well - that depends on when you installed your system
You’d definitely have had some of those when your fresh install was older than two years - or even less.
A relatively fresh install does not even encounter these issues - not yet …
I will have to wait in anticipation then, because the current install is less than 6 months. I rebuilt the system on a new SSD, after replacing the smaller HDD. But I nver had any on the older install either. I guess it was less than 2 years old. I will have to keep an eye on my partner’s machine, because she will not know what to do, even if told.
Nah - don’t wait for it - but pay attention …
It will happen for some file sooner or later.
Many of these things are not critical and may never become critical.
But this one here sure did.
You avoided it by not even having to address it -
the fresh install simply came without the community repo in /etc/pacman.conf
Well all I can do is continue to run pacdiff after every update.
What I do is using pacman to do updates
and the messages it prints out during that will tell about .pacnew files
I honestly never used pacdiff. 
But I “come from” using Arch - and later EOS
… the more “raw” thing 
Now I’m lame - I use Mint.
Too much (useless to me) work to keep the rolling release up to date.
I’m still here though - with VM’s of nearly every flavor of Manjaro,
to perhaps help others with my (limited) experience.
For me, this is my father.
He does not know or care - I have to tell him and “fix” things.
Things need to work.
Of course.
I do not know about Windows - and I don’t trust it either.
So:
I could not have him use Windows while he was relying on me to make things work and keep them that way.
I actually tried Arch (EOS) - much too much work …
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I realy like Manjaro, I love the Curated Rolling Release, but there are things that seem half-arsed, like we have pamac, which people coming from other distros are going to use, on the assumption that it is the proper package manager… only to be told “well we don’t use pamac, because it doesn’t work properly, so use pacman”.
My question is why was it developed in the first place, it it’s not supposed to be the package manager, and if it’s presented as the package manager, should there not be a concerted effort to make it work properly, instead of telling everyone to fall back on pacman?
Personally I use the pamac GUI for all my updates, the do the pacdiff check after. But that check really needs to be part of the part of what the package manager does.
That functionality was built in to the Mandrake package manager… a Graphical tool, back in 2000, some Linux Distros seem either to have not advanced, or are reinventing the wheel… badly.
In addition Manjaro, the company, seems to be trying to project a Professional image, yet as above, some thing don’t come across as particularly Professional.
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There were still config file changes, that had to be dealt with, same on Ubuntu, and Linux Mint.
Those changes had to be ignored, overwrite existing, merge with exising etc. A change to a Config file is a change, regardless of Rolling or not.
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yes - and?
these did have and do have a proper package manager
Gentoo is a bit of a different beast - and too long ago to be familiar
Arch is different - and is not hiding it.
But pamac is … kind of … trying to …
all this has gone way off topic - look at the initial post
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pamac is the official package manager in Manjaro as per the Manjaro Team. It was created so as to unify the management of packages from the repositories with those from the AUR and with Snaps and FlatPaks, all under a single user interface.
At one point, @philm even had the idea of no longer shipping pacman with the official ISOs, but the community strongly objected to that resolve, and @philm walked back on his decision — he is very open to feedback. The plan was then changed to the release system currently in use in the upcoming Manjaro Summit editions.
That said, pamac is still actively being worked upon, but it remains fraught with all kinds of issues to this day, which is why the experienced members of the community — not the Manjaro Team itself per se — continue advising people to stick to the tried and trusted pacman instead, and to either use the command-line version of pamac or an AUR helper for AUR packages only.
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I have seen as many topic as you - dismissing pamac - as that is not right.
Instead educate in the correct use of pamac - it is quite good.
A hammer is not a bad tool - you just don’t use it to cut bread - use the tool correct.
On stable branch: Do not enable AUR updates, preferably not AUR at all - as this is the most prominent cause of problems with Pamac.
Instead use pamac CLI for the occasional alien package.
Because I a console guy - I recommend using
- pacman for maintenance
But I also use pamac GUI if I cannot find the package I am looking for as Pamac is as good as any tool.
Just a metaphor to illustrate how tools should be used correct and when used incorrect it becomes a bad tool.
But:
casual and normal unsuspecting users don’t expect to get handed a hammer to cut their bread - while having them believing it is a sharp, serrated knife.
I know - but I could not resist. Sorry!
In german we have a saying:
Alle Vergleiche hinken, aber nicht alles was hinkt ist ein Vergleich.
… try that one for size $AI or $translator …
Wait, what, are you telling me I’ve been doing it wrong all along? 
no - just use the sharp side of the hamme 
Yep - can be used by a dane as well
Alle sammenligninger halter, men ikke alt, hvad der halter, er en sammenligning.
One can always point to a situation that does not match, when one illustrates using ideograms 
And that is on the company … it is sometimes hard to distinguish
- Manjaro GmbH & Co. KG
- Manjaro Community
A clear differentiation would have been nice - like Red Hat and Fedora - they are technically the same - a Fedora can be a Red Hat - but Manjaro is Manjaro.
I am here for the Community part - I have no affiliation with the company part - but if you somone in Denmark has need of professional and independent Manjaro support - please speak up - I am available should the need be.
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As a compromise, I use the ‘Manjaro Cheatsheet’ ( My Manjaro cheatsheet in a menu form ) almost every day.
Just to emphasize and appreciate @Teo’s great work once again
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Well, for what it’s worth, I agree with @philm on that.
No, no, no, no! 
An Arch derivative that is so close to its upstream should never ever leave the main Arch Linux Package Manager out of the distribution media. 
pamac is a work in progress and has already failed miserably at times. pacman always works. If you leave out pacman and pamac then goes belly up, then how are you going to fix your system?
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You would leave out pacman? or did you misread?
Surely pamac is a nice idea - but it feels a little bit beta software at times.
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I did not miss-read, I agree with @philm.
Then clearly pamac needs more work, rather than simply abandoning it because “It’s a work in Progress”.
But that only takes us back to some of my previous statements about have a fully functioning Package Manager on a OS that has a Graphical User Interface.
… and I guess we will go round and round on this.
It is not being abandoned. As the matter of fact, there were two updates to libpamac only last week — or at least, on the Stable branch.
In a UNIX system, most of the graphical utilities — I’m not talking of so-called productivity software and the likes — are actually only graphical front-ends to character-mode/command-line utilities, for two reasons…:
-
UNIX has to be fully usable even without its GUI running, because on UNIX, the GUI is optional; and…
-
It is more efficient, and makes it easier, to write graphical utilities that use command-line tools in the background than to reinvent the wheel.
pamac does live up to this design philosophy, but only partly. On the one hand, it is usable both as a command-line tool and as a graphical tool — and in both a gtk3 and a gtk4 version, even. On the other hand however, pamac works with the ALPM database, and is allegedly fully compatible with it, but it uses its own interpretation of ALPM, not the existing package manager of ALPM, which was designed specifically for ALPM by the ALPM developers.
Now, if you look at octopi for instance, then octopi doesn’t need to be compatible with ALPM, because octopi is merely a graphical front-end to the already existing and as-perfect-as-it-gets pacman, and to an AUR helper — it has a configuration section that allows you to choose which AUR helper.
Of course, what octopi does not support, is Snap and FlatPak. But as I said earlier, those are foreign package formats, and for all intents and purposes, that is third-party software, because Snaps and FlatPaks are intended to be distribution-agnostic.
Still, all things considered, pamac may get there at some point in the future, but considering its current quality level, the safest bet at having the least amount of problems with software installation/removal and system updates is to use pacman.
There is an additional factor involved here, which I have addressed in my HowTo on updating as safely as possible, which is that it is always best to update from a tty while completely logged out of the GUI, because while your GUI is running, more shared libraries are going to be in use, while the update process may be overwriting them, with as a result that if the GUI needs to load some code in memory from an already opened but only partly loaded shared library, strange things can and will happen.
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I agree with your criticisms about pamac, and I have been suggesting for many years that the pamac GUI have a notification pop up for important update announcements, but I will never want pacman gone.
pacman is the original, full-featured CLI package manager for Arch and its derivatives. It needs to be included. It also provides Manjaro users with the understanding of the legacy of Arch, the precursor, and how it works, so that if they want to, they can also explore using the parent distro. It is also a great fallback to sort out issues.
pamac just has to be tweaked to work more similarly to pacman and most other AUR helpers in how it deals with AUR updates, and in how the GUI provides warnings and notifications.
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