** General intro stuff, not terribly important, tl;dr as appropriate **
Hi, all! Qubes newbie here; I installed Qubes on my new laptop just to see what
happens and now I'm bumbling my way along, using it and reading docs, trying to
get a feel for how things get done. For the most part, it's kind of awesome,
but every now and then there's something that confuses me, and right now the
most seriously confusing thing is that packages which I installed have a nasty
tendency to uninstall themselves, and I'm not sure why...
Now a relevant bit of context is that I'm one of those nasty users who never
does things according to the official guidelines and stuff, so I've made a
number of tweaks to my installation to fit my habits. I'll do my best to keep
track of what's unusual on my box and make those things clear up front, but I
might forget something I've done, so please bear with me.
** Quirks about my Environment **
Right now, the main quirk on my box, I think, is that I really, really don't
seem to like Fedora, and I really, really do like Arch, so I'm using the Arch
template for most of my AppVMs. Building and installing the Arch template on
Qubes 4 was a bumpy process (I used the instructions for Qubes 3.2 here, and
had to improvise a fair bit as things didn't work), and I'm not 100% sure it
went totally right, but I got to the end of the instructions and mostly it
seems to work...
** My actual issue **
Except for the vanishing packages. So every now and then, I install a package
into the TemplateVM (NOT the AppVM; I expect those packages to vanish when I
reboot the AppVM, but packages in the TemplateVM should stick around until I
remove them, yeah?) and it works and shows up correctly for a while, but some
time later (often, I'm pretty certain, without any kind of reboot in the
interim), the package is simply gone. I have to reinstall it cuz it's just not
there anymore. I'm pretty darn sure this is not expected behavior, but maybe
I'm just not understanding something.
It seems to be more prevalent for some packages than others; for instance, I've
had AUR builds fail because `patch` wasn't installed, so I install patch and
try again, and it works. The automake and autoconf packages do it too, but less
often than patch. I've installed patch several times on my Arch TemplateVM by
now, but it keeps disappearing behind my back:
[user@archlinux ~]$ history | grep patch
57 pikaur -S patch
200 pikaur -S patch
204 pikaur -S patch
276 pikaur -S patch
291 pikaur -S automake patch autoconf
292 history | grep patch
So that's my main confusion with Qubes right now; I'm hoping someone can help
me understand what's going on. Am I making some dumb mistake? Thanks for your
time! =)
--
Nathan
