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Discussion on: Why I always recommend Arch Linux

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vasilvestre profile image
Valentin Silvestre

I'm not ok with the verbose. With Ubuntu, you understand what you ask. It's longer to type but whatever, you get what you do.

I have no idea what -Syu mean and no way to memorize it..

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wpdevvy profile image
wpdevvy

I have been using arch for two years. The ones that I use most frequently are,

Syu - update, upgrade
Qe - query all explicitly installed packages
Qi - query info about a package
Qtd - unneeded dependencies
Ss - search repos for a package
Sc - clear local cache

These are muscle memory and are easy to use after some time :)

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rkfg profile image
rkfg • Edited

This, and there are always aliases to the rescue, like these:

alias agi='apt install'
alias agr='apt remove'
alias agp='apt purge'
alias agu='apt update'
alias agup='apt dist-upgrade'
alias agar='apt autoremove'
alias ags='apt source'
alias agbd='apt build-dep'
alias acsh='apt show'
alias acs='apt search'
alias acd='apt depends'
alias acrd='apt rdepends'
alias afs='apt-file search'
alias afl='apt-file list'
alias afu='apt-file update'
alias acp='apt policy'

It all boils down to the personal experience that's highly influenced by the environment, hardware, tasks and whatnot. I use Debian testing, it has much richer repos than Ubuntu and is more stable than bleeding-edge distros (like Arch). I also don't use DEs as they tend to break more often than anything else, Awesome WM is the choice.

If you know your system it'll work OK, if you don't any distro would be fragile and error prone.

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iduoad profile image
Iduoad

In my case, it's the opposite.
I find apt more confusing, some of the tasks by the apt-get and the others with apt-cache or ap-file.
Even using the python wrapper(apt), there are tons of completely different commands to remember (remove, purge, auto-remove, auto-purge and update, dist-update ...)

On the contrary Pacman is symmetrical, there are operations (8 of them) , the most important are S for Sync, R for Remove, Q for Query.
And then there are options to each of those operations.

if I need to do something related to a package installation, I am sure that I'll use the S.