[HowTo] Enable AUR, Snap, Flatpak for beginners (through pamac GUI)

Difficulty: ★☆☆☆☆

This tutorial is for those who just installed Manjaro and do not know how to enable the AUR (Arch User Repository), Snap or Flatpak images through the pamac GUI.

Note: You are not required to enable these package managers, but they can provide more diversity of applications available to you as an user (Google chrome can for example be found under AUR).

  • AUR: contains Packages not maintained by the Manjaro team. Responsibility for errors lies with the package maintainer. File a bug there if you run into trouble.
  • Snap: Package system developed by Canonical (the company behind Ubuntu) to allow developers to create one package for all Linux distributions.
  • Flatpack: Same as snap but not controlled by Canonical but by the developer itself.
    • Disadvantages for both of the above are slower boot speed and higher disk space usage as a Snaps/Flatpacks contain the executable with all its libraries and 3 versions of a package are kept at all times (minimum value: 2)

Now onwards to the actions to perform:

  1. First of all, press the start menu (might look different from my setup). Gnome users might want to use the key (aka “Super” or “Windows” key on your keyboard) to open the start menu.

  2. Depending on your setup, you might need to search for Add/Remove Software. The icon looks like this:

  3. This opens up the pamac GUI, which is the GUI interface of the Manjaro pamac CLI command which in turn is the equivalent to the Arch pacman CLI command.
    Look at the triple line up to the right and click it:

  4. In the drop down menu, select the second lowest line, which should say “options” or something similar to that (mine is in Icelandic, sorry about that):

  5. Navigate to the application you want to enable and slide the slider to the right, these all look similar:

Note: If you can’t find these options, please make sure that the libpamac-flatpak-plugin and libpamac-snap-plugin are installed.

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