What would you change about your favorite Linux distribution?
What would you change about your favorite Linux distribution?
Examples could be things like specific configuration defaults or general decision-making in leadership.
What would you change?
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pacman and nix are both really neat conceptually but they both fail at the most obvious usability test, which is "I just want to install a package"; its like exiting vim all over again.
edit: yes, I know you can set an alias to
pacman -Syor whatever, but if you need to set up an alias for a command to be usable, then I can't in good faith recommend that OS to anyone, and I don't want to use an OS I wouldn't recommend to others.What's complex about pacman? I've found pacman to be more reliable and easier to manage than apt, so I'm just curious about your experience
My experience with pacman was via rwfus on steam deck. I was coming in as someone with experience with apt, npm, pip, even choco and winget on windows. My expectation from pretty much every other command line tool is that commands are verbs, flags are adverbs. So having to install with "pacman -S" (or is it "pacman -Sy"?) just feels unnecessarily cryptic. Same with "nix-env -iA". I understand that there are some clever internals going on under the hood, but you can have clever internals and sane defaults. For instance, "npm install foo" both downloads the package to node_modules and updates package.json for me, so I can see what change was made to my environment. Nix should do that.
Yeah, I don't understand how you could make installing vim simpler than
pacman -S vim? Is it about "-S" being less obvious than "install"?How about
pacman install vimorpacman --install vimorpacman -i vimWhat the heck does
Smean?! What's all the syncing nonsense. A million obscure parameters that are all single letter, don't tie in with anything meaningful. You might be used to it, but it's a mess of parameters.My guess is it’s called sync because it’s the “do stuff directly relating to remote repository” sub-command, including remote repo search (--sync --search) and syncing package database/updating packages (--sync --refresh --sysupgrade). Notably, installing or updating a local package file you do with --upgrade.
A lot of package managers just have separate commands instead. It’s just a matter of organization.
To me that's part of the ideology I associate with Arch. If you actually use
-hin pacman, I find that the help is presented in a nice and contextual way. You only need a few commands on a daily basis, and most of the other things you might need are easy to figure out when you need them.In regard to
-Sbeing confusing, I think it's basically making the external operations map to how the software works internally. I feel like learning what the software is doing, rather than expecting the software to hide away the details, is also part of it. When you want to do more complex operations, or when something breaks, you'll have a better understanding of what happened.I wouldn't mind a better interface, I'm not claiming it's the best it can be or even close to it, but I wouldn't want the improvement to come at the cost of obscuring how the software works. I don't want the commands categorized just by convenience rather than logic, or magic buttons that automatically perform a sequence of hidden operations. I want something I can learn, understand, commands I can dissect into their components, not something I'm expected to use in the 10 ways provided and hope it does what I need.
I see this in the same way as people tend to use git - some GUIs will offer convenient buttons with their own made up names, and when git throws an unexpected error, the user will have no idea what the error means, or what the software did to get there.
People often complain that git doesn't make sense. They might have a point in terms of it being unintuitive... But I find that with a general understanding how it's built and what the commands do, the complaints are often people trying to force the issue using the wrong tool for the job.
And, honestly, sorry for the rant. In the end it's just my opinion, I don't want to force it on anybody, I just started writing and kept finding things I wanted to elaborate on. If you're reading this, I hope you have a good day!
You can use an alias for that. Or even a wrapper script that intercepts that.
For example you could place this script in your PATH named idk mmm installpkg (install might be an issue for a name)
Which would do the following:
#!/bin/sh sudo pacman -S $@So when you type
installpkg vimit will runsudo pacman -S vimYou can repeat that for pacman -Syu, pacman -Rsn, etc. You can even replace pacman for your aur helper instead. (remove the sudo if you will use an aur helper instead).
I think the point is that if one needs to read a thousand pages of documentation before they can start using a new operating system they will just give up regardless of how good it is.
Installing packages is probably one of the first things you'd want to do so there is a lot of value in keeping its design intuitive.
The 'you can make an alias or script for it' argument only works if someone already has a working understanding of the underlying mechanisms. Which you can assume it someone gradually gets introduced to a Programme, but not if they are making a big switch like installing a new OS.
Oh I totally agree with that. But I don't think the regular a new user should be using CLI tools to install packages. There are plenty of GUI tools that should be doing that for you instead.
And if they did, it should be very simplified with a wrapper script like in the example above, iirc the common command update-grub is a wrapper script that simplifies it, it is a shame this isn't more common with other tasks.
This could be even standardized, like regardless of the distro if you type installpkg vim, the installpkg script would do something like this that will run it thru the most popular packages managers to do the simple operation:
# Install with 'pacman' (if available) if command -v pacman >/dev/null 2>&1; then sudo pacman -S $@ || exit 1 fi # Install with 'apt' (if available) if command -v apt >/dev/null 2>&1; then sudo apt install $@ || exit 1 fi # Install with 'dnf' (if available) if command -v dnf >/dev/null 2>&1; then sudo dnf install $@ || exit 1 fi echo "No package manager found"
Just curious, why a script instead of just a bash alias or something like it?
alias totally works, but if you want to simplify it for multiple package managers then it is better to use a script.
Like this example that when the user types pkginstall vim, pkginstall would be a script in path that would do the operation regarless of the package manager:
# Install with 'pacman' (if available) if command -v pacman >/dev/null 2>&1; then sudo pacman -S $@ || exit 1 fi # Install with 'apt' (if available) if command -v apt >/dev/null 2>&1; then sudo apt install $@ || exit 1 fi # Install with 'dnf' (if available) if command -v dnf >/dev/null 2>&1; then sudo dnf install $@ || exit 1 fiThey could even install it in their ~/.local/bin, and as long as their distro makes that part of PATH (which arch does not kek) by just using that same home with another distro they already could install/remove packages and update using those wrapper scripts regardless of the distro.
If you are wondering why the script needs to check if the package manager exists, it is because when testing it I discovered that if the first one is not installed it will cancel the operation and not continue, and if I remove the exit 1 it will attempt to use the next package manager when canceling the operation with ctrl+c.
Thanks for the solid explanation.
As a noob that doesn't change my distro too often, I never would have thought of something like this.
I've also seen it as
pacman -Syandpacman -Syuand so on. I really just think "install" should be a subcommand, not a flag. That's really my only issue I guess, I've only ever used pacman via rwfus on steam deck so maybe my usability problem is with that.