Strit

If you got it second hand, could it be a defective touchpad?

I watch Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney on my Ubuntu laptop on Firefox all the time. I have a laptop setup in front of my treadmill just to watch shows while I walk.

Are you watching in regular 1080p or above, or the gimped 720p most DRM services impose on the Linux platform?

If it’s 1080p+, how? If it’s 720p, that’s not really acceptable to most people.

I think the point of OP is that Streaming services don’t care about Linux and downright gimps them, so the apps will “look better”. Casual users won’t know or care about the technical reasons.

And where does it download the newly installed package from? It’s not in your cache, because you haven’t had it installed before and the remote server only has the newest version.

The remote server only has the latest version of the package, and the latest version is always built against the dependencies on the remote server. So if you didn’t update the database, then your pacman -S command will fail, because it can’t find the package version on the remote server. So you did not install anything.

No, pacman -S package is safe. Because the package list is not updated this way, and therefore the system is not updated and nothing else is affected. New packages can be installed with this command, perfectly okay. That is in the spirit of Archlinux.

If the package is not in your cache, it needs to download it from the remote server first. The version on the remote server is built against the dependencies on the remote server. So if your local dependency is older, it will be a partial update!

But -S package is not upgrading the package. Installing with that command is supported. That is NOT a partial upgrade of the system. -Sy package is considered a partial upgrade, because that command updates the package list.

I disagree. The -S flag stands for “sync”, which means sync the local version with the remote version. So if there is no local version it just installs the remote version. This is still a partial update, because any dependencies it might have, that you already have installed, might be the wrong version compared to the one the newly installed package expects.

pacman -S should be discouraged because of this. The correct one is pacman -Syu for installing new packages.

Another codec, that will take a decade to get widespread adoption and hardware compatability. /sigh