• bequirtle@lemmy.world
    81·
    3 hours ago

    IME, KDE Discover and similar app stores are so unreliable, telling beginners to use them is akin to harmful misinformation

    If you need a GUI software manager, my suggestion is to not use arch

    • Nalivai@lemmy.world
      21·
      2 hours ago

      If you need a GUI software manager, my suggestion is to not use arch

      Arch is actually great for beginners, way better than usual alternatives like Ubuntu for example. If you need a GUI software manager, Arch or Arch derivatives are still better than a lot of the rest.
      Besides, a lot of people like fancy GUIs, nothing wrong with that. You’re right that graphic app stores aren’t amazing, but that’s shouldn’t be the norm then. I will still do everything in CLI, but I will vehemently defend our less technically advanced bretheren’s right to click their mouse on the colourful buttons

      • bequirtle@lemmy.world
        1·
        1 hour ago

        To be clear I’m not against GUI software managers, just had bad experiences with KDE Discover… and I don’t trust anyone who recommends Arch for beginners…

        If you never want to see a terminal just use Mint or whatever

    • SpongyAneurysm@feddit.org
      3·
      3 hours ago

      Hard agree. I always struggled when using Discover, as a Beginner. Don’t know if I could make it work now as a more experienced user, Because I don’t use it and don’t have a need to. Learning how to use ‘pacman -S $pkg_name’ was super simple and is very fast. Sure I don’t have a nice GUI, that lets me browse what apps are there to be installed, but I have a webbrowser for that.

  • Speiser0@feddit.org
    26·
    12 hours ago

    Installing something on arch is easy imo. The CLI is simple and well enough documented, and the package build system is easy to use. For comparison with ubuntu: pacman -S name is not harder than apt install name. And try to install something on ubuntu if it’s not in the official package repos.

    • OwOarchist@pawb.socialEnglish
      2·
      3 hours ago

      ubuntu: pacman -S name is not harder than apt install name.

      Eh, it’s a teensy bit harder, since you have to remember what -S means, rather than the easy to remember and plain English ‘install’. But, yeah, not much of a difference.

      And try to install something on ubuntu if it’s not in the official package repos.

      1: Go to that something’s website.

      2: look for their download/install instructions page, scroll to Linux instructions if necessary.

      3: Install instructions for Debian/Ubuntu are usually the first one listed, and typically just consist of a few commands you can copy and paste over without modifying.

      It isn’t particularly difficult in most cases.

      • Nalivai@lemmy.world
        2·
        2 hours ago

        4: those commands were written for previous version of Ubuntu and now dependency tree doesn’t compute, also one of the commands is to add their custom repo, and you don’t have keys for it so it doesn’t work anyway. You try to remove the bad repo and now your apt is all fucked. You regenerate your repo list, googled the package and your version name, random stackexchage page gave you their live repo, but it needs a newer version of a library that incompatible with 54 of something that you already have. You learn about snap, installed 43Gb of something, it exists but still doesn’t really work because package maintaiers didn’t actually move it to snap, it was someone else. By this point you copy-pasted so many commands into your terminal you afraid it gained sentience. You call your more computer literate friend, he starts saying something about incompatible dependancies, containers, and you don’t really understand much. By the end, you decide that you didn’t actually want the software.
        Later you discover that your sound doesn’t work anymore, and there is an error when you reboot.

        Good ending: you installed Arch, installed yay and instead of remembering unmemorable -S you just do yay package_name and you’re very happy with your choices.

      • ekZepp@lemmy.worldEnglish
        5·
        10 hours ago

        -S, --sync

        Synchronize packages. Packages are installed directly from the remote repositories, including all dependencies required to run the packages.

        • floquant@lemmy.dbzer0.com
          4·
          4 hours ago

          Technically correct answer but not super helpful imo. yay <package name> starts a search from which you enter your selection(s) from matches. yay -S <package name> installs the package directly, errors if it’s not found

  • Brokkr@lemmy.world
    12·
    15 hours ago

    I’m not an expert, but I thought on Arch you are specifically not supposed to use the discover store because it can cause partial updates which can in turn cause major problems.

    However, the point still stands, pacman and the AUR are easy and have nearly everything.

    • anyhow2503@lemmy.world
      14·
      13 hours ago

      The AUR is a great resource but it’s also being sold as a package repository users don’t need to actively think about or understand. I honestly think malware is going to be much more common on the AUR if we aren’t careful.

      • copygirl@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
        2·
        9 hours ago

        I keep hearing this claim online but the Arch bible (which you really should be familiar with if you use Arch) and pretty much everyone that knows anything will tell you that the AUR is useful, but not something to blindly use. I recommend everyone check the PKGBUILD, verify the source URLs are correct, and check the diffs when updating. It’s not that much effort.

        And since it comes from a single (user) package repository, you’ll probably have hundreds of people doing the same, or even going a step or two further and looking into the code, reporting the package if anything bad is going on. Still miles better than downloading .exe files you find from a Google search, even if you were lazy and didn’t do the aforementioned checks. (But if you don’t do that, you should probably just use Flatpaks or similar.)

        • anyhow2503@lemmy.world
          5·
          8 hours ago

          All official resources, Arch maintainers and high quality guides have been putting a ton of effort into teaching people how to use the AUR safely. That hasn’t stopped some people, even back before Arch got really popular, but you can’t reach everyone. Alternative package managers and pacman wrappers made the AUR a lot more accessible, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but there are good reasons for all the caution. Combine that with Arch increasing in popularity and getting picked up by all the shitty influencers and you get a lot of people ,who don’t know what they’re doing, installing everything from the AUR with their CLI/GUI of choice. Then you’ve got Arch derivatives making AUR packages easily accessible from the start, bad advice on places like reddit etc.

          Long story short: it seems that over the years whenever I check in, users that barely know how it works are happily installing random shit from random people on the AUR because they saw it in a YT video or something.

          • copygirl@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
            1·
            8 hours ago

            That makes sense, but what’s the alternative here? Linux is freedom, so that means freedom to run / install anything you want, including malware if you’re not careful. Maybe if you discourage people from using the AUR, they will install it through other means, like a developer-provided Flatpak or AppImage. But if that’s not available or doesn’t work, then it’s nothing (= sad user), or you’re back to “Google, then download an .exe the first thing you can run” or just curl | sh. Is that better? (Assuming we’re still talking about the kind of people who would skip vetting what they install.)

            • anyhow2503@lemmy.world
              1·
              4 hours ago

              I mean, yeah that would be my solution. I get that the AUR is attractive, precisely because it has a low barrier for anyone to submit their PKGBUILD. The level of oversight and verification is just a bit too low to recommend it to an average user, without a lot of caution. You’ve mentioned some alternatives that fall on different points along the spectrum of delivering software. Something like flatpak is a much more reliable tool in the hands of someone who just wants a GUI app and not think about how it gets to their desktop. For everything else that isn’t part of your distros repositories, there’s really not a good noob-friendly solution that doesn’t carry a big potential risk. Most distros have third-party repositories that use the same underlying tools to deliver software, but are less strict about QA and stuff. This is kind of a bad fit for rolling release distros in my opinion and is probably one of the reasons the AUR is so hands-off and DIY oriented.

              There’s probably a better way to handle this, but I don’t think it’s an easy thing to solve (especially for the rolling release model) and the AUR isn’t really appropriate for mass-consumption by average users. Also, there will always be a certain point beyond which you’re on your own, it’s just not feasible to have reliable, safe, distro-agnostic packaging for every piece of software out there.

    • MousePotatoDoesStuff@lemmy.worldOP
      5·
      14 hours ago

      Eh. I haven’t had issues for a few months and I back up my files on a weekly basis and -Syu once or twice a month. Worst case scenario, I’ll just reinstall and restore from backup.

      Also, I mainly use Discover for high level stuff like browsers and IDEs.

        • NathanUp@lemmy.mlEnglish
          1·
          2 hours ago

          IMO it’s overblown. If you even have an issue at all, 99.99% of the time it’s user error. And to mitigate that, you just use timeshift with BTRFS and snapshots on GRUB.

        • TheOneCurly@feddit.onlineEnglish
          7·
          13 hours ago

          Yeah but imagine reading about a new release of something and it appearing in your updates the same day. Shiny new software every day is addicting.

          • sudoMakeUser@sh.itjust.works
            4·
            13 hours ago

            On the flip side, reading about an exploited vulnerability in a package and then realizing your machine isn’t affected because Debian has an outdated package in it’s repo

          • Monstrosity@lemmy.today
            2·
            11 hours ago

            You’re not wrong. That said my broke ass can’t afford cutting edge hardware so most of the time it doesn’t matter.

            When it does, I can usually compensate with either a NixOs profile install, a container of some sort (or Flatpak), or just building the emefferr from source.

      • Ooops@feddit.org
        3·
        13 hours ago

        Flatpak just working would be a nice thing. Everytime I try they fuck something new up…

        (Last time I thought about installing Steam via Flatpak on Arch to get rid of all the multilib 32bit stuff not needed for aynthing else anymore it worked for nearly 4 days. Then flatpak update randomly uninstalled its nvidia drivers because an “update” removing the old package first, then realizing it can’t find the new one make total sense of course.)

          • Ooops@feddit.org
            1·
            46 minutes ago

            Yeah, I heard that several times but decided to try it anyway.

            But I expected problems with Steam not with flatpak itself just removing the very same graphics driver it had just installed as a dependency…

  • rtxn@lemmy.worldM
    9·
    15 hours ago

    The original image gives me strong “Shepard, Tali, and Garrus doing shenanigans” vibes.

  • Hiro8811@lemmy.world
    18·
    12 hours ago

    I get where most comments saying to use pacman or yay but it’s not a good idea to install everything with terminal. Also KDE discover uses flathub and into bazaar is a better client for it.

    • Shanmugha@lemmy.world
      51·
      8 hours ago

      Downvotes you already have, so I will restrict myself to explaining:

      • CLI is the only way I’ve ever installed anything in a Linux OS. Has served me well for a decade or more
      • doing stuff without knowing what you are doing is going to land you in a mess, no matter how hard GUI tool devs are trying to prevent that
      • Hiro8811@lemmy.world
        21·
        4 hours ago

        Top notch logic here. Driving a car without knowing the inner workings of the car will land you in a mess.

  • PointyFluff@lemmy.ml
    225·
    12 hours ago

    Imagine being so inept that you can’t use a terminal to install a terminal-based update. Arch users are posers and script kiddies and need to STFU

    • Xenny@lemmy.world
      5·
      5 hours ago

      Wow look. It’s the reason that linux market share is as low as it fucking is.

      Like dude, maybe people can use the terminal just fine but prefer the GUI. What if having the GUI it really opens up accessibility to less technically competent users And promotes adoption of the OS across the board?

      What if using this GUI leads to users using the terminal for more complex tasks? Have you ever thought of that??

      Or are you too busy being some elitist snob in your basement?