Best way to install/uninstall programs

General system Newbie
23

My advice, for what it’s worth:

  1. Look in the official Arch repositories (“the repos”) first for the software you want to use. A good way to do so is to use the website. All of these packages will work on an upgraded Arch system (assuming the hardware requirements are met). These packages are all trustworthy (at least as trustworthy as Arch Linux is), and are already built for your convenience, so you can just install them with pacman.

  2. If the software you want to use is not in the repos, look in the Arch User Repository (AUR). The best way to search for a package is to use the AUR website. This also gives you a chance to look at the popularity of a package, the name of the maintainer and especially, the comments. If the package has changed the maintainer recently, or is not very popular, you should also closely inspect the PKGBUILD file as well as any other build files (like makefiles, scripts, etc), just in case there is something fishy there (this is extraordinarily rare, but there have been cases of malware being found in the AUR before). The packages in the AUR are not actually packages, like those in the repos: they are not pre-built, they just contain what you need to build a package yourself, locally. You can use yay to automate the process of building and installing the package from the AUR, or you can build it manually and then install it with pacman. After installing a package from the AUR, if you find it working well and think it is a useful package, consider voting for it on the AUR website. Packages that have many votes are considered for inclusion into the official repos, and voting is also a good way to let other users know what is a good package.

  1. Do not use Pamac, it’s rubbish. It’s name is also rubbish, so don’t confuse it with pacman.

  2. If the software you need cannot be found in the repos nor in the AUR (rarely, that happens to me), consider building it from source. If source is not available (proprietary software), there are usually AppImages available, as well as Flatpak. I would avoid these, unless really necessary.

  3. Do not use snaps. They are awful. Linux Mint is right about snaps.

7 Likes