• zewm@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    The only thing missing from Arch distros is a clean gui for installing shit from the repos or AUR.

    Octopi is cluttered and not very UX friendly imo.

    • sbeak@sopuli.xyz
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      10 hours ago

      clean gui for installing shit from the repos or AUR

      I believe this is because applications can be submitted by anyone in the AUR (Arch User Repository), and having a simple GUI where you can one click install is a decently big risk. Not a huge risk, but somewhat big. Both base Arch and EndeavourOS, the latter of which I personally use, do not ship with any GUI for installing AUR programs. I find that using something like yay or paru works perfectly fine for me

      And of note, CachyOS now ships with the Shelly GUI package manager, an actively developed one that is relatively new and combines Flatpak, AUR, and Arch repos in one location. Pretty neat I think!

      • sbeak@sopuli.xyz
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        10 hours ago

        One of the many criticisms of Manjaro is that they ship with pamac out of the box, especially given that they hold packages back for a couple weeks, causing a higher risk of partial upgrades (where the dependency required by one program is updated while another program still relies on the older version)

    • Prove_your_argument@piefed.social
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      2 days ago

      There’s shelly which i’ve seen some people gush over (and it’s included on fresh installs today) but i’d rather have clunky octopi myself. At least I have learned how to use it.

      I think people want a good graphical representation of an app store page with screenshots or something, but that’s just not much of a priority for some reason in parts of linux land. AUR doesn’t even have screenshots and the arch package guidelines don’t even mention anything like it. Normal people are going to want this kind of experience though.

      • zewm@lemmy.world
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        2 days ago

        Never heard of Shelly. And yea, I was inferring having an app listing front end similar to bazaar.

        Edit:

        just looked at some screenshots of Shelly and it’s just the same shit as octopi. I want a front end with screenshot, categories, icons, etc.

        • sbeak@sopuli.xyz
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          9 hours ago

          As many others has said, having screenshots of the different programs isn’t included in the AUR. The priorities of Arch Linux won’t be the same as those of Fedora, Mint, etc., as they target a different audience who appreciate a more minimal distribution.

          To put it another way, it would be like going to a hot dog stand for a sandwich. They serve hot dogs and intend for them to be eaten by people who like hot dogs more than sandwiches. If you want a sandwich, you would go to the sandwiches stall, not yell at the hot dog guy about why the hot dog doesn’t taste like a sandwich!

        • boomzilla@programming.dev
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          1 day ago

          It provides screenshots, categories and icons for Flatpak packages. AFAIK those aren’t provided by AUR or the official Arch repositories. Icons seem to be integrated for some official packages at least.

          A Shelly in-built way for user contributed additional data for Arch packages could be a way to tackle this. But that needs additional infrastructure, developers and volunteers who curate the contributions.

          Shelly is a nice frontend. Octopi is too, to quickly check PKGBUILDs, show contained files or open the respective AUR page.

    • taiyang@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      I mostly ever use Octopi if I can’t think of the spelling of the name of an app I want, it’s terrible for exploration.

      Otherwise, I just command line my installs, it makes me feel cool and pacman goes waka waka waka.