I’m from the US, and just recently switched over from Windows 11. Installed right on New Years Eve.
I had a dual boot setup with Windows 10 & Ubuntu during school before, and after working a few years and switching laptops, I recently just decided to try another flavor of Linux. After tinkering with Ventoy testing out various distros, I chose Manjaro, mostly because reading the forums here and other community discussions, it seems like the sweet spot for me to learn more.
Current goal is to practice good documentation, so I’m recording my novice level setup process in a blog. Basic summary:
General config, like dark mode, touchpad scroll directions, the basics using the GUI
Installing what I can using the add/remove app GUI, like texmaker
Trying my hand at installing via terminal:
used pacman to install python-poetry
install base-devel using sudo pamac install base-devel git
Zoom via git clone and makepkg -si
Used a tarball install for Zotero
Getting native texlive from source using curl
Next will be figuring out how to install R Studio Positron
Question: How much of Arch linux forum applies to Manjaro? Is it similar to the Debian-Ubuntu relationship?
Never use sudo in combination with pamac, because it will mess up your permissions.
Well, for most part, yes, but Manjaro is a curated rolling-release distribution, and we do have several custom tools that were developed and are maintained by the Manjaro Team, as well as a couple of custom meta-packages, none of which you will find in Arch proper — e.g. pamac, mhwd, manjaro-settings-manager, et al.
On the other hand, should you ever feel inclined to join up at the Arch forum in order to request assistance, don’t tell them that you’re using Manjaro — seriously!
We also have our own Wiki, but for everything else you can follow the Arch Wiki.
pamac search positron
positron-ide-devel-bin 2025.12.0.167-1 AUR
A next-generation data science IDE. Positron is an extensible, polyglot
tool for writing code and exploring data in Python, R, and other
languages.
positron-bin 0.3.0-2 AUR
Desktop application that allows you to manage your movie and show
watchlist.(Prebuilt version.Use system-wide electron)
So, it can be installed via pamac’s GUI (make sure you have the AUR enabled in 3rd-party settings, and the base-devel package installed). You can build (install) it via the command line:
pamac build positron-ide-devel-bin
Edit: after checking what RStudio does, I realised you probably are after the IDE, not the movie watchlist app
I’ll be sure to jot this down in my notes! Thanks (Just ran pamac reinstall base-devel git and it asked for pw midway, I see the difference now.
I’ll configure this and give it a try thank you! Is this preferred over using git clone to pull from, say, https://aur.archlinux.org/zoom.git and then running makepkg -si?
That question is going to get you some conflicting answers.
Strictly speaking, as long as you do look at the PKGBUILD file to see what it pulls in, using pamac — or yay, which is another command-line tool for accessing the AUR, but which does not come installed by default — is perfectly fine.
Looking at the PKGBUILD is always advised, especially for packages with obscure names, because the AUR has already been abused by bad actors for the dissemination of malware.
P.S.: Your profile says that you’re on Plasma, so perhaps you might be more interested in octopi as a graphical package manager than in the gtk-based pamac GUI. octopi has a different look & feel — somewhat akin to Debian’s Synaptic — and it’s qt-based, like Plasma itself. It does however not handle Snaps or FlatPaks, if that’s your thing.
As your post content and responses generated are beyond that expected of the Welcome and introduce yourself topic, your posts and all those related have been moved to a dedicated Support topic, where your questions might better be answered.
Yes, because I’m the only one who recommends trizen
It’s good to take your first steps with git and make to understand what’s happening behind the scenes. However, this will become tedious over time and with the increasing number of packages.
Also, you might have to recompile one or two things after an update. For all of this, an AUR helper is recommended.
when I use git and make do application managers like yay recognize it as an installed application, or will I be keeping track of those myself manually?
So as an example, I installed Zoom via git and makepkg -si — what’s the appropriate way to remove it and reinstall using pacman? Zoom is installed at /usr/bin/zoom do I do rm -rf /usr/bin/zoom?
What’s the difference between using pacman vs yay vs pamac (with AUR enabled)?
If you installed it with makepkg then it is recorded in the database, and then you can simply remove it again with…
sudo pacman -R zoom
… (or zoom-git if that’s what the package was called).
pacman is the original and official Arch Linux Package Manager.
yay is a wrapper around pacman, which also offers access to the AUR — it will use makepkg in the background for building the package.
pamac is Manjaro’s own package manager, which uses the Arch Linux Package Manager format and database in the background, but it does not use pacman itself.
Cool! I found it (keeping it since I did that one via application manager).
I installed Zotero by downloading a tarball and putting it in /opt/zotero (following instructions from installation [Zotero Documentation]) I also did a symlink for the desktop file .
As @scotty65 suggested, I turned on AUR for pamac in the GUI. When I search, I see zotero is also hosted on AUR. but it’s not recorded as installed since I basically just unzipped a tarball — for removing this kind of install would I just remove the folder? (this one doesn’t show up in add/remove software)
That’s the thing of installing software manually vs using a package manager. I think the rule of thumb is to use when possible a package manager to install software (as a package). That makes software management significantly easier.
If some software is not in the official repos, I check the AUR to see if it is there and if still is a maintained package (check always the AUR webpage for the package with the comments). Installing from AUR is like building yourself the software but integrating it with the package manager (plus it can contain certain patches to work better in an Arch based distro).
If package is not in the AUR, then I have to consider do I want to maintain it for my system, because I have to remember that it is there, it does not update with the rest of my software through the package manager and if I want to remove it, I have to do it manually (many programs don’t have an “uninstaller”).
I think that this applies to whatever distro you choose to use. Always try to use a package first.
Yeah, of course. I forgot to mention alternatives to the distro’s official package format. I don’t use them, but they are a good alternative if something is not in official repos or AUR. At least management is still reasonable.
