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Henry Barreto
Henry Barreto

Posted on • Updated on

Pacman's simple guide for APT's users

#ubuntu #manjaro #pacman #archlinux

The major time I have been using Linux I have used distro which has APT as its package manager, but some weeks ago, I have migrated to an Arch Linux distro called Manjaro because I wanted a rolling release and easy distro. To help me in this journey back to pacman, I am writing this guide to map commands from APT to pacman.

Basically, pacman commands are composed of a capital letter option following by small letters for mod this actions. In this guide I will just talk about action, how to perform actions with apt and with pacman. If you would like to know more about the options, the man page from pacman gives you an excellent support.

Installing a package

apt

apt install <packasge-name>
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pacman

pacman -S <package-name>
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Removing a package

apt

apt remove <package-name>
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pacman

pacman -R <package-name>
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  • Removing packages and all dependencies which is not used by other packages 
pacman -Rs <package-name>
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Update packages

apt

apt update && apt upgrade
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pacman

pacman -Syu
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Searching for packages

apt

apt search <package-name>
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pacman

  • Searching for local packages 
pacman -Q <package-name>
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  • Search for packages in database 
pacman -Ss <package-name> <package-nam
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And PPAs, what to do? Manjaro as an Arch distribution has a repository called AUR, what contain a large broad of packages made by users. If you need a package what is not in the official repositories, it is probably it is in AUR.

To use the AUR, you can use the yay command, what is pretty similar withpacman, to install, remove and so on.

That is it. It is a simple blog, but I guess it can be useful for who wants to try a distro with Pacman.

Thanks for reading and feel free to commend, correct me or just say a "hi".

Top comments (1)

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patarapolw profile image
Pacharapol Withayasakpunt • • Edited

Hi. Just tried Manjaro.

I found pamac first, but I don't know if I can just switch to :yay:

Furthermore, I have trouble building ungoogled-chromium -- it's too slow.

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