I’m on a fresh installation of Manjaro and I am a complete Linux noob. I tinkered a bit before in a VM with Ubuntu 20.04 but besides that I’m clueless. I wanted to install Firefox so I searched it up and the wiki told me to use the command pamac install firefox. It wouldn’t work without sudo so I ran pamac install firefox. It gave me a prompt to which I typed in Y and then it started a process. At the bottom of the terminal after generating a bunch of lines it said Downloading… 16/764mb… (x amount of time remaining). Sorry, I don’t remember the exact syntax.
Is this an appropriate amount of time to install Firefox? In the end it took about an hour after I left the computer alone, but I just figured Firefox shouldn’t take that much disk space. If it is supposed to be 764mb then I have no issue but I just want to be sure.
Firefox is nowhere near that size. As @Yochanan mentioned, there must have been updates that needed installing first. When you do a fresh install of Manjaro, or any system that is Arch-based/related from an iso, you should always do sudo pacman -Syu in a terminal as the first thing you do. There may have been updates since the iso was released and these must be taken care of first before you start installing individual pieces of software.
Once you are up to date then installing most software is very quick. The exception to this is installing packages from the AUR because these have to be assembled from the source packages rather than pre-compiled binaries that are in the regular Manjaro repositories. This takes a lot longer sometimes.
Thank you for the help, everybody! However, if these commands are necessary to have a user friendly experience, shouldn’t they be part of the manual or ran by default? My main issue with Linux overall has been headaches because of commands just to configure simple things like volume control and brightness. But sincerely, thank you for the advice, I appreciate it