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

Just for that, I'm installing more stuff from cachy's package manager.

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.

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.

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 I'll be okay with slightly outdated versions of various packages, as long as they still work.

IMO it's overblown. If you even have an issue at all, 99.99% of the time it's user error. And to mitigate that, you just use timeshift with BTRFS and snapshots on GRUB.

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 buttons

Yeah, I heard that several times but decided to try it anyway.

But I expected problems with Steam not with flatpak itself just removing the very same graphics driver it had just installed as a dependency...

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.

Good ending: you installed Arch, installed yay and instead of remembering unmemorable -S you just do yay package_name and you're very happy with your choices.

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.

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

Oh is that how you guys install snaps?

/evil laugh

Oh yeah, I added a disclaimer.

I mean I've been running an arch derivative for nearly ten years and the last time I got got was an Nvidia driver bug in 2020.

As much as arch talks about it it doesn't happen that often.

And it will. Why do you think they explained to me how car works long before I ever sat in a driver's seat?

Im sorry for all actual arch users, who are contrary to all stereotypes, not posers. If you feel the need to use Arch, and then use kde discover, or any other gui, and flatpak based installers, why are you using it in the first place?

The CLI way, and btw the ACTUAL way the devs intended to install mainstream software for YOUR distro, is legitimately far less hard than any of you make it seem like.

So, if you plan on using your distro correctly, and plan on stability, use your lovely package manager, or switch. You can get a rolling release distro everywhere else too, you can change every system file, everywhere else, you can change your fucking fast-/neofetch output, if you need to.

Just use a distro that is for your skill level.

Btw its:

Pacman, and then -S for install, -y for your repos, and -u is for updates.

So do me a favor and dont try to suffer.

Thanks for reading my mindless babbling and weird, maybe even contradictory logic, have fun :3

No, but then flatpak and snap fail most of the time anyway.

Having steam installed both ways was the easiest way to be logged in to 2 steam accounts simultaneously.

But also why does it matter, the whole point of arch is that you can turn it into whatever the hell you want. If that means using discover as your main source for programs, then so be it.

Mainly due to senior coworker influence lmao. I'm planning to VM some other KDE distros soon, but Arch is good enough for now, haven't had much more than minor nuisances.

also, I know pacman -Syu. That's my second-most-used command (after yt-dlp)

meld makes the task less annoying +1

Couldn't for the life of me get the PCSX2 Flatpak version to use GPU acceleration even with Flatseal so I try to avoid flatpaks now lol.

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.

why do people assume I get intimidated by installing an arch package?

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

Pacman -Syu java

Windows users : 😨😨😰

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.

I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're referring to as Linux, is in fact, GNU/Linux, or as I've recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux. Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX.

Many computer users run a modified version of the GNU system every day, without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the version of GNU which is widely used today is often called "Linux", and many of its users are not aware that it is basically the GNU system, developed by the GNU Project.

There really is a Linux, and these people are using it, but it is just a part of the system they use. Linux is the kernel: the program in the system that allocates the machine's resources to the other programs that you run. The kernel is an essential part of an operating system, but useless by itself; it can only function in the context of a complete operating system. Linux is normally used in combination with the GNU operating system: the whole system is basically GNU with Linux added, or GNU/Linux. All the so-called "Linux" distributions are really distributions of GNU/Linux

Pamac is great too, and it can run all your updates at shutdown.

sudo pacman -S (name), far easier than any gui in my opinion.

I'm installing everything on terminal since I began using Linux. Where is the bad thing in that?

I dont know that one, is it an aur?

I couldn't find anywhere where I referred to Linux, also, Linux is, as you said, the kernel, and there are actual Distributions that do not use any GNU software (see Alpine, Chinera, LFS, Gentoo, etc.). Assuming, that every Linux-kernel based operating system is using GNU software is wrong, and for your wonderful Copypasta a thing to consider adding :3

Meow

...is this a Stallman quote?... -_-

I 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.

Octopi is a pretty great GUI software manager

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.

yay chrome, enter, 1, enter

much easier than discover

Stand up, there you go. You were dreaming. What's your name?

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.

I think so, just a relatively famous copypasta.

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.

Thanks! I initially thought about writing this in my comment in parentheses, but then didn't do because it would've made the comment longer, and I'm not sure if other people want to read the pedantic truth anyways. I'm glad you filled this void.

The instructions for installing on ubuntu only work because of ubuntu's popularity.
Also if you can copy-paste commands, you can also just follow build instructions.
In arch, these commands are in the PKGBUILD, you don't have to copy them manually. Plus you have the knowledge that you'll have something that you can also deinstall later. Applications' websites usually don't have uninstallation instructions.

Always read the PKGBUILD before running makepkg!

I’m not sure if other people want to read the pedantic truth anyways. I’m glad you filled this void.

Glad my pedantry could be of service, lol!

The instructions for installing on ubuntu only work because of ubuntu’s popularity.

True, but this is still a very real effect with real-world benefits.

(And I wouldn't necessarily say it's just Ubuntu's popularity. More like, due to Debian and Debian derivatives' popularity, of which Ubuntu is one. Since there are so many popular distros out there that are Debian-based where Debian-style install instructions will work (and quite a few people running Debian itself), it makes sense to give Debian-style install instructions first.)

Also if you can copy-paste commands, you can also just follow build instructions.

In my experience, not so much.

Because even if you follow the instructions exactly, you'll always run into some problem due to your build environment not being quite identical to the developer's build environment, some library being half a version number off, and then cmake fails with a cryptic error message. So then you downgrade that library to the older version and try again, and this time it fails with a different cryptic error message that you can't make any sense of at all this time, or the compiler quits because it says the code is formatted improperly on line 1437 and now you're left wondering whether it's an issue with your compiler or whether you should go in and edit the source code yourself to try and fix that supposed formatting error...

I don't know... I've tried this approach a few times -- usually as a desperate last resort -- and it never seems to actually work. In theory, it should. In practice ... good fucking luck.

That's not easier, maybe quicker though.

its easier once you know how, but i see what youre saying