DISCLAIMER: Arch Linux is not a beginner friendly distribution, and this is not a recommendation or good practice.
I know how to use pacman -S. I have yet to experience a Discover related issue after months of use.
why do people get intimidated by installing an arch package?
i recently wanted to play morrowind and i use the terminal like a search engine for programs. i just typed “yay openmw” and voila it was there, checked in the aur if the package is clean and installed it by clicking enter 3 times.
and i thout “yay _ that was easy! :3”, got off a ship in seyda neen and killed fargoth with my bare fists as soon as i locked eyes with him.
Stand up, there you go. You were dreaming. What’s your name?
why do people assume I get intimidated by installing an arch package?
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 buttonsI am pretty much, “for GUI” and tend to make enough KIO servicemenus to make my right click menu looong.
But after trying out both GUI and CLI methods of managing software installation, I’d say I am inclined on using the CLI for this task.
To 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
I’m talking from experience both in education and sysadmin duties. In my life I helped hundreds of people switch to Linux, for work, for home, for everything in between, and was that helpful person that answers all their questions. I have the statistics, however informal, I know what I’m talking about. There are whole categories of problems that people encounter with Ubuntu and it’s derivatives that just categorically don’t exist in Arch. And you can trust whatever the fuck you want.
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.
Oh yeah, I added a disclaimer.
Pacman -Syu java
Windows users : 😨😨😰
Pamac is great too, and it can run all your updates at shutdown.
I had issues with btrfs-assistant. It’s a permissions thing, tho. Might work if I added myself as an administrator, but I like the security of needing sudo, so pacman version it is.
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.yay chrome, enter, 1, enter
much easier than discover
Yay -S “Am I a joke for you?”
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.
That makes sense, but what’s the alternative here? Linux is freedom, so that means freedom to run / install anything you want, including malware if you’re not careful. Maybe if you discourage people from using the AUR, they will install it through other means, like a developer-provided Flatpak or AppImage. But if that’s not available or doesn’t work, then it’s nothing (= sad user), or you’re back to “Google, then download
an .exethe first thing you can run” or justcurl | sh. Is that better? (Assuming we’re still talking about the kind of people who would skip vetting what they install.)I mean, yeah that would be my solution. I get that the AUR is attractive, precisely because it has a low barrier for anyone to submit their PKGBUILD. The level of oversight and verification is just a bit too low to recommend it to an average user, without a lot of caution. You’ve mentioned some alternatives that fall on different points along the spectrum of delivering software. Something like flatpak is a much more reliable tool in the hands of someone who just wants a GUI app and not think about how it gets to their desktop. For everything else that isn’t part of your distros repositories, there’s really not a good noob-friendly solution that doesn’t carry a big potential risk. Most distros have third-party repositories that use the same underlying tools to deliver software, but are less strict about QA and stuff. This is kind of a bad fit for rolling release distros in my opinion and is probably one of the reasons the AUR is so hands-off and DIY oriented.
There’s probably a better way to handle this, but I don’t think it’s an easy thing to solve (especially for the rolling release model) and the AUR isn’t really appropriate for mass-consumption by average users. Also, there will always be a certain point beyond which you’re on your own, it’s just not feasible to have reliable, safe, distro-agnostic packaging for every piece of software out there.
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.
pacman -S app
Oh is that how you guys install snaps?
/evil laugh
The original image gives me strong “Shepard, Tali, and Garrus doing shenanigans” vibes.
How did they fuck up so badly that ending? Ahhhhhh
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
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?
you need to run pacman -S sense-of-humor
Lol. Imagine being so inept that you can’t imagine anyone preferring GUI over CLI
Just for that, I’m installing more stuff from cachy’s package manager.
I work with computers all day, I don’t want to work when I come home lol.
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.
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 the inner workings of the car will land you in a mess.
And it will. Why do you think they explained to me how car works long before I ever sat in a driver’s seat?
Care to explain why it’s not a good idea to tell your computer “install this package” in a CLI format?
Nothing wrong with CLI, you can use it to install from flathub. I’m saying it’s not a good idea from a security standpoint. Yay uses user repository and pacman has root permissions. For example installing wine with pacman will allow access to the whole disk
installing wine with pacman doesn’t allow any special access. if you run it, then it gets access to whatever the user who ran it has access to. whether you installed it with pacman or a gui wrapper doesn’t matter.
