Manjaro provides pamac (with the option of using AUR). The stalling “providing” prompt seems to be a bug. I had to kill it. Half baked it seems. I’m comparing this distro with Arch Linux and I am surprised how bad it got. If you take responsibility for your distro, I’d expect you to honor the errors. From this discussion, that does not seem so.
pamac works if you use the terminal. So either remove the UI and tell your users - we can’t control the UI - or fix it. Or remove pamac altogether, if you can’t handle it.
Moderation note: I have moved your post to a new thread, and considering the criticizing nature of your post — a bit acerbic as it may be — I’ve put it under the Feedback category. The thread you were initially replying to was not yours — which means that technically, you were hijacking it — and had already been abandoned two months ago.
Please don’t judge the whole distribution based upon one component — which, granted, opinions are divided on. Manjaro is an excellent distribution, and the fact that it’s curated — while Arch proper is not — makes it even more stable, in my personal opinion.
On account of pamac however, as you noted, most of the time, the CLI version of it works well, even though I personally only use it for the AUR stuff. For the repo packages, I use the tried-and-trusted pacman, and I strongly advocate using pacman in a tty session — as opposed to a terminal window — when it comes to a full-scale system update, like the one we had today.
The pamac GUI is however quite a problem child — I personally never use it — in part because its developer/maintainer isn’t always available for fixing things. But just as it has its detractors, it also has its fans, and thus the opinions about pamac within the community are highly divided. It’s a fact, and I’m not going to lie about it.
Hopefully however, this topic — and the one it was forked from — will soon reach the pamac developer’s attention. 
As a non-native speaker, I had to look up “acerbic”. I agree and would like to apologize.
Since I’ve been installing Manjaro onto about 20 devices used by people that can’t use the command line (and don’t have the money to buy the latest Windows hardware) I rely on the functioning of the pamac-manager - trying to avoid any AUR software if possible.
Nevertheless, I’ve experienced some other caveats lately, which I will write down in another thread.
2 Likes
Well, there is an alternative, but with a few caveats…:
-
It’s a
qt-based application, so it integrates best in KDE Plasma and perhaps LXQt, but not so much in GNOME, Xfce, Cinnamon, MATE, and the likes. But then again, thepamacGUI exists in two differentgtkversions — one of which will be dropped soon, or so I have been told — and that in turn means that they don’t integrate well withqt-based desktop environments either. -
It does not support Snaps or FlatPaks, but it does support the AUR, provided that you point it at the proper AUR helper —
yayis in the repositories.
This alternative is called octopi, and unlike pamac, it uses pacman directly, along with — as said already — an AUR helper. It also has a "News" tab, which presents you with the content of the opening posts of the most recent Announcements threads.
1 Like
acerbic - I noticed that word too
and had to pause a bit until the meaning came to me
acid - “Säure” in my language - it’s a bit corrosive, harsh … 
You could teach the people who can’t use the command line the use of pacman and yay instead of pamac.
Or you could “give” them Systems based upon Debian or Mint or Ubuntu - which do work much better for someone without knowledge of the command line, or who despises it.
Giving Arch or Manjaro to someone who doesn’t know and is not interested in what he is getting into
is not a good idea.
Not for you as the one they will be turning to,
not for them as well, of course.
1 Like
Just chiming in as a supportive gesture;
I don’t often use a graphical installer - pacman is my preference - but when I do, I find the combination of octopi and yay is very practical.
From the user perspective, the main difference is that (unlike pamac-manager) there are no pretty per-package icons, however, descriptions and other useful information remain easily accessible.
All package managers tend to be an acquired taste, but once used for a time, become second nature.
Regards.
1 Like
I use the Pamac GUI (Add/Remove Software) almost exclusively, and I have seen no issues when using it for AUR or Flatpak.
My partner uses only the Pamac GUI with the AUR enabled, she has never complained about any issues.
We both use KDE Plasma, and the version of Pamac is pamac-gtk3 v 10.7.0-1, the CLI version is pamac-cli v 11.7.3. But as I’ve already said, my partner doesn’t use it
1 Like
My wife is using Pamac all the time because she’s not used to the CLI.
Whenever Pamac stalls, she’s simply rebooting the device. Next attempt Pamac works as it should be.
I wanted to explain her how to use CLI and how to update the mirrors, but she denied it.
Better to explain to her how to shut down Pamac manager rather ran rebooting. Or perhaps giving her a script with a GUI front end to kill the stalled pamac manager, and perhaps add in a full update mirrors.
She is probably more likely to use it if there’s a button to press.
1 Like
Manjaro has 2 versions of pamac GUI pamac-gtk3 and pamac-gtk (gtk4)
package was split to 2 versions in 2023
No issues with pamac-gtk3 on my Xfce systems
Older installs of Xfce that are still using pamac-gtk may have issues
AFAIK there are no issues from using pamac-cli as a package manager
pamac update --no-aur
but I usually use GUI to update repository packages to check if there are issues that may affect Xfce updates for new users
2 Likes