Arch Linux – Best Tips for Beginners?
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If you go the EOS route, yay is already installed.
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The only thing I have ever installed using Flatpak on Arch is pgAdmin. Inkscape from the repos works fine for me.
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You are better off using -Ss with yay than pacman. If you use pacman, it only searches the Arch repos. If you use yay, it also searches the AUR.
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Paru is a yay alternative. You can use either one. Just pointing this out since yay is mentioned in a lot of the other comments. I am not saying not to use paru. I am just pointing out that it is not something different. You can use paru instead of hay in any of the other comments in this thread. Or use yay instead of paru in this one.
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Ya. Ok. But pacman does not let you use the AUR. Using the AUR is one did the primary reasons to choose Arch.
So, if you want to use the AUR, you need to use something like yay or paru. And, if you do, you no longer need to use pacman.
To be clear to the newbies, pacman -Syu updates your entire system ( except packages from the AUR ). yay -Syu updates your entire system, including packages from the AUR.
If you just ran yay -Syu, running pacman -Syu will report that there is “nothing to do” since your system will already be up to date.
The same is true if you sub paru for yay above.
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Use Slackware to Linux like it is 1993. Nothing wrong with that.
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I'm using manjaro-i3 for a pretty long time now (6-7 years) and I'm fully satisfied, I won't change any time soon. It was not very difficult at first, even though I wasn't a linux user when I moved to manjaro. I would just maybe move to sway instead of i3 which seems probably more modern now.
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You definitely do not need to use any pacman wrappers to build a package from the AUR. Those tools make it easy, yes, but are not required.
Building a package can be as simple as
git clone AURpackageherecd AURpackageheremakepkg -si
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"Arch" for people who think Arch is too easy.
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lol Arch wasn't hard and neither was vanilla NixOS, in fact NixOS was easier
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Arch was the distro that got me to stop distro-hopping. It's stable, it has a rolling release, and it's mine (as in, customizable, manageable).
I guess, if there's anything I wish I'd known off the bat is that the Arch documentation is probably the best available. So much so, a LOT of it applies to Linux in general and not strictly to Arch.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Main_page
If something breaks, READ the error messages, understand each component, and check the wiki, there's a very high chance the troubleshooting section has the exact issue laid out.
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Yes, and I love it
Maybe I should have added “if going the arch route”..
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Not if you have a weird app that only installs with a self-executing tarball. But for initial setup, sure.
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Um. Ya, I guess. Ok.
First, how do you keep that package up to date?
Real question though is, do you really think that is better than “yay -S AURpackagehere” or even “paru AURpackagehere”?
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To update the package, you use git to pull the latest branch code and repeat the process. You should double check if there are dependency changes though.
Like I said, its easier with a pacman wrapper, but not necessary.
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Sure unless you want to use AUR and now what do they recommend?
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They have a whole wiki for the AUR.
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Yes. Thank you. My question (or point) was how you know that the package needs to be updated? As you point out, I need to do that for dependencies as well.
You are certainly correct though. You can pull AUR packages and build them without yay or paru.
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Per the Arch Wiki, the burden of figuring out if there are updates to your AUR package falls on you.
