Best way to install/uninstall programs

Hi have been playing around for the last couple of days just getting used to the system, can not see myself going back to ubuntu at this point really starting to dig the gnome layout, do not see the point of having a dock any more the super key is much easier so Kudos to the endeavour os team

One thing I am unsure on is installing/uninstalling programs

For instance I type yay -Ss kodi - it will bring up a list of programs I know what I am looking for but it does not really tell me much - its hard to describe what I mean

AUR is better ie the comments let me know the general state of the program and the latest updates - is this the preferred way to install programs?

Pacman very similar to yay for programs I dont really understand this one :anguished:

Now deleting programs, earlier I tried to delete a build of tvheadend 4.3 using the sudo pacman -R tvheadend

I then installed tvheadend 4.28 but my config files were still present when I installed a different version of the program, does the -R command do the same thing as ‘sudo apt purge’

As you can tell I am still learning, but I keep hearing most ubuntu users migrate to arch eventually so it obviously works I just need a month at it to understand it correctly

Another thing earlier i used the ‘rm -r’ command earlier and it just spammed the letter ‘y’ for about 20 minutes to delete a package, obviously its faster to go into files and delete but that was a bit puzzling

I really do like endeavour os its just different from sudo apt get

pacman is the real package manager.

yay is a wrapper that uses pacman to manage packages from the repos but can also install/update AUR packages.

pacman will remove packages and any files associated with those packages. However, if the config files are in your home directory or are generated by running the program they will not be removed.

You can use pacman -Rn but all that does is not generate .pacsave files for key configs. It doesn’t do what most people think it does.

I have no idea what you did there but you probably shouldn’t use rm -r to delete a package.

3 Likes

(post deleted by author)

When i used the rm -r command it asked me did i want to delete the packages about 5 times then a screen with continuous ‘y’ as if it was deleting stuff one by one

Good point about the config files, I did not think about it that way

One of the best “features” of Archlinux is ArchWiki:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Pacman

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Pacman/Rosetta

:open_book:

2 Likes

The n only effects things that are in the backup array of the PKGBUILD. In the grand scheme of things it is a relatively small amount of files that will be impacted. Without the n, it still removes the file, it just creates a backup of it with the extension .pacsave

The s portion of that command also removes the package(s) dependencies.

1 Like

rm doesn’t remove packages, it deletes files.

Hi Dalto,

Do you have any recommendations on what method you would use to determine if an application has created configuration files\folders in the or /.config folder? I have a hard time giving advice for this kind of thing to help someone clean up when uninstalling an application.

As a technical person, I will usually read through the issues reported if there is an open source project. Sometimes there are clues in the Arch Wiki. For persons who don’t work in the software industry it can be a bit challenging.

In most cases, you can just look. They are usually named something fairly obvious unless it is something like a DE which keeps files over the place.

For example, the configs for yay are in a ~/.config/yay and the settings for vivaldi are in ~/.config/vivaldi.

That being said, I don’t usually waste time finding and removing config files when I remove applications. They are usually small text files which take up little to no space and don’t really cause any other issues.

1 Like

I currently have version 4.3 of tvheadend installed with version 4.2.8 config files present

I want to totally purge version 4.2 and reinstall 4.3 as a fresh install

if i use the command ‘find .hts’ (where tvheadend config files are) it shows me all .hts files and one of them is .hts/tvheadend/backup/4.2.8.tar.bz2

Where is this file as it does not show you what directory it is in it just lists all .hts files

Sorry its a bit of a vague question I know

Files/directories that start with . are hidden.

With ls use -a to see them. With the file manager enable the showing of hidden files.

Can I ask one more question if I install a package from AUR

Once I have installed the package is the folder in my ‘home’ directory the program files? do I just leave those files as is ie I dont need to delete them

Can you be more specific? How did you install the AUR package and which files are you referring to?

for instance ‘yay’ I installed from AUR, i use the git clone command then cd into the folder and use makepkg -si

I now have several folders for various programs I have installed this way in my home folder one being ‘yay’

yay
yay2

Two things:

  • Yes, you can delete the files in the folder you used to git clone and build.
  • On Endeavouros, yay is in the repos, you can just install it like any other package.

Newbie here…

I use Pamac for install/uninstall programs and endeavour’s welcome app for updating the system.

I am trying to get myself familiar with using the terminal, although I suspect most long term gnu/linux users probably use the gui more?

There are tasks which are more suited to GUI, tasks which are more suited to CLI, and tasks that can be done either way with similar ease, for which GUI or CLI is a matter of preference.

Package management on Arch (and EndeavourOS) is best done through the terminal, using the default package manager, pacman. There is no doubt about that. A good AUR helper like yay or paru is also very convenient.

People who do it through GUI are doing it wrongly, but they are responsible for their systems and are free to mess them up however they want. :wink:

3 Likes

image

1 Like

I’m sorry, but this forum does not render very well in Lynx.

It’s not my fault.

innocent_72

2 Likes