Thank you for all your replies. @fbodymechanic asks, “- what made you want to leave Debian.” The answer is simply that Debian does not have official support for the Pinebook Pro. I have Debian on my desktop. I always install a minimal Debian and use “tasksel” to install the GUI. Looking at EndeavourOS I found the installer script looked much like “tasksel” on Debian and so I chose to use it.
@pebcak suggested packagekit and the gnome plug in, which was just what I was looking for. Thank you very much.
Please don’t do this. While it technically works, using this method puts your system at risk.
packagekit has no ability to support manual intervention and this is often required to get the correct outcome. Using packagekit to install software or perform updates can and will leave you with a broken system on Arch-based distros.
If you want a graphical package manager, you can use pamac, bauh or octopi
I started out on Debian, still think Synaptic Package Manager is one of the best GUI package managers ever, but unfortunately, not available on Arch.
My suggestions are Pamac-all as others previously noted, or my fav is Bauh package manager. It also handles Flatpak/Snap/AUR installations and updates with ease. You can also integrate Bauh with Timeshift for backups, etc. It comes with a seperate Updates monitoring app for the taskbar if you choose…and you can switch out the icons for it (which I highly recommend, default icons are .) Have fun app hunting.
I’m not sure that is even true on Manjaro: back when I used Manjaro, most update announcements advised to update in the TTY using pacman -Syyu (something not necessary on Arch/EndeavourOS), and we’ve all seen videos like this (in fact, the word “brick” was censored on Manjaro forums ).
But more importantly, even if Pamac worked perfectly on Manjaro (maybe today it does, it’s been awhile since I used it), EndeavourOS is certainly not Manjaro.
This actually works a bit in reverse. The fact that is built for Manjaro actually makes it more prone to breakage than some of the other solutions. Not because they are doing something wrong, but because it targets the Manjaro repos and release cycles. There are times when it is broken on Arch but still works fine on Manjaro.
Yeah I should perhaps clarify here. As far as I am aware (!) Pamac was built by one of the Manjaro team and that was where it first surfaced. It is not part of Manjaro, it is merely a tool. Various versions are in the AUR. People can try them out, or not, and form their own opinions.
Manjaro does not use Pamac from the AUR, but has a build of it in its repos. Pamac comes preinstalled with every Manjaro flavour (a long time ago, Octopi was supplied with Manjaro KDE, but even there it was replaced with Pamac). I know the plan was to replace Pacman entirely with Pamac-cli, but I haven’t kept up with it even when I was using Manjaro, and certainly not now, when I no longer use it.
Personally, I removed Pamac from my Manjaro install, as I found it unreliable and annoying.
Not really for the sake of semantics (though that’s an interesting thing as well), but because it’s an interesting question to ask: is Pamac a defining feature of Manjaro or not?
pamac was born out pacman-gui might be pacman-gui , but was first a frondend of pacman with pkgbrowser x pacman , with the first pamac in python it advanced only was the pyhton rebuilds sometimes needed… but as keep up libalmp the fix is pretty long if i compare to octopi or other aur helperS…