Hi all,
I did search the forum for this, but didn’t see any questions along these lines.
Newb here. Just installed Manjaro Plasma this morning after 7 years on Linux Mint.
I fire up the UI for add/remove software (I think it’s called Pamac… is that right?) and it only seems to show software which is currently installed.
What do I need to do to search for, and install, software from the web, please?
Cheers.
Use pacman on the command line. It’s not scary.
Welcome to the forum! 
Yes. As you noticed, it’s menu item is Add/Remove Software. See Pamac - Manjaro for more info.
There are three tabs on top: Browse, Installed and Updates. Click the search 
icon to search.
What software? Programs are installed with package managers such as Pamac or Pacman like Ben mentioned above. Software is not normally downloaded from the web except for things like AppImages or Flatpaks. Pamac can handle the latter as well as Snaps.
Thanks for the speedy response!
I HAVE tried the magnifying glass, but whenever I search for something (let’s take “Chrome” as an example), it returns a “No packages found” message.
I’m sure I’m missing something simple and obvious! 
By default you won’t be able to install Chrome because it’s not in the repositories. You would need to enable Flatpak or AUR first. However, there should be at least something showing up (e.g. xf86-video-openchrome), so there might be an issue with your setup. What is the output of the following command?
pamac search chrome
Also note that linux is case-sensitive.
And packages generally dont use capitalization.
Aside from it being outside the regular repoistories the package name is google-chrome.
(in my tests of an aur helper ‘Chrome’ returns only a handful of packages that state ‘Chrome’ in the descriptions)
1 Like
Absolutely nothing!
I typed it in at the terminal, hit enter, and it just gave me a new line.
Alright, let’s try doing a force refresh of your database. Enter the following and then try again:
sudo pacman -Syyu
Edit: fix command as per @cscs below
Dont upgrade without refreshing and dont refresh without upgrading …
sudo pacman -Syyu
(though the extra y is likely unnecessary)
And yeah … dont install new packages without doing both first.
1 Like
Ummm… I started the process before I saw this message. Hope I will be ok.
Its fine in this case we can tell you to do the upgrade right after:
sudo pacman -Syu
(you will notice that while the y is passed you wont have to update the repos… but you may be presented with package upgrades)
Maybe in this you can see how a problem could occur - maybe you synced and installed new software based on that sync … while all of your installed libraries and things are not upgraded.
So we avoid that by always syncing and upgrading together.
1 Like
You know you could be speaking a foreign language right now, yeah?
I’m guessing the ‘u’ in -Syu is ‘upgrade’?
S Sync
y refresh
y (again) hard refresh
u upgrade
Many answers lie in man pacman. But for most things you can just use Pamac and not have to worry about learning the many different commands.
1 Like
Thanks!
So are things working now?
Yes, they are! Thanks one and all!
This topic was automatically closed 2 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.