We are talking about 40k here, so dying will probably be the nice outcome you hope for...

it’s getting more prevalent as more stuff (especially servers) run on Linux [...] Linux’s days of living in “security through obscurity” are over"

Servers are primarily running Linux for decades. So any security through obscurity would be gone for as long, if it even existed ever...

though I’ll admit to not having tested that sort of thing with Wine/Proton installed

The more primitive the better the chances. And there are some really primitive cases of ransonware perfectly happy with running through Wine and encrypting your files. So limiting Wine's file access (or better running it as a separate unpriviledged user with no access to anything but your games) is always a good idea.

It should be +/-∞

Minus or plus depending on the side from which you approach the limes.

pacman -S vulcan-mesa-implicit-layers

Which will then probably tell you that it conflicts with vulkan-mesa-device-select and asks if you want to replace it. Which might either work or just get you another conflict because vulkan-mesa-device-select is required by some other package.

Btw... pacman -Qi <package name> usually tells you anything you need to know about a package. In this context mainly why it was installed (as a requirement for which package) and which other packages are required as a dependency.

So maybe you should take one step back first. Check why 'vulkan-mesa-device-select` was installed in the first place. If it's not dependency of something else you can either remove it (or replace it) alongside its lib32 version.

That's a totally separate error... It can happen that the keyring itself is so out of date that it blocks the update, and with it the upgrade to a newer keyring. For this reason it's often safer after a long time to do pacman -Syu cachyos-keyring (pretending I guesse right and that's the name of the package) first to avoid the whole update getting blocked by signature with an out-of-date-key. Yet that should not apply here.

But Ignoring the warnings you get for now... This looks like vulkan-mesa-implicit-layers did not replace vulkan-mesa-device-select but now the 32bit library version lib32-vulkan-mesa-device is supposed to be replaced by cachyos/lib32-vulkan-mesa-implicit-layers, which would in turn need vulkan-mesa-implicit-layers as a dependency.

What happens when you answer 'no' to that first question? Alternatively, is there anything keeping you from installing vulkan-mesa-implicit-layers (thus replacing vulkan-mesa-device-select)?

Not using CachyOS but Arch... but after a long break from updates you should probably start by checking if your mirror is still up-to-date (doesn't look like it when you local stuff is newer...).

Again... not my OS but this seems to be the file you could use to manually replace the mirrorlist in your /etc/pacman.d/ directory.

Edit: Also just to be sure... -Syyu will force a refresh of all databases (doubling the u would force "upgrading" even it's an actual downgrade from your local version). You normally don't do it because it puts extra load on the mirror, but in case of problems it won't hurt.

PS: For the future (and although partial upgrades are normally to be avoided)... after a long break in updating the key breaking points are mirrors, then keyfile (they can be so out of date that you can't start the update; so do them separately first - If CachyOS keeps with its usually sane naming structure the package you should first update, just to be sure, will named cachyos-keyring, but no guarantees there...), then pacman itself...

The latter is very rare but there have been a handful of major changes in pacman's lifetime that broke down compatibility after a long time. Arch keeps a static pacman version available for these cases, so you can still do a proper update to fix it, but don't know where CachyOS keeps it's equivalent.

2nd Edit for sake of completion: A quick searched seems to indicate that CachyOS does not have a separate static pacman. So if everything else fails and it's an actual problem of pacman itself (and only then, so please don't try that just now) https://pkgbuild.com/~morganamilo/pacman-static/x86_64/bin/pacman-static has the static standalone version of pacman. So you can download this file, make it executable and run it.

GNOME guys complaining about someone trying to force unilateral decisions upon them and being totally uncoopertaive must be satire...

Don't Look Up was a documentary...

Germans are still suffering from having to integrate another failed quasi-soviet state more than 30 years later, so you couldn't pay them enough for taking Königsberg back.

An immutable OS is fixed and mounted non-writable. Every update you get, every program you install is handled on top of it via containers or filesystem overlays so the underlying OS is untouched. Basically the same concept you know from smartphones or other devices with a "reset to factory settings" function. No matter how hard you screw up your system, you can always reset to the base OS, either by granulary deactivating things installed on top, or by a reset to the working base OS.

No... the Crowdstrike debacle primarily shows the dangers of today's corporate culture in software development.

Ship as fast as possible, fix issues later if necessary...

"More Tech and Venture Capital Execs Are Coming Out as ~~MAGA~~ Believers of Tax Cuts, Deregulation and Corruption"

Fixed that headline...