I like pacman too but I will probably never get comfortable with its arguments. It’s worse than tar which has already become a meme. apt is more intuitive to use.
Right, but if you don’t already know what those arguments mean, then its not exactly super obvious as to what they do.
For example, I’ve been told that you’re generally not supposed to do pacman -Syyu because it can result in partial upgrades (unless I’m remembering the wrong set/combination of flags, which would just be case in point…) - I tend to remember flags by associating them with words.
For example, the common flags for tar was brought up in one of the sibling comments here, but at least I can remember them by:
x: eXtract
z: Use gzip for the operation (which originally I remembered as “the file has .gz” in its extension before I knew what gzip was)
v: verbose, giving the details about what its doing
f: file, the file name you’re wanting to work with
c: create archive
t: test archive (I use this with the v flag to see what is in an archive before extracting it)
But with Pacman, even after using it on and off for a couple of years, I can try to estimate what the flag names are, but have no idea if its right without double checking:
S: Sync with repositories
s: No idea on this one
y: Also no idea on this one
Q: Query (search)
u: Allow upgrades (?)
Really I think its the fact that some of the flags can be used in different combinations which have different effects - like passing z to tar doesn’t change the effect of the flag whether you use x or c. Yet apparently -Syyu and -Syu are valid but one does a proper supported upgrade, and one does a partial upgrade which is not supported and is generally not recommended unless you know what you’re doing. I also know of no occasion where passing the same flag to tar multiple times mutates its behavior as well.
That makes it feel like an anti-pattern to me, similar to using magic numbers in programming. Maybe there is a valid reason for this decision (such as why the Linux kernel uses magic numbers in syscalls) but the result is still that it feels incredibly foreign to me, despite having 10 odd years of Linux experience under my belt.
I agree with that. My reply was to illustrate how cryptic sometimes the most common pacman commands are, and you have to refer to both –help and man pacman, though I find it easier to go to Arch Wiki or Google it generally. The tar flags are great! Pacman can be a bit confusing.
s is for search, I believe. When you add the S flag, so it becomes pacman -Ss, it synchronises the package database and search within that database.
y is refreshing local database or something like that? If you put pacman -Syyu, it will force refresh the master package database so that it can deal with corrupted databases or something like that. Pacman seems advanced to me but I just don’t really remember / know my way around it that well.
Q is for searching local package database.
u is for system update, since it is preferable to rebuild the whole package database in your system to synchronise against the database containing the latest packages.
I hope I’m somewhat correct. There are other flags but I don’t remember them. It is elegant if you already are familiar with the commands, but otherwise, other package managers and program commands like tar are much easier since they contain English language imperatives.
As for the magic numbers, that’s the first time I knew of that concept. Quickly looking at Wikipedia seems to suggest that there probably are accepted use cases, though that might be historical and not entirely logical.
Really, sometimes computers can be a mess, we’re just used to that mess.
Those definitions of pacman’s flags sounds correct to me, at least when I correlate them to my (admittedly rough) memory of using them in the past. I generally ended up using yay for handling both Arch and AUR package management, but I did most of my package searching via DDG’s !arch and !aur “bangs” to look at it on the web (or just yay likely-the-package-name) which explains my lapse in the Q/s flags.
As for the magic numbers, that’s the first time I knew of that concept. Quickly looking at Wikipedia seems to suggest that there probably are accepted use cases, though that might be historical and not entirely logical.
I won’t pretend like I’ve seen every possible API out there, but the only time that I personally know the use of magic numbers made sense from a developer standpoint was in Linux’s reboot system call which this question/answer does a good job of explaining the reasoning behind it but the quick rundown is that its a safety feature; A bit-flip could inadvertently trigger the reboot system call to be ran instead of something like say exec() which you definitely wouldn’t want to have done on your PC while you’re working (or even worse, something like a web server) . The magic numbers are required for the reboot system call to eliminate this possibility because its practically impossible to inadvertently pass in the exact correct numbers for the reboot syscall to another one in the same way that its unlikely you’d accidentally unlock the guard to a fire alarm and pull the trigger by just brushing up against it.
(Okay, maybe that rundown wasn’t quicker than the answer on stack-exchange… oops)
I suspect any other use cases for magic numbers are very similar to this (a safety precaution against accidentally calling a destructive API) or some silly (and weak) “security through obscurity” type of principal. Somehow I doubt the “magic arguments” for pacman are for either though 😅
Really, sometimes computers can be a mess, we’re just used to that mess.
Oh yes for sure, computers are quite the double edged sword - vastly handy and important tools but also a royal pain in the ass way too often…
That makes sense about the magic numbers! Though I suspect that that isn’t the case for pacman’s commands. This might be totally false but Arch is designed with simplicity and elegance in mind, and so short single letter commands to manage your entire system is preferred.
Just out of curiosity, are you a developer or sysadmin?
Just out of curiosity, are you a developer or sysadmin?
Somewhat both! Most of my background is software development, but I always felt it was important to have decent sysadmin skills so that I’d be able to fully understand the requirements of something that I could be in charge of developing (or at least, helping develop).
This idea was further cemented when I started hearing more and more cases of professional sysadmins having a disdain for developers not understanding things like DNS. And to be fair, I think the reverse is important too - that sysadmins should have at least some knowledge of the development world. At the end of the day, usually both roles have to coexist with each other in a symbiotic relationship of sorts or else it doesn’t work. If you don’t have people to make an application, then you have nothing to deploy - but if you have no one to deploy and maintain the environment an application runs in, there’s no point in creating it. It makes me sad to see that even to this day there still tends to be an “us vs them” mentality from both sides, but I guess that’s just humanity in general…
Funnily enough, at my current job my roles are the opposite - I primarily do a lot of system administration, but every now and then I do some of the development at my job as well.
It worked out though, because it got me more into the sysadmin side of things and I try to strengthen my knowledge of systems administration even in my personal time - that’s one of the reasons why I’m hosting the instance I’m commenting from 😁
Probably a longer answer than you were looking for, but there you have it!
Ah I see! So you were/are both, that’s why you can understand both perspectives. I see, you’re your instance’s host! Nah, thank you for sharing! I’m quite new to the free/open-source software and Linux world, and this meme sort of sums up my feelings about the different Linux distributions. I guess I’m still in that infatuation phase where I think of distros as cool and looking at new cool stuff and projects. I’m not a technical person, so this is a total noob’s perspective.
I guess I’m still in that infatuation phase where I think of distros as cool and looking at new cool stuff and projects.
To be honest, I don’t think I ever left this phase ahaha. I’ve been using Linux for quite a while now, about 10ish years on and off (definitely more the “on” over the last 4 years) and I still find it really cool to switch distros whenever I find something that looks neat/different. Right now I’m trying out Fedora Kinoite (An “immutable” version of Fedora’s KDE spin), but when the new “Orchid” release of Vanilla OS comes out I have a good feeling I’ll be switching again to try that one out!
I’m not a technical person, so this is a total noob’s perspective.
Well I think you’re selling yourself short here (checkout imposter syndrome which is very common in the tech field), you could’ve certainly fooled me! You had a really solid explanation of pacman’s arguments, and being able to explain them (rather than just memorizing “I use this combination in order to do X”, if that makes sense) is part of what makes someone stand out as more of an intermediate level rather than a beginner level in my opinion!
I have a good feeling I’ll be switching again to try that one out!
Ah, the eternal distro hopping. I can relate. Frankly, I do think that Vanilla OS and even something like NixOS are genuinely exciting development in the world of Linux distributions. I’m unfamiliar with Fedora Kinoite, but skimming thorough its page, it looks really good! In general, I do like this side of things where Linux distributions tend to focus on being “universal” and “reliable”, even if it means fundamentally pushing forward and away from the traditional this-distro-does-this-uniquely-and-manage-packages-like-this thing. I’m not super well versed in Vanilla OS but I did watch The Linux Experiment’s video on it. I believe that it is immutable and installing packages through GNOME software defaults to the Flatpak format. Another thing is that you can create/launch containerised systems inside your OS, perhaps for developers or tinkerers who want to mess with different OSes.
NixOS on the other hand, well I think it’s a package manager as well as a distro (?), and it basically builds packages in containers or in isolation of some sort. I do like this philosophy of containerising things to manage them by themselves individually (I think? sorta like Flatpak?), and NixOS also makes it immediately reproducible by its declarative system management. I think this sort of development is really good since it is a battle against the naturally occurring fragmentation in the Linux environment. Perhaps, there will be less “apt snap pacman yay zypper dnf yum emerge etc”, since the method of having unique repos for each distro can be a bit annoying and time-consuming for the overall Linux and open-source ecosystem, though I think it’s okay for the most part. Making the fundamental design and maintenance of the systems and packages modular is really great, since we’ll have better hardware and software in the future. It is pretty exciting, for me at least.
Well I think you’re selling yourself short here
Haha I’m flattered, thank you! I promise you I absolutely suck at all in these things, I just have some really minor interest in *-nix stuff. I’m not in the tech field (at least not right now), I’m just a postgraduate student studying solar cells. I used MX Linux for about a year during my final year of bachelor’s degree, and right now I’m toying around with Arch. I’m that new kid interested in Linux, you know? I think in general I’m more interested in the free / open-source software (FOSS) world. Throughout several years, I played around with Ubuntu/Lubuntu, Mint, Fedora, openSUSE, Debian, even tried FreeBSD, and experimented just a tad bit with Alpine. Read about UNIX, GNU, Linux, FOSS stuff, and then OS, software, programming, web, technology stuff. Then I just have my own setup using almost entirely FOSS for personal use (mostly browsing, writing, learning programming, and some light retro gaming for leisure), and also for academic work (LaTeX, Zotero, Taguette, just a little bit of Python). I’m also using Vim. Again, I’m that excited kid, ya know? Anyway, I’m just a science student, but only now getting quite interested in Linux, computers and software in general. No experience in the tech field at all. Thank you though!
NixOS is really cool! I’ve actually tried it out a couple of times, and I find the premise of a completely reproducible system to be incredibly intriguing. In the time that I’ve tried it, I’ve found that it strays a bit too close to the “The way this system is designed is getting in the way of the things I want or need to do with my PC” - but it will up there on the distros to circle back to every now and then to see if things change.
You’re correct that Nix is a few different things, it’s a language (the Nix language), a package manager (Nix as a package manager), and then finally a distro as well (NixOS) - when running NixOS you get the benefits of all of them wrapped up in a convenient package so that your whole system can be managed in a declarative way (even down to your home folder / “dot files” if you use Home Manager - which technically also works outside of NixOS too).
Your knowledge of the FOSS world is stellar, even if you’re not in the tech field - keep up the great work because I can tell you’ve got some wonderful adventures ahead of you!
I see, that’s what Nix is! Interesting. Perhaps someday it can change and improve until it becomes a seriously viable distro for most people. It’ll be a sight to see.
Hey thanks man, I appreciate it! Thanks for this conversation too! Hopefully we can have more conversations like this in the future. 😄
Could be because they have more users slowing down the repo servers, especially for debian as it’s used by a huge proportion of docker images, which tends to pull a bunch of packages during the build process eating tons of bandwidth.
I hate yum with a passion, but still wouldn’t touch dnf when I have an alternative. As it earns my keep (alas, no deb based distro at work… yet), I’ve managed to hide all that perfectly in scripting/config management setups.
When you install software, other packages are pulled in and installed. Some of those are necessary dependencies but some are just recommended (but not actually required). This setting makes apt only install the actual dependencies (no extras).
Sure, that’s why I endured Canonical’s BS for almost a year, but when I started my new job I just installed Arch even though Ubuntu was the “safe” choice.
Got my new laptop with Ubuntu, s they offered to install it on it instead of windows. (The license costs of windows was as high as doubling the mem to 64 GB, no contest what so ever) It was on the laptop for a few min (sync install to backup location on NAS) before Debian was installed. When looking around, I just couldn’t get to grips with it. (couldn’t be bothered as well to be honest, as OS replacement was already planned, I just wanted to nick the graphical config)
I’m not a big fan of Mint or Cinnamon (or GNOME for that matter), and as someone else mentioned, Mint does not have a KDE spin. Might have to try KDE Neon.
Cinnamon doesn't work properly across multiple monitors. Your task manager thing doesn't stay in sync. The one that says it works with multiple monitors just... doesn't.
Plasma hasn't given me any issues, but Mint doesn't have a KDE distribution. So I've been on KDE Neon.
I don’t even use Mint anymore, but Cinnamon is still my favorite DE by far. I guess that means I hate fun? Why can’t you just say you dislike a thing without insulting everyone who does?
I’m being tongue-in-cheek. I personally find Mint boring and dated, and it can be pretty buggy on newer or more complex setups. I don’t actually think that you “hate fun”, it’s my hyperbolic way of saying that Cinnamon isn’t fun to use for me.
Sometimes being literal makes things less fun, too.
I personally find reinventing the wheel every few years with user interface tedious and pointless, and in my experience Cinnamon has been the least buggy DE. They all have their flaws and strength though, and it’s cool if you didn’t have the same experience I did with Cinnamon. Choice is a good thing.
You can be tongue-in-cheek without being insulting though. I’m not really upset or anything. I’m just 10,000% out of patience for people being inconsiderate right now. That’s not really your fault though, so, you know, sorry if that came across as judgemental.
I didn’t find it judgmental, I was slightly concerned that you were genuinely upset. I have some autistic friends who find it difficult not to take things literally and feel genuinely hurt, so I’m often cautious not to make jokes with them that seem mean-spirited.
I didn’t mean to be insulting to any people who actually enjoy Cinnamon. Sorry if it came across that way.
However, I agree with you about Cinnamon. It feels like someone tried to copy Windows using a desktop environment that wasn’t designed to work that way.
I prefer KDE Plasma or MATE (since I did like GNOME 2)
LXQt is something I would only use on ANCIENT hardware. I mean hardware from a while before 2011. It’s hideous and barely gets updates.
XFCE is a weirder one. It’s very customisable but also doesn’t get updated much. In my experience it provides barely any performance advantages over KDE although it is smoother than GNOME on crap hardware, so there’s that.
I don’t need either and wouldn’t use them unless I did.
I use GNOME when I’m on Linux. KDE has had this bug for years now which makes working with a home server more annoying, and despite having grown up with and still using Windows I find GNOME comfortable.
There are other options too. Budgie is derived from GNOME and made to feel more Windows-like. It’s very pretty. Pantheon is probably somebody’s favourite although I personally despise it. And if you like having a gorgeous backdoor for the CCP, you can use DeepIn.
And if you vow to never again touch grass, you can even switch to a TWM such as Worm or Awesome. You shouldn’t, but you can.
With Linux, you kind of have to fumble your way around and pick some stuff for yourself, like the desktop environment. It also depends on what type of user you are, and what type of work you do. However, I do want to switch to a tiling window manager like Awesome or Sway though. It just seems much more efficient and less resource-intensive.
It’s definitely less resource-intensive, but that hardly matters on modern hardware unless you’re doing insanely fast computations and need every spare resource.
As for more efficient, that heavily depends on what you’re doing. It’s mostly suited to programmers and maybe some writers, but if you’re looking to do graphic design, animation, anything like that… fuck no. Just no.
That’s true though, if I use any modern hardware, I’m not really going to suffer performance penalties whether I’m using GNOME or KDE as compared to LXQt or XFCE.
I’ve actually never used a tiling window manager, so I don’t really know how unsuitable it is for a creativity-based workflow like needing to design graphics or animation or video editing. Can you tell me why it’s troublesome to use TWMs (or any WMs?) for that kind of work? This is just out of curiosity though, since I don’t do that kind of work.
I have barely used them, so I’m not the best at explaining, but for me it boils down to a number of things.
First, TWMs are meant to work with keyboard shortcuts more than with any mouse input. Easy for those to conflict with the shortcuts of your app.
Second, compatibility might be an issue if your TWM doesn’t use a normal compositor. I don’t know how well something like Blender would render its UI on a TWM.
Third would be that a lot of creative apps are not meant to be tiled by the system and have their own solutions for window management, which could conflict with the TWM.
I’m sure there are more reasons. I can’t think of them just now.
LxQt is actively maintained though? It’s the mainline Lx project now instead of LXDE. I just upgraded Debian last week and LxQt went from 0.16 to 1.2.
I find LxQt surprisingly powerful for a lightweight DE. I have basically no complaints. It is ugly af out of the box but it also has pretty good customization options so that I’m now happy with how it looks. It runs like glass on my old laptop as well.
If I were using this machine as a desktop I’d use KDE, but it’s mainly a server that I still want a UI for, so LxQt fits the bill perfectly.
For applications like that it makes sense. But afaik it still doesn’t plan to support Wayland at all so anyone doing multi monitors can get fucked lmao
They’re actually working in Wayland from 1.3. There some support already in 1.2. Otherwise I would’ve chosen a different DE because I do want to be on Wayland eventually.
Basically I saw a brighter future coming for LxQt compared to LXDE and XFCE which is why I chose it.
I may be confusing LXDE with LxQt then. I was thinking of a de that’s basically confirmed to be on life support/maintenance only with no major overhaul planned. My bad.
Sounds great! Tumbleweed has always sounded like a stable rolling-release distro, kind of strange that it never got the attention like Arch or Arch-based distros.
The whole OpenSuSE/SuSE community seems to be on the quiet side for some reason. I never really understood why either. It’s one of the old traditional distributions that’s doing a lot of stuff in the background, but nobody ever hears or talks about it. They even have fun songs.
Maybe it’s because it’s based in Europe (although I would have seen that as a bonus point)?
I don’t even know if it’s very common in the enterprise world, I’ve never actually even seen it there, although I’ve seen lots of Redhat. But according to Wikipedia, it’s out there.
I’ve only meddled with openSUSE a little bit but I suspect it’s due to several reasons. Firstly, perhaps the lack of marketing. You hear news about Ubuntu and Fedora and NixOS and stuff, but never really about openSUSE, I think? Maybe they do promotions but I don’t know about them that much. As you said, they do a lot of stuff but in the background. Perhaps they’re really more of a technical distribution, for sysadmins and some users?
They often tend to sell it as a distribution for developers. for some reason. I don’t write much code any more and just use it (tumbleweed) as my main system for general use. I never really noticed it being any different from any other operating system. You just install whatever you need. In my case, I take notes, edit photos, play games from Steam, and do the usual Internet stuff. Mostly what most users do.
I see. Yea, someone I know has used Tumbleweed before and it seems fine. Stable and solid. Just out of curiosity, what Steam games do you play? Do you use Proton?
Currently, I play Deep Rock Galactic, Insurgency Sandstorm, Cyberpunk, sometimes Squad, but I haven’t had the time for a while.
Games I have to catch up with Generation Zero, Disco Elysium.
I tried this once, it had some weird default settings when it came to privileges needed to connect to WiFi, printers etc. Normally polkit would be preconfigured on a desktop to let the user do these things without giving the root password but not opensuse for some reason! Maybe things have changed now.
Mint has always been my go-to grandma-friendly system. I remember using it when I was in my single-digit years. Most intuitive operating system ever. :)
Arch is good for a machine that gets used a lot, but for something where you need stability or to be able to run it for a long time between restarts and updates, something Debian-based is preferable. Just not modern Ubuntu because Snaps are performance-sapping nightmares.
But with Arch you have to pay attention whenever you update or else you brick your whole system. Ask me how I know.
I've decided it's not worth my time trying to figure it out. I just use KDE Neon and press the "check for updates" button. Don't get me wrong - I know my way around a terminal - but honestly it's just not worth my time anymore. Just give me a thing that works without me needing to think about it.
You represent the meme so well. Eventually checking Arch news for a manual intervention, using pacman properly, and making sure your system is properly maintained on a regular basis can be a bit of a hassle, which is why sooner or later you’ll choose something like KDE Neon or Mint or something similar.
He represents the meme well in the sense that these memes are all made by people who tried to climb up the bell curve but fell back down to the start, and think that’s the same as reaching the end.
He literally says he couldn’t figure it out. That doesn’t make him smarter than people who can figure it out and use Arch with no problem.
He represents the meme well in the sense that these memes are all made by people who tried to climb up the bell curve but fell back down to the start, and think that’s the same as reaching the end.
That’s true, that could be a trap! I mean I’m currently toying around in Arch and so far there’s been no problems at all, but I’m just a casual user and I’d say that I fall left-side to the curve. I’m one of those in the “OS is a bootloader to the browser and maybe other applications” camp. I do feel though that it’s possible that some people may not want to think about maintaining Arch (Arch is just an example obviously), and would rather turn off their brain when it comes to system maintenance and use something like Ubuntu or Fedora or Mint, which is the point of the meme. He said that it’s not worth his time figuring it out, not that he couldn’t figure it out, if that’s worth any distinction.
Another example I can think of is using Vim when you could just use Nano or any generic text editor. I mean I use Vim as well (for pretty much everything), but in the end some people may not want to spend time getting decent at Vim because they don’t feel it’s worth their time, not because they inherently can’t. If he spent some time, he may be able to do it. I’m sure most Linux users can. But it’s just the time and energy that you must expend to get there, and not everybody feels it’s worth it, even technically proficient Linux users.
A more general abstraction of this bell curve principle is sorta like managing depression; the left-side of the curve will say something like exercise, socialising, eating healthy foods, and having life purpose. The middle might say that we need SSRIs, multiple therapy sessions, mindfulness exercises, daily journaling, compassion training etc. But, the right-side of the curve might again say exercise, socialising, eating healthy foods, and having life purpose. A realisation that something is not worth your time is not inherently indicative of the inability to do said something, though I get your point. It’s all good though!
This. I still daily drive arch, and, even though I've rarely had any breaking updates, it's always feels like a gamble. Have to keep a mental note of which critical packages are being updated, just in case I have to rollback the package. Always carrying an install medium with an arch iso when taking my laptop out.
just pacman -U /var/cache/pacman/pkg/package-X.Y.Z.tar.xz or install the downgrade script for a better experience. not sure about timeshift, it sounds like a backup tool to me.
This is the Arch way, I feel. Timeshift though, if I’m not mistaken, is a system restore tool, which seems pretty useful though I’ve never used it myself.
I toy around with Arch a little bit but sometimes these are the kinds of things that you really don’t want to think about. But the tradeoff is latest packages, of course.
Always carrying an install medium with an arch iso when taking my laptop out.
Same. Have to say Ventoy is an amazing tool, my emergency USB stick has 4 distros and Windows, just in case. There is also some Android app that let’s you turn your phone into bootable medium
I’ve only used Manjaro a little bit but isn’t it the case the Manjaro holds back updates before rolling them out, thereby messing with stuff if you use the AUR?
My take is they're a little more cautious than full Arch. Arch will just push stuff because it's "ready", Manjaro does at least some testing so I'm not the guinea pig.
I don't have any issues with AUR stuff though, everything pretty much works out of the box.
On the flip side, it's a rolling-release distro, so you don't have to play a game of "what broke?" whenever you do a major version upgrade or do a clean install to avoid it, because there are no major version updates. And the AUR is pretty much the reason to use Arch outside of being at the cutting edge (which is mainly useful for using brand new hardware that hasn't got the best support in the more conventional distros yet, like a new laptop).
That’s why no matter how much we make fun of Windows or MacOS, they both are still “just works OS” for friends/family who might not care / have time about facing issues that Linux users are accustomed to firing up the terminal to solve. Well, it might change someday. We can always hope.
…Anyway, I agree. I wasn’t saying it’s necessarily bad, just that there seemed to be an influx of new posts that sound like they came from Linux virgins.
I tried a couple of times too before I could install vanilla Arch on a VM. Eventually I got it working, but I do think that projects like EndeavourOS is good step towards easing yourself into Arch, if that’s what you want. Maybe I just don’t use my computers that much and don’t need to edit config files and what not, but nowadays, Linux distributions matter less and less, especially since I’m a casual desktop user. I’ll just use Flatpak for all supported applications and use the distribution’s package manager. Basically, just use informant (or add to hook), pacman -Syu (or -Syyu in some cases), and flatpak update. Other than that, there’s nothing really that different from using other Linux distributions, with the exception of the problems of drivers or something like that. The way I interact with a computer to use basic desktop applications don’t fundamentally change with what Linux distribution I use, since I’m a casual (with a minor interest in *-nix stuff).
I’m mostly addressing normal users (with the exception of gamers probably), who just use a couple of desktop applications like Firefox or VLC or document software or whatever. That’s pretty much going to be the same across all distributions.
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