as the title states why does manjaro use pamac over pacman?
wouldn’t it be easier to maintain just a graphical frontend to pacman rather than a cli and gui?
Manjaro uses Pacman. Pamac is there if you want it (and it also brings support for snaps, flatpack, and the AUR).
No, since pacman only takes care on Manjaro’s repos.
1 Like
Pamac started as a graphical frontend for maintaining applications.
Over the years @guinux has developed and fine tuned pamac and it is now capable of handling all package related tasks on Manjaro including complex AUR dependencies using the CLI.
6 Likes
If I’m having some conflicts while updating the system with pacman, I just use pamac.
If the program I want to install has generic name and I get bunch of search results with pacman, I use pamac to get a nice GUI interface.
And I guess the majority of people use it as update notifier, once you get the notification you update via pacman.
Pacman can’t install/build aur packages so if you use Pacman you need an aur helper like yay. So its simpler to just have pamac in your analogy. Pamac also has cli so you can use gui or cli with pamac.
According to me and how I understand it:
Pacman is Arch’s pacakage manager. It was designed and built for Arch.
Pamac is Manjaro’s package manager. I’s designed and built for Manjaro.
And as everyone knows, or should know, Manjaro is not Arch. In the same way Pamac is not Pacman. Just as Manjaro is different than Arch, has a lot of customizations that make it different, easier, than managing the packages with Pacman.
And since Manjaro has its roots in Arch, Pacman does still work. But since it isn’t Pamac, it doesn’t have all the customizations that make it easier than Pacman.
Many people around me praise manjaro because it also has a graphical installer.
Primarily it is not a question of good or better but to offer these people an alternative.
I think Manjaro is taking a clever second path with pamac.
Ubuntu is not debian but it still uses pacman. Why keep pacman if pamac is the official package manager for manjaro?
No, it uses APT. That’s their choice.
Pamac does use libalpm though (I think that’s the right library name.) which is part of Arch. As I mentioned, Pamac has customizations for Manjaro that Pacman doesn’t.
Like I said, Manjaro has it’s roots in Arch, but it’s not Arch.Pamac has it’s roots in Pacman, but it’s not Pacman.
You can’t get rid of pacman without reinventing the wheel. As an Arch based distro Manjaro needs pacman. Or else on top of Pamac Manjaro would need to recreate all the libraries it is based on. But I think people already replied to your questions, I’m not sure where you’re going now…
2 Likes
I use pamac over pacman mostly as I’m lazy.I like being able to click on pamac to update or install something and I’m done.Like most here I know my way around the terminal but why when I can open pamac and have it install it.I use the unstable branch so usually I will have updates everyday and pamac is just simple to use.
oops! 
I meant to say that ubuntu still uses apt
Ok, then marking this as solved. Thanks for the explanations!
Hehehe.
it also uses aptitude as well as apt doesn’t it ? There are so many distros and most of them have multiple package managers, thats one of the things that make linux great choice
This topic was automatically closed 2 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.