• Björn Tantau@swg-empire.de
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    7 months ago

    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.

    • WFH
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      7 months ago

      pacman -Snstall -yefresh -yefresh -unly-upgrades

    • exu@feditown.com
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      7 months ago

      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.

    • Encamped@lemmy.ml
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      7 months ago

      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

      • Peasley@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        Wow I must be doing something wrong, zypper has always been faster for me than pacman, both on my newer desktop and my older laptop

        • Encamped@lemmy.ml
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          7 months ago

          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

    • VeganCheesecake@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      7 months ago

      I use tumbleweed on my desktop, but run arch on a secondary machine. From experience, pacman is much faster than zypper, even on a slower machine.