Arch Linux 6.15.5 upgrade fail
Thursday, July 31. 2025
On my Arch, I was doing the basic update with pacman -Syu. There was an announcement on linux-6.15.5.arch1-1. Nice!
Aaaaaand it failed. 
(75/75) checking for file conflicts [####################] 100%
error: failed to commit transaction (conflicting files)
linux-firmware-nvidia: /usr/lib/firmware/nvidia/ad103 exists in filesystem
linux-firmware-nvidia: /usr/lib/firmware/nvidia/ad104 exists in filesystem
linux-firmware-nvidia: /usr/lib/firmware/nvidia/ad106 exists in filesystem
linux-firmware-nvidia: /usr/lib/firmware/nvidia/ad107 exists in filesystem
Errors occurred, no packages were upgraded.
Oh. How unfortunate, that. How to get past that obstacle? I tried all kinds of pacman -S --overwrite "*" linux-firmware-nvidia and such, but kept failing. I was just getting error messages spat at me. That's a weird package as it contains number of subpackages, which in reality don't exist at all. Confusing!
The winning sequence was to first let the thing go pacman --remove linux-firmware and follow that with install pacman -S linux-firmware.
Before: Linux version 6.14.4-arch1-2
A reboot later: Linux version 6.15.5-arch1-1
Maybe that's why people think Arch isn't for regular users. Its only for nerds.
