Use Octopi instead of Pamac in KDE Plasma

Feedback Feature Request
1

May I suggest IMHO that KDE Plasma may use Octopi instead of Pamac?

Moderator note: Please don’t hijack other requests

2

That’s how it used to be, but the Manjaro devs decided to make pamac the default package manager because it’s more versatile — octopi does not support FlatPaks, Snaps or AppImages, while pamac does. Also, octopi needs an AUR helper, while pamac can build the AUR packages itself.

Don’t get me wrong, I too prefer octopi over pamac — or actually, I prefer doing things from the command line — but pamac is Manjaro’s own creation, so it makes sense that they chose to make it the default.

3

I used octopi with Chakra and it didn’t handle updates very well, which was important since Chakra was a rolling release. That was a couple of years ago so maybe Octopi has been improved since then, I’m happy with the current pacman/pamac tools.

4

The golden rule — which nobody follows, of course — when using a rolling-release distribution…:

  • Always apply the bundled updates by way of the command line in a tty while completely logged out of your graphical environment, so that no shared libraries will be in use that will be overwritten by the update process.

Then, there are two additional golden rules specific to all Arch-based distributions…:

  • Always update the packages from the official repositories first, and update the AUR stuff, the Snaps, the FlatPaks and the AppImages afterwards.

  • Never interrupt the update process. You can interrupt the download of the packages — for instance if your mirror is too slow and you want to run pacman-mirrors first in order to switch to a faster mirror — but once the actual updating has begun and the downloaded packages have begun replacing the installed ones, you have to let it finish, or else you will render your system unbootable.

And lastly, the golden rule that applies to all distributions…:

  • Thou shalt make backups on another storage medium than the one your system is installed on. (Note: timeshift snapshots on btrfs are not backups! If your drive fails, then you still lose everything.)
4 Likes
5

I think that most users don’t know how to do this exactly. :grin:

1 Like
6

timeshift backups in my second nvme has saved me countless times from my driver making adventures (lots of kernel panics and system breaks). I would never run anything without timeshift

1 Like
7

Always I do,
I only have apps from official repo and few AUR
I do cpoy of my data, browsers and Thunderbird :smiley:

1 Like
8

For the benefit of passers-by, I usually do: CTRL + ALT + F2/F3 from the Login screen, and then F7 when finished, to return to the Gui. Cheers.

9

GTK project is being indirectly poisoned/degraded by those GNOME devs who are at the same time GTK devs, instead of improving pure GTK4, they decided to fork its components under LibAdwaita umbrella and push everything that fix/improve their GNOME desktop inside it, and finally locking any attempt to theme or modify the look of the library on other desktops.

For now, they are continuously playing with the look of LibAdwaita in every major release, so that every hobby theme will break after each upgrade, and they don’t even want to provide any standard API to control their changes. Even KDE devs are finding it hard to follow them and decided to not release any temporary working theme for LibAdwaita that will break in the future.

This kind of behavior pushed some desktops like COSMIC and Budgie to totally ditch GTK framework, and it was a good decision to embrace more open solutions.

So using a Qt based package manager will be much better for Manjaro project which include many desktops in their official and community flavors.

10

There was a Qt-based version of the pamac GUI in the making, but it lagged behind on the GTK version, and then the project got pushed onto the back burner somehow.

I have no idea whether it’s still considered a potentially viable candidate or whether it has completely become abandonware, though.

Nevertheless, it’s not the widget toolkit that bothers me about the pamac GUI — I use a GTK theme that looks very much like the stock kvantum theme, so it blends in well — but just the user interface itself.

Either way, like I said, I prefer doing things via the command line anyway. :man_shrugging: