Yet again, after the latest update, the forum has many posts from people complaining that they were doing the upgrade via the GUI, that crashed and they’ve been left with a broken system.
Perhaps it would be a good idea if users open the GUI for a significant upgrade (say, including kernels, system libraries, desktop elements, etc) rather than a smaller one (say, a new Firefox version) a pop-up required them to acknowledge that they understand the risks, with a message strongly recommending using a TTY (with a link to instructions on the Wiki).
Though given that a lot of people will probably just click through it without even reading it, I can’t help thinking it might be even better to completely prevent major updates via the GUI.
Automatically opening the commandline output might help. But after reinstating the community repo, i fear it will not happen. They made it even simpler for ignorants to survive.
Poll in [Stable Update] 2025-05-04 shows 89% of users (235 out of 264 total) had no issue with update. That may include a number of users where pamac GUI crashed but the daemon continued update in the background, and the user did not panic and force a restart
Not sure that’s gonna work. I just saw a guy complain bitterly that he had no way of going back to his desktop after switching to a TTY… it’s hard to make stuff foolproof.
I don’t bother going to a TTY, I just use Konsole (too damn lazy) but I do have snapshots to fall back on.
That’s the nature of a forum. Most people report only if problems occur. But you need to compare it to the total amount of users never having issues and therefore do not need to report it.
My wife is using the GUI all the time. Installation is now 3 1/2 years old, no issues so far (apart from slow mirrors from time to time, which also occurs while using pacman)
I can search while using “add/remove software”. There is the search icon on the top left which opens the search bar in the middle of the title bar.
Searching for plexHTPC should show you two versions, AUR and Flatpak.
If I search flatpak in terminal it shows fuzzy results…
❯ flatpak install plexhtpc
Looking for matches…
Remotes found with refs similar to ‘plexhtpc’:
1) ‘flathub’ (system)
2) ‘flathub’ (user)
Which do you want to use (0 to abort)? [0-2]:
Obviously, now that I actually want to do a search in add/remove programs to show that plexhtpc will ONLY show one result, the pamac-manager GUI isn’t showing up at all.
Ok, it was waiting (30 seconds later…).
plexhtpc - blank, no results??? WTF?
If I search plex-HTPC I find the AUR (plex-htpc)… this is as expected (though annoying) and it isn’t found by typing plexhtpc. Same story if you try using yay, or pamac search plexhtpc.
yay plex-htpc
1 aur/plex-htpc 1.70.1.303-4 (+1 0.01) (Installed)
Plex HTPC client for linux
pamac search plex-htpc
plex-htpc 1.70.1.303-4 [Installed] AUR
Plex HTPC client for linux
So really, the ‘Software Centre’ expects very precise input and you can’t easily get results… I would expect to see a result for both Plex-HTPC AUR and Flatpak together.
So in the GUI, now, try typing ‘HTPC’ - BINGO!!! it takes a special kind of Genius to find anything there
So the TL;DR from this:
Use a web browser to search, then use the terminal to install.
The defaults (aur disabled etc.) are pretty safe. The problem is when there is an update for pamac itself and it has to be closed midupdate, which does not work smoothly always. And since pamac has a ton of other problems…just use pacman in terminal for the monthly updates.
Most new users do not read anything until they experience a problem.
Some users don’t even read update announcements before complaining
When community repository was migrated to extra (2 years ago) It was reported as a known Issue in subsequent update announcements. and some forum users were good at spotting when a new user had failed to remove community.db
Recent comments from Unstable and Testing branch update suggest that users on Stable will have 3 .pacnew files (hosts.pacnew, passwd.pacnew and shells.pacnew) in the near future
Thanks, now it makes sense.
When i am trying to find the app in my pamac GUI, the search does not return any results. And i have AUR enabled (but not flatpak)
And instead of educating the user base on account of taking responsibility, the project leader decided to just put an empty community.db back on the servers.
The template for the project leader’s opening post for every new Stable Updates thread warns people to check their .pacnew files, but in the same breath, he bluntly and stupidly announces that he personally never tends to his .pacnews.
There are two ways of doing something: the right way, and the wrong way. In this case, the right way yields better educated and more responsible users, and the wrong way yields more potential customers for an associated business venture in Germany.
I think we can both see which way has been chosen.
There are more than 2 ways… and for much of the time you can probably get away with doing stuff the wrong way as long as you have your snapshots/backups/fairly recent ISO…
But obviously, then, there’s the ‘IDGAF’ way - which is going to lead to more problems.
While I agree in essence, it does rather seem a behavioural issue than much else. I mean to say; one can recommend what you describe until the proverbial cows come home, but user habits are always difficult to change.
Not just user habits, but also user stubbornness. And it doesn’t help anyone one bit if the arguably most influential figurehead in this community stupidly decides to set the wrong example.
The GUI works just fine for the majority of users.
Indeed in all the time I’ve used the pamac GUI I have not experienced a single issue doing any sort of update, nor has my partner on her very different hardware.
My personal policy is to use the GUI, it has proven to be non problematic, in all the time I’ve been using Manjaro.
I suspect the issue, is not the pamac GUI, but some thing done or left undone by those users who end up having issues.
