I used to use discover, but its really not a great tool for system administration, but it is perfectly fine for installing user-facing applications. Also, packagekit will probably never work with the AUR. That’s what got me to ditch it.
It’s not much about elitism, at least for most people. Discover just leans to heavily towards managing apps and doesn’t offer much for managing packages, the way that the system is composed. Which is a very large point of interest for a lot of Arch people.
That doesn’t mean Discover is not a good tool. It’s just not a tool that works great with what Arch users usually need.
On the original topic: Discover does the job of installing packages well on Arch, and the bugs listed are related to security issues that are rather insignificant on single-user systems. However, removing packages can blow your entire system off with little notice. Also, error handling and administration is just not there.
Modern shells like fish come with support for VERY smart completions. I never have to remember package names because my shell knows them. It’s really great and not just for package management. Maybe the lack of a proper shell is what scares you away from the amazing world of terminals.
Ok, so we’re losing the plot here. I don’t want you to feel that I’m being elitist, I’m far from being an expert.
For updating, when we see an alert ‘You Have Updates’ pamac in the tray or whatever, the first step would be to open the thread. (RTFT)
From there, you can also see we are in the Manjaro Forum - which is BY FAR the best place to get advice on how to manage and update/upgrade your system. It’s what they do. They wrote long threads about it… and you can guarantee that KDE developers are less knowledgeable than the mad genius Philip Müller…
Having used Linux for a while - starting with Software Centre, Ubuntu on to Mint and then on to Manjaro… I just learned (bad) habits over the years… For me, the shortest way to success is the best (and not necessarily the simplest).
GUI, might be useful for finding things - but still, it can’t come close to an internet search to find out what kind of thing you need.
I like Linuxlinks as a first search - imagine we want a text editor we can use (we don’t like Nano, we hate VIM, because we aren’t neckbeards)… and we despise neckbeards that tell us how stupid we are for not learning vim. We know we’re dumb, but we don’t like to admit it
Oh dear, it seems we found the first issue with using Discover right here. It sucks for finding an application - in fact, I cannot work out how to get the repository version of Micro to even show up there.
Pamac-manager gets 10/10 there, it shows me the ‘extra’ repository, as well as the Flatpak.
Now you have an argument stating that you have problems spelling words and you are lazy… but the terminal is more able to help with that because it can automatically complete, and has tools that can fuzzily search. Tools like yay.
As such, I would say that currently, on Manjaro, Discover does suck - but Pamac is fine for searching.
Play with it - use Konsole with ZSH, tidy it up yourself.
Install FISH and use that in Konsole and see how you feel. I love FISH as an everyday terminal, but my default is ZSH because it is posix compliant (don’t know what it means, don’t worry - it’s definitely better for scripts).
I love it when people ask a question that they already have been told the answer to (as per your screenshot), just because they don’t like the answer and refuse to accept it. Only to then get told the very same answer again because it is the correct answer. What do you expect? Why did you ask this?
Hey guys, is the sky really blue?
- Yes.
You’re wrong, you elitist, I want it to be green.
Regardless of how you feel about it, pacman remains the only recommended and safe way to upgrade arch.
Though its already been stated, as someone with a fair amount of arch experience I can also say, no it isnt “safe” to use Discover with packagekit for arch. You may get away with it for a while but it WILL cause issues eventually.
The problem with using Arch with a graphical package manager is that pacman was not designed with a GUI like discover or pamac in mind. You lose the ability to see what is going on an the ability to do manual intervention when needed and have to trust what the default response is from the GUI application. Part of Arch and its package management relies on the user being able to tell what is happening and taking the reins when necessary to prevent system breakage or to troubleshoot installation issues (conflicts,etc.). Its not “elitist” to say you shouldnt, its what the arch maintainers say and it is in your best interest from a support,bug report, and general maintenance perspective to do things how youre supposed to. You will get no support/help from the arch folks if you do not do things the supported way and should be prepared for a fair amount of RTFM.
If you dont want to type package names every time you can simply create a list of packages once and cat that list like so (and is even easier than manually install through GUI every time)
sudo pacman -Syu $(cat packages.list)
you may need to occasionally update package names but this is how i hop between arch, fedora, and suse/debian on occasion.
If you dont agree with the Arch folks and how they run things you might try fedora. If you want to be real bleeding edge you can go rawhide which is even more up to date than arch and Fedora does work well with packagekit.
This actually happens with pamac-manager too… though generally I prefer a terminal to install after using Pamac to search across repo/AUR/Flathub.
Interestingly, I was talking to the developer of Yay who thinks it would be a nice idea to work out some kind of ‘plugin’ system to enable people who want it to include flatpak and even snapd if possible in their results.
Knowledge is power, and choice is the way… but yeah, Discover sucks for us and no terminal makes it frustrating.
