Currently, I am using yay and pamac (The Manjaro’s GUI frontend) together, because for the most part, GUI is easier to use (even if I know the terminal command, GUI makes it easier to see and navigate the information), but the GUI is buggy, so I have to use the terminal yay, too.
My problems are:
When I try to find a good application by installing a several candidates, it is annoying to remember what I have installed to uninstall them later.
When I install a package, pamac asks me if I want to install some of its optional dependencies. If I install them there, they get uninstalled together when I uninstall the main package. But if I chose no optional dependencies there, and after the main package is installed, if I open pamac and then click one of the dependencies to install it, it is treated as “explicitly installed” and that optional dependency does not get automatically uninstalled when the main package is uninstalled.
And more. All these means that after a long use of the OS, there can be a lot of never-used-any-more packages that I have lost track of, and it will just bloat the system. I wish the package managers had some sort of history feature, like a web browser to allow the user to easily find which packages installed on a calendar, but I could not find such feature.
The only alternative I could think of is creating my own calendar and manually write down the names of the packages I installed. It can be done, but this kind of feel stupid in this day and age.
pacseek is always a good option, it works way better than pamac. I never get tired of promoting it. pacman -Qm will show you packages you have installed as another way of checking.
I am not sure how to help you with this one. Although, if they are GUI programs, you could find them in the menu.
Another alternative is to test in a VM so you don’t clutter up your install.
You should either install them as dependencies or convert them to dependencies after installation.
I think part of the challenge you have is that you are using pamac which only implements a portion of the functionality available to the package manager.
You can add --asdeps to pacman or yay to install something as a dependency.
To convert an already installed package you can use sudo pacman -D --asdeps packagname
Pacman in terminal or pacseek in terminal are by far your two top options by a long shot.
In general, the best advice is to avoid pamac at all costs, it’s bad with dependencies, you should never update with it since it also can’t do manual interventions. It breaks more often than an unmaintained Fiat since it’s designed for Manjaro and not Arch/Arch based distros.
It’s really good at searching for software if you really decide need something and scanning the repos though, so if you treat it like a search engine it may be a good fit for you. I always preferred just going right to the Arch website. Outside of that, it’s not worth your time.
Actually, pamac does support manual intervention. It is packagekit-based front-ends(discover, gnome software, etc) that don’t support manual intervention.
That must be new a new feature as it didn’t use to. Even still, I wouldn’t trust it regardless. It’s proven track record is very poor at best, and it is surely not something to advocate outside of package searching.
I had just figured that out - it’s an EndeavourOS package (in the Endeavour repo). I don’t use Endeavour, but in the back of my mind I had this thought that there was a package named pahis that I’d read about somewhere.
Sure. Me too, I use terminal mostly for managing the system but once in a while I like something “more visual”. I use pamac for example once in a while for “window shopping”.
Apologies in advance for a dumb question, but does installing pamac in EOS mean you have access to Manjaro repos? And does it default to it on purpose?
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