Serious question: What makes Arch’s package manager so “great”? I always just found it confusing to use. The flags don’t make any sense to me. It feels like you have to add a varying number of s or y to get it to do what you want. I never found it to be any faster or slower than any of the others (apart from portage of course) out there. And apart from the flags it doesn’t seem to give me any more or less trouble than the others.
It’s fast. That’s why it’s great. I’ve considered switching to opensuse a lot, but the speed of pacman compared to how slow zypper is always drags me back to arch
I’ve heard countless times it’s one of the slowest package managers and the last time I tried opensuse it confirmed that, though that was a year ago, so I guess improvements have been made
As a user it’s definitely harder to get into than apt or dnf. However, as a packager, it’s very easy to package new applications for pacman. That’s also why the AUR offers this many packages often not found in other distros.
Dunno. Anecdotal, a few years ago pacman appeared to be much faster than apt-get for me. Currently I don’t see that very much difference but then again I haven’t paid much attention to it.
OpenSUSE was actually released long before Arch even existed. I’m an Arch user, btw, but I consider both operating systems to be excellent choices. Everyone has their own preferences. Let people enjoy what they like and embrace their individuality. We don’t all have to be alike…
OpenSUSE was actually released long before Arch even existed.
You’re basically right but just some historic facts added :
Judd Vinet started the Arch Linux project in March 2002. OpenSUSE : Its development was opened up to the community in 2005, which marked the creation of openSUSE. Before that it was called SUSE Linux, first released in 1994.
OpenSUSE exists as a testbed for SLE, I don’t think there’s anything confusing about that. It’s also much easier to get to a sensible setup for new users. If it weren’t for the AUR and the Arch Wiki, I would probably still be using it.
Problems I had were because of software not being on the latest version, not updates. Things just work on Arch for me. Only thing that ever broke was Xorg because of Nvidia drivers but that’s pretty easy fix.
You’ve been lucky. I’ve been daily driving EndeavourOS for a few months now and I really love it but it did spontaneously break spectacularly twice already due to updates.
Problems I had were because of software not being on the latest version
I really need to get someone to make a jingle for this: just use flatpak/appimage/distrobox/nix…
Things just work on Arch for me.
And how long have you been using that install? I ran arch and derivatives for 2+ years on multiple devices and can’t count how many times they failed to boot due to an update.
MX + nix unstable give me the same bleeding edge packages without risking my system exploding randomly, while also giving me a bunch of other benefits.
That sounds reasonable to me! Would explain why the mobile app has it and the web app doesn’t; I don’t know if a Lemmy instance has a way to advertise the functions it supports to third party apps.
For me, the Boost Lemmy app let me downvote even though my instance has it disabled… It just quietly failed and when I go back the downvote isn’t there.
The Jerboa and Voyager apps, on the other hand, don’t: Voyager let’s you try but correctly shows an error, while Jerboa flat out doesn’t offer it since I can’t anyway
I think blocking downvotes is an option built into Lemmy servers that can be communicated through the API. I know there are a decent amount of instances that don’t federate downvotes because of toxicity concerns.
Arch stable ? I mean, from experience, I’ve had one break in stability so bad it made me hop : the lack of gentoo-like config protect. To be fair, I was on Artix but the breakage was versions of Pipewire deleting not just my changed config files but config files it couldn’t run without ! Or to be fair, also, actual Arch but on my phone, plasma 5 package conflicts (that came as is from the installation image) prevent the whole system from updating 🙃 … Never had any of those 2 problems on OpenSUSE or, to be fair, non-Arch-based distros
Nevermind : just got my boot borked on OpenSUSE (which is dumb as the rest of the system is fine but I can’t easily just reinstall just the boot) THANKS, TPMsEdit : “what do you think is stable then ?” idk, fcking Gentoo ? “And what if I don’t wanna compile blah blah” use linux lite, may not be rolling and pretty nooby but it is stable and the only one I feel comfortable handing to my mom (amongst the ones I’ve tried) without that much bloat
I guess I’m smart enough to install opensuse, but dumb enough that I somehow got slow pacman.
I kid you not, on my hardware zypper is the fastest between ubuntu apt, fedora dnf, and arch pacman. dnf was the second-fastest on my hardware, with apt and pacman being pretty sluggish
I’ve also used portage which was even slower, but probably not a fair comparison considering how much more complex it is.
In the grand scheme of things the difference between C, C++, and Python isn’t meaningful when operating over a network (edit: for a single-user system). It’s very likely that the difference for thread OP is just caused by weaker connections to specific repos.
We’re talking about a package manager, not a game, network server, etc. On a basic level the package manager only needs to download files from a network and install them (OS syscalls for reading/writing files, these are exposed C functions or assembly routines), or delegate to a specific package’s build setup (which will also likely be written in a compiled language)
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