Hey, i think Pamac, the so-called “package manager” of the Manjaro Linux distribution should instead of trying to be a secondary pacman just solely focus on handling the AUR, Flatpak and other semi-third party repositories & app distribution platforms; at it’s current state, pamac is very unstable and i believe that it adds unnecessary overhead that shouldn’t have been there in the first place, i believe that the pamac-cli and pamac gui should only be used along with the already well developed pacman from Arch to search and update packages, instead of trying to be a weirdly stand-alone application as not only would that decrease the risk of security vulnerabilities being found in the program but it’d also remove that said unnecessary overhead and prevent stuff like that pamac breakage from happening again, at least on the Manjaro official repositories which people are advised to use standalone in the first place. To clarify, i think that pamac should instead of trying to handle pacman packages as a stand-alone program, just do pacman related stuff accept the ones that are not already readily available in it just through the commands available on pacman, like doing pacman -Q to list the packages & pacman -S to install applications & combine all other repositories like the AUR in one place instead of having people resort to yay or standalone GUI’s to manage flatpak applications etc.
Edit: I wrote this as i think the general direction of pamac has been a little bit off these days, i might’ve missed a few points and might be slightly off on certain ones but this is just my opinion from what i was able to understand on the latest state of the package management on the distribution.
Hey, it tries to do a little more then that which in turn sometimes & somehow breaks the entire program; making the GUI unusable and a mess to navigate through for lesser advanced users. It caches it’s own stuff & whenever something breaks it’s honestly a nightmare for a non-cli user to fix.
pacman is actually pretty easy for the most basic stuff. S-sync/search, U-update, Y-refresh(no logic here), A-aur, Q-query. Make it double to “force it/use not default und dangerous option”. like Syyuu - sync,force refresh, force update-downgrade.
Of the two, pamac is easiest. I have also found, personally, that pamac takes care of more things and that human intervention is neccessary a lot less.
I think the whole point is that a LOT of ppl, understandable, assume that a tool created by Manjaro (or is pamac not made by Manjaro?) is able to manage the downloads and updates for the operating system.
Isn’t the whole point with pamac to get a graphical interface?
If it’s demanded by the user to learn cli to manage the os, why is pamac not optional in the first place.
And why is that not mentioned on the manjaro page?
This and even the AUR part should maybe be removed. I’m pretty sure 95% of the problems arising around this is from users having NO IDEA about having to learn cli.
And for me, I ASSUMED pamac was a wrapper somehow. that syncing pacman would also sync pamac because in this forum, I CONSTANTLY see advice using pacman, not pamac.
And I have NEVER seen the comment “dont forget to also sync your pamac”.
Edit
I also want to add, I had ZERO problems with this update. I waited about a day before running the update and ONLY used pacman.
Only when also including pamac I started getting strange results, never broke anything, but I also waited 48 hrs before even running pamac so a lot of updates were pushed during that time.
It is not enough to be easy. It has to be easy AND work
Let’s face it - the people that use manjaro want a bit of user friendliness (they would be on arch otherwise). Pamac, Manjaro settings, and manjaro hello are those things. So screwing pamac and essentially the whole system for the beginner user it a big fu**up for the manjaro team and a big hit on the PR/ marketing image / Manjaro brand. It is just a no-go to do such thing, and it is a BIG NO-GO to do it in the stable branch.
Well, I think that is a position Manjaro has to evaluate and maybe change the info on the Manjaro page. Maybe having a LOT of “linux noobs” are not the users they should go for?
Mistakes can be made, S**T happens, it’s human.
Yeah, there has been a LOT of hits for the pr-team, the reputation of Manjaro did NOT need this to happen, I agree, hence my above statement about them re-evaluating the target user base.
What I want to see, when this is over is responsibility (from the TEAM), not “this is aCkShUaLlY not manjaros fault”.
Again, mistakes were made, end of story, no use bashing ppl for that, I’m 100% sure none of this was intentional!
I get it, correction, I TOTALLY UNDERSTAND that 13 (or is it 14 people) on the Manjaro team has a MASSIVE job to do, and I am GRATEFUL for that!!!
I have a HUGE respect and freakin’ LOVE the work these guys put in so I can run this os on my computer!
Besides, we are all here now, and pamac is kinda working right? They FIXED it.
So at the end of the day, it’s all “good” right?
Now all we need is a little communication.
Hey! If you haven’t noticed on the forum, and in this thread, I’m all for pamac, I always recommend it, I even have a standard disclaimer for it where appropriate. So you don’t have to defend pamac to me.
Yes, I agree wholeheartedly about the user friendlines. But if you want your computer spoon-fed to you, you should stay away from Linux.I think that’s where CLI pamac works well. It allows you to easily, logically search, install, and remove stuff, while using the CLI. While pacman is from Arch which, as you mentioned is more advanced and forces the CLI and so on on you.
I strongly disagree to that statement and is something that should be tried to be washed away.
I see that comment as “if you are not good enough stay away from our community” and that is EXTREMELY unhealthy and uninviting.
Linux has done ENORMUS advances the last years, especially since the steamdeck became a thing.
And this is the age that a lot of ppl actually see a chance of moving away from f ex microsoft, statements like above goes AGAINST inclusiveness.
As someone stated above, if a user wanted to have a technichal challange with their os, go for ARCH, manjaro SHOULD (imho) aim for the users that does NOT want to have that level of expertise and still use linux.
Who is the target user for this os?
The target can NOT be “ppl who completely understand ARCH” because if that is the case, why use manjaro at all? All manjaro would do is demand the same level of work as ARCH would.
If the target is “ppl who have descent knowledge of linux” then that should be stated on the manjaro page, that is NOT how it’s worded now.
The reputation for manjaro if you watch influencers ritght now is “why tf use Manjaro when Arch is there, they both demand the same kind of work AND all the rescent Fk-ups makes this distro completely unessecary”.
I REALLY do NOT want to agree with above statement, but it’s VERY hard not to.
Let’s agree to disagree then. You don’t have to like my opinion.
No, I am not trying to be elitest. I love it when people go against the norm. But I also know if you want to go against the norm, then yo9u need to think for yourself. And then Linux is good.
If, however, you don’t want to think, just to do, then I don’t think you want to go against the norm and don’t want to think, so you should not use Linux.
Except, perhaps, if going against the norm becomes the norm…
I agree with the first part of you comment, “that’s like our different opinions, maaaan…”
But then you went to far and wrote this the last part.
Cmon dude, you can’t claim to be “not elitist” and then say non linux users “do not want to think”.
This whole conversation is clear evidence that the guidance from Manjaro, an explanation of what is expected from the user is needed.
They have to deal with this PR nightmare now.
I said if you don’t then Linux isn’t for you. I never said that only non-thinkers use something else or that if you use something else you don’t think. However, do say if you don’t want to, then Linux isn’t for you. Just like maths isn’t necessarily for you. Or science. Or being a public speaker.
There is a differencwe. And yes, best way to find out what suits you is practical experience.
But this iss getting off-topid, so I’m leaving now.
Exactly my point. WHO IS THE TARGET USER FOR MANJARO?
Comparing being a scientist to using an operating system should not even be in the discussion unless the idea is that you should be able to handle ARCH to be able to run Manjaro. THEN I would agree with above statement. Is that the case Manjaro?
From manjaro dot com:
It is user-friendly and suitable for those new to computers
I argue this is EXACTLY on topic.
Pamac is confusing AND breaking installs on stable.
Is the reason “the user is wrong because they should know better” or “this is not what we intend to happen, it was a HUGE mistake that we will analyze and hopefully never happen again”?
■■■■ happens, but it shouldn’t take 2 weeks, 5 patches to fix, if it is a critical system component, and the bug still found its way to stable. An apology and “lesson learned” would be appropriate.
I really hope we won’t get a de ja vu with grub in a couple of weeks.
If you want to know what happened …
The issue was a single person trying to close a long open security bug also made mistakes and pushed the changes to all branches.
Thats going beyond general summation of pamac.
I have never used it, never will … theres always been something … it took me well over a year to successfully argue that it should not use cascade removal by default (which was constantly breaking peoples systems) … I’m not kidding … multiple threads and discussions and quotes of the archwiki:
To remove a package, its dependencies and all the packages that depend on the target package:
Warning: This operation is recursive, and must be used with care since it can remove many potentially needed packages.
And its always been a stated concept that “pamac will replace pacman” … it wont. Not successfully anyways, and if it is ever an enacted ecosystem decision … then manjaro will be worse off and less a few users for it.
btw.:
a) seems this isn’t the first time that this serious mistake happened.
b) claiming to be a user-friendly os for newcomers is a tough statement and there is no excuse to let them alone if such a bug happens.
