My use of manjaro involves half a dozen workspaces with one or more terminals, web browsers and thunar open in most. Because it takes about an hour to restore all the apps to my required format and layout after a reboot I sometimes do not reboot when pamac suggests it; this delay can sometimes extend to a few days and I sometimes forget whether or not a reboot is required. Would it be possible to modify the panel icon, perhaps with, say, an orange bar, to indicate a reboot is required?
Also, to indicate after a new update during this period that a reboot is pending - eg debian uses wording something like “a reboot is required for this or a previous update”.
When a package fails to update, as for example a recent AUR instance of pdfview which lacked a dependancy, the icon remains red. This means repeated checks on the icon to see if any extra packages are also due for update. In such cases, could the icon be, say, pink instead of red?
Another change I would like to see is to the search feature. It is very frustrating that a search cannot (apparently) be made for multiple words and the result of a search is often a very long list. On my web sites I include an option to search for all words entered, any word entered, or for the exact match of words. Would that be feasible in some way for pamac?
you can combine the “pamac search” function with grep or egrep and create your own skript to automate it.
the tools are already there to fullfill your wishes.
why to overbloath everything ? use the existing, they are more than powerfull enough.
It would be far more logical to only update your system when you can make the time for it, rather than update the system while you’re in the middle of working.
Besides, the safest way to update/upgrade is always to completely log out of your desktop environment and run the update/upgrade process from within a tty. That way, the least amount of shared libraries will be in use that might get overwritten during the update/upgrade.
Any update that includes the kernel, glibc or systemd requires a reboot, and considering that Manjaro bundles the updates together, this will apply to 99.99% of all bundled updates.
Please be advised that Manjaro is not a set-and-forget distribution, and that some commitment and responsibility are required.
touche, that’s a different construction-site. i agree a more complex search function that would check into the descriptions of the packages would give an effort.
I am aware of the premises behind manjaro. I have been using it for several years and moved from mint and ubuntu which I used before that for several more years. I am also very familiar with using terminal but prefer not to for many operations.
Your suggestion of logging out for every update is not feaasible - if it does NOT require a reboot I still have to waste an hour restoring everything.
If you are after something to remind you to reboot, why not just create a simple script that will send a reminder notification to reboot to your desktop every minute (or whatever):
#!/bin/bash
while true; do
notify-send "Make sure you reboot as you have updated your system"
sleep 1m
done
exit 0
Not requiring a reboot would only happen in 0.01% of the cases, then. And like I said, don’t update your system while you’re working. No one says you have to update right away.
Besides, you may want to take your time for reading the Stable Updates thread before updating, because there will be important information in there, such as for instance — as with the transition to Plasma 6 and GNOME 46 — that you have to run the update from a tty.
So the responsibility is yours. You cannot expect the developers to work around your unwillingness. Besides, that is unfeasible too, considering that this is a rolling-release distribution.
So perhaps you will be better off with Mint, Ubuntu, or whatever other non-rolling distro. Nobody’s forcing you to use Manjaro, but if you are going to be using it, then please do so responsibly.
GNU/Linux isn’t user-unfriendly. It simply asks for its users to be a little more computer-friendly.
i’ve got a different opinion, a more better search function that would check the descriptions of the packages in the gui could improve searching in a favor way. it’s very often that you need to dig the www first for an applications-name to find it afterwards in the packet-manager. there is a good potential to improve pamac/pacman if the search would check the package-descriptions more detailed into keywords.
yes we’re used to the state-of-the art like it is now but i agree that there is some more potential.
I was talking of the bundled updates, not of small updates for packages like chromium or firefox. In 99.99% of the cases, a bundled update will include a new kernel.
This I will agree on, and for good measure, this request should be posted at pamac’s GitLab page, because the pamac developers might miss it if it’s only posted here at the forum.
Why? The use of pamac is conducive to updating small sets of packages. The 300-package update is relatively rare. Which is why I sometimes forget the reboot is due.
Not quite. They come about on average twice a month. It just so happened to be that, given how incisive upgrading from Plasma 5 to Plasma 6 and from GNOME 45 to GNOME 46 was, there were two whole months between this upgrade and the previous bundled update. But on average it’s twice a month, and in December 2023 it was even every single week.
At the risk of oversimplifying the perceived issue, I’d suggest perhaps a change of behaviour might resolve much of what the OP has highlighted.
For example; perform an update (if an update is available) only before or after a productive days’ work. In this way, there is no interruption; apart from the possible visual annoyance of an update notification.
That said, additional visual cues might be a nice touch; such as the changing icon colour of the Octopi Notifier, for example.
Whether (or not) something similar is warranted for Pamac Manager, I can’t say, however, if Manjaro (corp) still desires to push Pamac as being noob-friendly, perhaps it’s at least worth consideration.
Improved search and maybe some tweaking in the icon states would be nice.
All the rest is not necessary and contradicts the whole way the system works. Not bothering to restart is a problem of the user (it is bad maintanance), not pamac.
