What does it mean by "terminal-centric" distro?

General system Newbie
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Hi,

I’m relatively new to Linux, but I like using the terminal. I come from Linux Mint and Debian derivatives.

Now moving to Arch-based distros, I’m still kind of divided between Manjaro and EndeavourOS until I found that the latter is more “terminal-centric”.

So I’d like to know exactly, what do EndeavourOS devs mean by being a more “terminal-centric” distro?

Thanks!

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Take a look at this post. It explains it pretty well.

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The “terminal-centric” tagline was just a justification for not supporting a GUI package manager, for reasons explained in that post @dalto shared.

But EndeavourOS really is a great distro if you enjoy doing stuff in the terminal.

It’s not that you really have to use the terminal for everything – you can use the GUI for almost anything (even package management, regardless of it not being supported). But if you prefer the command line interface, you’re at home. :slight_smile:

Also, don’t complain about it, if you dislike using the terminal. The “terminal-centric” tagline is excellent for shutting up people who complain about it. :rofl:

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“Terminal-centric” is what drew me to EndeavourOS. I do have pamac-aur installed, but only use as a lookup on the rare occasion I can’t find the exact spelling of a package in the pacman, yay or the AUR.

The terminal is set to stay on top and it’s giving me plenty of muscle memory, plus it’s faster. Also, as they say in what Dalto posted, Pamac, being a Manjaro package, is well documented to be unreliable. I found that to be the case during my short-lived dalliance with Manjaro.

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:point_up_2:t2:

Pamac already makes a lot of problems under Manjaro …

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Right. A few days ago I read an article related to problems in Manjaro Linux here https://github.com/arindas/manjarno and here https://www.hadet.dev/Manjaro-Bad/
By the way the last time I tried Manjaro Linux on a Live USB a few months ago it looked fine. But after I connect to the internet and press “Install Manjaro” the laptop suddenly crashes. Forces me to force shutdown.

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Honestly, having spent a lot of time in Debian and Ubuntu based distros, I was anticipating pacman to be a “learning curve”. The thing is, it’s so well laid out that I wound up getting comfortable with it very quickly. You absolutely can install a graphical package manager if you want to, but you really don’t need it. Instead, I just run with “guake”. That is, I hit F12 and a terminal drops down from the top of the screen and I update/install software from there :).

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Yeah, pacman is a great package manager, much better than apt. And very simple, too.

The only “difficult” part is remembering what all the single letter options mean, but that comes down to using it for a couple of weeks. After that, installing and upgrading packages on Arch is the easiest thing in the world.

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sudo pacman -make_me_a_coffee

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I hate reading about distros I have left. It gives me a false sense of security in the distro I have now. Fortunately I read up on the financial accountability of EOS, since that is one thing that trip up a great distro.
That said, I think EOS is my permanent home port.

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Terminal centric or not I’m here for the community and for purple :rocketa_purple:.

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It doesn’t matter. I finally did not install Manjaro Linux. Had tried other distros based on Arch Linux (Archcraft, Arcolinux) for some time before finally using EndeavorOS for about 2 months.

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What blew me away about EOS is how close it is to Arch without being Arch.

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Umm, it is arch, with a separate repository. Right ? :slight_smile:

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If you have “man” installed then just type “man pacman” in a terminal and you get the full breakdown of the commands.

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They actually have more readable counterparts (–sync, --upgrade, --remove etc). The really difficult part is comprehending the difference between “–sync” to “–upgrade” or why “–search” is a suboption of “–sync” and “–query” but not a standalone operation…

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The problem with long form pacman command is twofold:

  • They seem totally out of place because almost nobody uses them
  • They honestly don’t make a lot of sense. You get commands like pacman --sync --sysupgrade --sysupgrade --refresh
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For one simple reason: they were added ad-hoc and follow the implementation rather than the tasks on hand. Tongue-in-cheek mode: one-letter options don’t have a lot of sense either, for the same reason :frowning: Why is it “-Ss”/“-Qs” rather than “search --repo” / “search --installed” respectively? Why “-S”/ “-U” rather than, again, “install --repo” / “install --local”?

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I understand that the letters don’t make any more sense than the long form. The difference is, most people don’t know what they mean and just memorize them :wink:

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Exactly, for good and for bad.

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