this post was submitted on 19 Apr 2025
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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Agreed. The normal
pacman
CLI does have a comparatively much higher learning curve though compared to e.g. APT. It's not that hard to learn either but when you're scrolling over a long-ass manpage, you do not immediately realize from the headers which whizz by in a flash that -S (alias for --sync) is for installing from repos, -Ss is for searching from repos, -S does not by itself "synchronize" with repos by pulling newest repo package metadata because well that's not what we're "synchronize"-ing with and you have to add the "y" flag, -Su (remember to add "y"!) is for upgrading all packages instead of -U (alias for --upgrade), and -U is for installing a local package. Compare that to the APT/dpkg system's apt install, apt search, apt update, apt upgrade, and dpkg -i.Admittedly APT does need one to get behind the fact that there are different commands and that "update" and "upgrade" are different, but that's way less to remember (especially since
apt
is meant to be the interface for everything a user should do) compared to rememberingpacman
's interesting definitions of database, query, sync, upgrade, and maybe files, while the only definition unlikely to be guessed with APT IIRC is update vs upgrade. You're far more likely to need apacman
cheatsheet than anapt
cheatsheet.But in the end, let's all love libalpm, and the actual code behind that
pacman
interface.Pacman has many of the same issues git does. The DX is lacking, but all of the tools you need are there, and it’s reliable despite the lackluster experience.
Good thing there are community frontends.
@Aatube @LordKitsuna @Tea There are some things I'd like pacman to do automagically that it doesn't, like update the list of archives when they change. Tried to install a package the other day and it kept throwing 404 errors because I had a stale list of archive sites. It didn't tell me that, it didn't fix it automatically.
Always run
-Suy
before installing new packages. That's how it is supposed to be.