Garuda System Maintenance

Garuda System Maintenance is a background service that sits in the system tray. Its package description reads “Automated Garuda system maintenance tool”. It warns about partial upgrades, an out of date system, old snapshots and new maintenance announcements on the Garuda forum. It does not install or update packages by itself.

This page describes the code of version 3.1.0, the version in the PKGBUILD.

Package

Package	Notes
garuda-system-maintenance	Version 3.1.0. Depends on qt6-base, knotifications, kstatusnotifieritem, garuda-libs and snapper-tools.

Every Garuda edition lists it in its Packages-Desktop-Common file.

File	Purpose
/etc/xdg/autostart/garuda-system-maintenance.desktop	Starts the service with the desktop session. See XDG Autostart.
/usr/share/applications/garuda-system-maintenance-settings.desktop	Menu entry “Garuda System Maintenance Settings”.
/usr/share/polkit-1/rules.d/garuda-system-maintenance.rules	Lets members of the wheel group run snapper-tools find-old without a password.
/usr/share/knotifications6/garuda-system-maintenance.notifyrc	Notification settings. Notifications show as popups.
~/.config/garuda/garuda-system-maintenance.conf	The settings of the user.

Running it

garuda-system-maintenance
garuda-system-maintenance --settings

Command	Effect
garuda-system-maintenance	Starts the tray service. Only one instance runs per user. A second one exits with code 1.
garuda-system-maintenance --settings	Opens the settings window only.

Schedule

• The first round of checks runs 30 seconds after start.
• After that, a round runs every 15 minutes.
• The partial upgrade check also reacts at once when files in /var/lib/garuda change.
• The snapshot check runs once per session.

Network requests

The service makes one kind of network request.

Request	Target	When	Turn off
Forum announcements	https://forum.garudalinux.org/c/announcements/announcements-maintenance/45.json	Every round: 30 seconds after start, then every 15 minutes	Untick “Notify about forum maintenance announcement posts”

The request is a plain HTTP GET for the public topic list of the forum category “Announcements - Maintenance”. It sends no data about the system. All other checks read local files only.

The service no longer checks for keyring or hotfix updates. The package agent that did this was removed (changelog entry “packageagent: Remove”). garuda-hotfixes itself is retired. See Garuda Migrations.

Checks and notifications

Forum announcements

The service sorts the topics of the category by creation date and compares the newest one with the timestamp it stored last.

• On the first run of a new user, it only stores the timestamp. No notification is shown.
• When a newer topic exists, it shows “New maintenance announcement: <title>” with the topic link and the first 150 characters of the excerpt. The action Open in browser opens the topic.
• When the settings were created by an older version (settings version 2), the stored timestamp is set to 2025-07-18. Announcements after that date are then shown once.

Partial upgrade

The pacman hook runner of garuda-hooks creates /var/lib/garuda/partial_upgrade when packages were updated but the system is still not fully up to date. It removes the file after a full update. Garuda System Maintenance watches this folder.

When the folder changes and the file exists, it shows “Partial upgrade detected”. While the file exists, the tray icon also shows the alert icon. The notification has these actions:

Action	Effect
Update system	Opens a terminal and runs garuda-update.
Learn more	Opens the Partial upgrades page.
Disable warnings	Turns off the partial upgrade warning.

System out of date

After a full update, the hook runner touches /var/lib/garuda/last_update. When this file is 13 days old or older, the service waits two more days. It then shows “System out of date”. The notification repeats at most every three days.

Action	Effect
Update system	Opens a terminal and runs garuda-update.
Disable warnings	In the code, this turns off the partial upgrade warning, not the out of date warning.

To turn off the out of date warning, untick “Notify if system is critically out of date” in the settings, or use Ignore permanently in the tray dialog.

Old snapshots

Once per session, the service runs pkexec snapper-tools find-old. The polkit rule lets wheel members run it without a password. It lists old Snapper snapshots without automatic cleanup and old restore subvolumes.

When it finds any, it shows “Old snapshots/backups found”.

Action	Effect
View and delete	Shows the list. Delete runs pkexec snapper-tools delete-old, which asks for the password.
Disable notifications	Turns off the old snapshot check.

Tray icon

The icon turns into the alert icon when a check needs attention. A click on the icon opens the dialog of the most urgent check:

Priority	Check
1st	Partial upgrade or system out of date
2nd	Old snapshots

The dialog offers Update system or Delete, Ignore permanently and Cancel. When nothing needs attention, a click opens the settings. The context menu has one entry, Settings.

Settings

The settings window has two groups. Changes apply when you press OK. The running service reloads the settings file when it changes.

Setting	Key in the settings file	Default
Notify about forum maintenance announcement posts	application/notifyforum	On
Notify about partial upgrades	application/partialupgrade	On
Notify if system is critically out of date	application/outofdate	On
Notify about old snapshots	application/oldsnapshot	On

Note

The group “Automatic updates” still shows the boxes “Automatically update core keyrings” and “Prompt to apply critical hotfixes immediately”. They are not saved and have no effect. The code behind them was removed.

The package also installs /usr/lib/garuda-system-maintenance/migrate-dr460nized, an old Plasma theme migration script. The current build does not include the migration agent that ran it.