So i recently built my first desktop. I of course put endeavourOS on it, installing plasma on install as well as hyprland. Cause stability and sexiness. Anyway on plasma my discover store is missing all categories other than kde applications like themes, icons, and, cursors. Even then though it fails on install of quite a few packages. The errors throw vary between https refusal to a 404, but ik for a fact I’m connected to the internet. Any help would be appreciated.
Discover is not really safe to use on Arch based systems. If I had to guess, the EOS folks did not setup Discover to install software or update the system. Someone from the EOS team can probably confirm or deny this.
PS - Discover uses packagekit to manage packages and packagekit does not fully support the pacman protocols and can lead to problems. It is fine for KDE themes and such, but not for package management.
3 Likes
That’s correct. The appropriate way to install software using using an Arch package manager, such as pacman, yay, or paru.
pacman is the Arch default, but does not include an AUR helper. Simply, you can use it to install official Arch packages.
sudo pacman -Syu somepackage
yay can do what pacman does, but also includes an AUR helper and other quality of life improvements. You can use this to install official Arch packages, and AUR (Arch User Repository) packages.
yay -Syu somepackage
1 Like
I have heard this before, but personally never had any issues with it. Is there any explanation as to why it is more unsafe on Arch based distros? On my thinkpad, i mainly use discover to look at apps then sudo pacman -S or yay -S them. I just cant do that for plasma themes and what not
Broadly speaking, using non-Arch package management tools, results in files being installed on your system that Arch is not aware of. This leads to issues like this.
Updates to those packages would also be handled separately, and may result in incompatibilities post updates.
Ok fair enough, so for kde plasma themes and widgets is there another place other than discover that is arch safe?
For themes, you could try here?
Otherwise, the AUR also has lots of Plasma themes, although not the best place to browse them.
It isn’t safe to use Discover for packages from the repos. This is because Discover is packagekit based and packagekit doesn’t support manual intervention. However, updating and installing Arch packages does require manual intervention at times.
There should be no harm in using Discover for plasma themes and widgets. You can also safely use Discover to manage flatpaks.
1 Like
Yea ive used the get new button, thing is it still uses discover, as far as i could tell any way. It just seemed to be like a fraction of the selection vs from the full discover app. I think what i am going to try is to go to pling, browse there, download it. Then just add from file on the settings window
1 Like
Thanks for confirming what I wrote earlier. It’s always nice to get seconded! 
1 Like