Solve “Starting full system upgrade… there is nothing to do” Issue In Arch Linux, Manjaro Linux

I recently noticed that my Arch Linux desktop system will not update/upgrade to the latest version. I thought there wasn't any new updates yet. I visited Arch Linux website and noticed that there are plenty of updates are already available. But, whenever I try to update my Arch Linux system, I keep getting the following message every time.

$ sudo pacman -Syu

Here is what I got after running this command:

:: Synchronizing package databases...
 core is up to date
 extra is up to date
 community is up to date
 multilib is up to date
 archlinuxfr is up to date
:: Starting full system upgrade...
 there is nothing to do

I keep getting this same message for the past one week. I have no idea why this is happening. Finally, I find a solution, and I thought sharing it here would be helpful for someone.

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Solve "Starting full system upgrade... there is nothing to do" Issue In Arch Linux

The main reason for this issue is that the mirrorlists are outdated. If you get the same issue, your mirrorlist might be outdated too.

There are couple ways to update your mirrorlist in Arch Linux and its variants such as EndeavourOS and Manjaro Linux. You can find the most up-to-date mirrorlist by using Pacman Mirrorlist Generator. It is an online mirrorlist generator that can be used to generate the most up-to-date mirrorlist possible for Arch Linux.

Once you find the mirrorlist, you can manually replace the outdated mirrorlist with newly created one. If you don't like the manual way, there is utility named Reflector, which is used to find most-up-to-date mirrorlist for your Arch Linux, and automatically update the mirrorlist.

To install Reflector on Arch Linux and its derivatives, run:

$ sudo pacman -S reflector rsync curl

Backup your existing mirrorlist using command:

$ sudo cp /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist.bak

Then, update the mirrorlist using command:

$ sudo reflector --verbose -l 50 -p http --sort rate --save /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist

The above command will filter 50 most recently synchronized HTTP servers sorted by download rate, and update the mirrorlist automatically. For more details about Reflector, refer our previous guide attached below.

• Retrieve latest mirror list using Reflector in Arch Linux

Once you updated the mirrorlist, try to update your Arch Linux system using command:

$ sudo pacman -Syu

Or,

$ sudo pacman -Syyu

Now, everything should work just fine.

Fix "Starting full system upgrade. there is nothing to do" error in Manjaro Linux

Reflector is not available in the Manjaro repositories. Manjaro developers use pacman-mirrors instead of Reflector to retrieve latest mirrors.

Pacman-mirrors is a Manjaro specific utility for generating and maintaining the system mirrorlist. It comes pre-installed in Manjaro Linux.

To retrieve 20 fastest mirrors and update package index in Manjaro Linux, run:

$ sudo pacman-mirrors --fasttrack 20 && sudo pacman -Syyu

Or,

$ sudo pacman-mirrors -f 20 && sudo pacman -Syyu

Now you should be able to update your packages to latest available versions without any issues.

You can add an alias in your bashrc/zshrc to save a few keystrokes.

alias update="sudo pacman-mirrors -f 20 && sudo pacman -Syyu"

From now on, you can simply run the following command to update the mirrorlist and update your Manjaro Linux system:

$ sudo update

Hope this helps.