but even then I have often to call for assistance on the forum. Qt, Python, poppler and a few other can make it hard to go through an update without having to change stuff (use, mask,...).