IME, KDE Discover and similar app stores are so unreliable, telling beginners to use them is akin to harmful misinformation
If you need a GUI software manager, my suggestion is to not use arch
If you need a GUI software manager, my suggestion is to not use arch
Arch is actually great for beginners, way better than usual alternatives like Ubuntu for example. If you need a GUI software manager, Arch or Arch derivatives are still better than a lot of the rest.
Besides, a lot of people like fancy GUIs, nothing wrong with that. You’re right that graphic app stores aren’t amazing, but that’s shouldn’t be the norm then. I will still do everything in CLI, but I will vehemently defend our less technically advanced bretheren’s right to click their mouse on the colourful buttonsTo be clear I’m not against GUI software managers, just had bad experiences with KDE Discover… and I don’t trust anyone who recommends Arch for beginners…
If you never want to see a terminal just use Mint or whatever
Hard agree. I always struggled when using Discover, as a Beginner. Don’t know if I could make it work now as a more experienced user, Because I don’t use it and don’t have a need to. Learning how to use ‘pacman -S $pkg_name’ was super simple and is very fast. Sure I don’t have a nice GUI, that lets me browse what apps are there to be installed, but I have a webbrowser for that.
Installing something on arch is easy imo. The CLI is simple and well enough documented, and the package build system is easy to use. For comparison with ubuntu:
pacman -S nameis not harder thanapt install name. And try to install something on ubuntu if it’s not in the official package repos.ubuntu: pacman -S name is not harder than apt install name.
Eh, it’s a teensy bit harder, since you have to remember what -S means, rather than the easy to remember and plain English ‘install’. But, yeah, not much of a difference.
And try to install something on ubuntu if it’s not in the official package repos.
1: Go to that something’s website.
2: look for their download/install instructions page, scroll to Linux instructions if necessary.
3: Install instructions for Debian/Ubuntu are usually the first one listed, and typically just consist of a few commands you can copy and paste over without modifying.
It isn’t particularly difficult in most cases.
4: those commands were written for previous version of Ubuntu and now dependency tree doesn’t compute, also one of the commands is to add their custom repo, and you don’t have keys for it so it doesn’t work anyway. You try to remove the bad repo and now your apt is all fucked. You regenerate your repo list, googled the package and your version name, random stackexchage page gave you their live repo, but it needs a newer version of a library that incompatible with 54 of something that you already have. You learn about snap, installed 43Gb of something, it exists but still doesn’t really work because package maintaiers didn’t actually move it to snap, it was someone else. By this point you copy-pasted so many commands into your terminal you afraid it gained sentience. You call your more computer literate friend, he starts saying something about incompatible dependancies, containers, and you don’t really understand much. By the end, you decide that you didn’t actually want the software.
Later you discover that your sound doesn’t work anymore, and there is an error when you reboot.
It should be “yay [wanted program]” instead of “open discovery” in my opinion
Paru
Does yay integrate with flatpack and snap?
AUR pkgbuild files are basically just bash scripts. You can integrate them with anything.
Why the hell would I want snap?
Did pacman get packagekit support or are we just talking about flatpaks here?
Arch Wiki has still this warning
Warning
As explained in a GitHub comment by a Package Maintainer, “Handling system packages via packagekit is just fundamentally incompatible with our high-maintenance rolling release distro, where any update might leave the system in an unbootable or otherwise unusable state if the user does not take care reading pacman’s logs or merging pacnew files before rebooting.”
So its less about lack of packagekit support in pacman and more about lack of manual intervention features in GUI software managers?
it is more about arch’s philosy being your system may not boot next update, happens pretty no where else, except windows, manjaro and sometimes ubuntu
it is more about arch’s philosy being your system may not boot next update
Yeah … no thanks. I’ll be okay with slightly outdated versions of various packages, as long as they still work.
I’m not sure it’s ever happened to me. I imagine it must have, because of Arch’s reputation, but I can’t recall it ever actually happening to me personally.
My last Fedora version upgrade was a test of my troubleshooting skills, for sure.
Wait, I am supposed to care about .pacnew files?
Anyway, so far all I found there is new optional dependencies.
I rather wonder what happens when manual intervention is needed, like when JDK started being in conflict with JRE.Not right away, but they will eventually cause issues if you let them sit as
pacnew. I usemeldto resolve the conflicts and merge the two.
Octopi is a decent compromise: https://linuxvox.com/blog/octopi-linux/
It has been working for a while, but it’s not recommended
Thank you for the clarification
Did pacman get packagekit support
It appears using pacman on Arch is the recommended method for the repos, per this issue adding warnings: https://invent.kde.org/plasma/discover/-/merge_requests/829
or are we just talking about flatpaks here
https://apps.kde.org/discover/ ->
“With Discover, you can manage software from multiple sources, including your operating system’s software repository, Flatpak repos, the Snap store, or even AppImages from store.kde.org.”
So, were talking about flatpaks.
Yay -S “Am I a joke for you?”
I’ve just been using yay, what does the -S do am I missing something important?
-S, --sync
Synchronize packages. Packages are installed directly from the remote repositories, including all dependencies required to run the packages.
Technically correct answer but not super helpful imo.
yay <package name>starts a search from which you enter your selection(s) from matches.yay -S <package name>installs the package directly, errors if it’s not found
pacman -S app
I’m not an expert, but I thought on Arch you are specifically not supposed to use the discover store because it can cause partial updates which can in turn cause major problems.
However, the point still stands, pacman and the AUR are easy and have nearly everything.
The AUR is a great resource but it’s also being sold as a package repository users don’t need to actively think about or understand. I honestly think malware is going to be much more common on the AUR if we aren’t careful.
I keep hearing this claim online but the Arch bible (which you really should be familiar with if you use Arch) and pretty much everyone that knows anything will tell you that the AUR is useful, but not something to blindly use. I recommend everyone check the
PKGBUILD, verify the source URLs are correct, and check the diffs when updating. It’s not that much effort.And since it comes from a single (user) package repository, you’ll probably have hundreds of people doing the same, or even going a step or two further and looking into the code, reporting the package if anything bad is going on. Still miles better than downloading
.exefiles you find from a Google search, even if you were lazy and didn’t do the aforementioned checks. (But if you don’t do that, you should probably just use Flatpaks or similar.)All official resources, Arch maintainers and high quality guides have been putting a ton of effort into teaching people how to use the AUR safely. That hasn’t stopped some people, even back before Arch got really popular, but you can’t reach everyone. Alternative package managers and pacman wrappers made the AUR a lot more accessible, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but there are good reasons for all the caution. Combine that with Arch increasing in popularity and getting picked up by all the shitty influencers and you get a lot of people ,who don’t know what they’re doing, installing everything from the AUR with their CLI/GUI of choice. Then you’ve got Arch derivatives making AUR packages easily accessible from the start, bad advice on places like reddit etc.
Long story short: it seems that over the years whenever I check in, users that barely know how it works are happily installing random shit from random people on the AUR because they saw it in a YT video or something.
Eh. I haven’t had issues for a few months and I back up my files on a weekly basis and -Syu once or twice a month. Worst case scenario, I’ll just reinstall and restore from backup.
Also, I mainly use Discover for high level stuff like browsers and IDEs.
As a Debian slut this level of sweating over updates is wild to me.
Yeah but imagine reading about a new release of something and it appearing in your updates the same day. Shiny new software every day is addicting.
You’re not wrong. That said my broke ass can’t afford cutting edge hardware so most of the time it doesn’t matter.
When it does, I can usually compensate with either a NixOs profile install, a container of some sort (or Flatpak), or just building the emefferr from source.
On the flip side, reading about an exploited vulnerability in a package and then realizing your machine isn’t affected because Debian has an outdated package in it’s repo
You can use it for Flatpaks which works great for a lot of people.
Flatpak just working would be a nice thing. Everytime I try they fuck something new up…
(Last time I thought about installing Steam via Flatpak on Arch to get rid of all the multilib 32bit stuff not needed for aynthing else anymore it worked for nearly 4 days. Then
flatpak updaterandomly uninstalled its nvidia drivers because an “update” removing the old package first, then realizing it can’t find the new one make total sense of course.)If I learned anything with Steam it’s to never install it as a Flatpak.
The original image gives me strong “Shepard, Tali, and Garrus doing shenanigans” vibes.
How did they fuck up so badly that ending? Ahhhhhh
I get where most comments saying to use pacman or yay but it’s not a good idea to install everything with terminal. Also KDE discover uses flathub and into bazaar is a better client for it.
Care to explain why it’s not a good idea to tell your computer “install this package” in a CLI format?
Downvotes you already have, so I will restrict myself to explaining:
- CLI is the only way I’ve ever installed anything in a Linux OS. Has served me well for a decade or more
- doing stuff without knowing what you are doing is going to land you in a mess, no matter how hard GUI tool devs are trying to prevent that
Top notch logic here. Driving a car without knowing how the inner workings of the car will land you in a mess.
Imagine being so inept that you can’t use a terminal to install a terminal-based update. Arch users are posers and script kiddies and need to STFU
Ah yes, arch users, who famously hate the terminal
Just for that, I’m installing more stuff from cachy’s package manager.
Wow look. It’s the reason that linux market share is as low as it fucking is.
Like dude, maybe people can use the terminal just fine but prefer the GUI. What if having the GUI it really opens up accessibility to less technically competent users And promotes adoption of the OS across the board?
What if using this GUI leads to users using the terminal for more complex tasks? Have you ever thought of that??
Or are you too busy being some elitist snob in your basement?
Lol. Imagine being so inept that you can’t imagine anyone preferring GUI over CLI
you need to run pacman -S sense-of-humor
Fun hobby you have spreading negativity on lemmy.
I work with computers all day, I don’t want to work when I come home lol.
