I am currently using EndeavourOS, but am annoyed by the constant daily updates of 1GB and pacman not installing important dependencies automatically (ex: spell checker for document editor). I like the way Fedora works: you update whenever, important dependencies are downloaded automatically, and packages are recent-ish, but I don’t like that it takes forever to run dnf. I don’t want to use Manjaro (apparently it breaks quickly?), and the distro needs to support KDE. I know about Flatpak, but I don’t want to download 1GB of data for each app. Are there any good options?
(Yes, I can probably deal with Fedora, but dnf is slower than apt, and I don’t want to deal with external repositories for non-free software.)
EDIT: I do not want to tweak or edit configuration files, I just need something that has up to date packages and “just works”.
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There’s openSUSE tumbleweed. It’s rpm based like fedora and it’s rolling-release like arch. I don’t know what the 3rd party/nonfree software situation is like. Maybe someone else can chime in on that front.
I will add, as an arch user, I think you could easily tweak your current system to be less annoying with the updates, but I realize that’s not the question you’re asking so feel free to disregard that.
OP is complaining about dnf being too slow. I’ve heard zypper is even worse.
Yeah I love opensuse but zypper is the slowest thing in the world. It takes it several minutes just to refresh repositories a lot of the time
If you love openSuSE, never look under the packaging hood. Last time I did, it was horrific
I love using opensuse, don’t worry I have tried to make packages with obs and it did not go well. But then again I’m bad at making packages for most things.
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Important is subjective, do you consider Spanish spell checker important for your document editor? How about Arabic or Chinese? Why would you want all of that bloat installed by default? Better than whoever needs spell checker in a specific language installs that.
When you install a program Pacman lists the optional dependencies for it, just install the ones you want and that’s it.
As for daily updates you don’t need to update daily, just weekly or monthly is good enough, just because there are updates available doesn’t mean you should install them asap.
To speed up DNF:
/etc/dnf/dnf.conf ... max_parallel_downloads=5 max_parallel_connections=20I have found that RHEL/Rocky/Alma are very much faster at updating using DNF than Fedora, though I don’t know why.
Fedora should ship with DNF5 pretty soon now, and it is supposed to be a lot faster than the current DNF4
Fedora 41 specifically is when it’s planned to be introduced, which would release towards the end of the year. It was initially planned for 39 but got delayed sadly, though I think there’s a way to swap to it for testing? But yeah, hopefully DNF can shirk the obvious “did not finish” joke because it really is slow
With a rolling release you don’t need to install every update every single day. You just need to remember to occasionally update to the latest. Updating every day on a rolling release is actually kinda dangerous. I wouldn’t recommend that in practice. Why not configure an auto-install script? You could probably make a systemd unit file that does a pacman -Syu overnight, if it can.
Here – someone did it already - its in aur -
Isn’t this considered bad in Arch? Or was I misled?
You should ideally be updating manually so you can handle any issues as they arise and you don’t wake up to a silently broken system. Manual intervention is occasionally required. Usually it’s associated with a breaking change that’s announced on the mailing list, but sometimes it’ll just happen.
Automating updates is generally frowned upon, that’s when things can break. But waiting to run updates until you feel like it (instead of daily) is totally fine. I’ve been using Arch and its forks for years, and have always updated once a week unless something was wrong.
It is.
Why is it not dangerous to update only once a week or month on Arch?
Because minor patches are not always worth installing. If there’s a new exploit you should update immediately but you dont need to give a shit that every python package has a minor update. The point of a rolling release is to give you the option to use the latest and greatest.
That does not explain the dangerous part.
I would argue, that on Arch I can get a fancy update with a bug even if I only update every week, and I may have to live with it longer if I stick to weekly updates.
With this logic, it is always dangerous to update Arch, if you don’t look what is coming in. I know, that Arch is not that unstable it used to be. But people seem to warn about Arch updates, still. I wonder how the situation really is. I will never know for my self, because I will not install Arch again, anytime soon.
And I don’t agree that updating a rolling distro daily is per se dangerous. You can do that with Gentoo if you don’t unmask unstable (~arch) keywords and follow the news provided with eselect. I can even mask stable updates if I am not ready to deal with them yet.
If you update daily you will have a higher chance of running into bugs and shit that can break things due to doing more minor updates. Of course it also depends on how much stuff you got from the AUR.
With this logic, it is always dangerous to update Arch, if you don’t look what is coming in
Yes, it is. It’s why I never recommend arch and arch-based things to newbies, and certainly not without that disclaimer. Mind you I found it to still be incredibly stable provided you do the weekly updates.
Also, frankly, you’re wasting your time , disk space and internet updating every day. Granted not a lot usually but not needed.
Cool story bro. We’re talking about Arch.
NixOS users try not to talk about NixOS on every remote occasion they get chellange (impossible)
NixOS is the new Arch… BTW.
Try using
yaywith EndeavourOS. It’s much easier than pacman for most standard stuff but if you have to you can use pacman too asyayis basically a wrapper around pacman.To do a full update you literally just type
yay. To install something it’syayand then you’re given a list of possibilities including your related sub packages and can make multiple selections at once.Doesn’t
sudo pacman -S package_nameInstall packages along with their dependencies?
sudo pacman -SyuWill synchronize the database and update all packages, including their dependencies.
It doesn’t install any optional dependencies, is the problem the user seems to have.
That’s because Arch is all about user control, and they want you to pick which optional ones you want. I agree though that it would be useful to have a flag that just installed everything.
That’s a bad idea, even going back to his question, he wants spell checker, should it install every single language? It’s likely a bad idea to do that, you’ll get a lot of things you don’t need. Not to mention optional dependencies might contradict each-other if several of them perform the same service, e.g. video playback backend
Yeah, I think what they really want is an installer. Pop!_OS is a pretty great option. I’ve never had issues with their Pop! Shop.
Do
sudo pacman -S --needed <package-name>
instead.
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Kinoite probably won’t work for me, but distrobox sounds cool. I’ll check it out.
Check out ublue. They have Silverblue/Kinoite images with some extras to make it a more usable without having to layer it yourself. It updates in the background and you get the new version whenever you decide to reboot. It keeps a few snapshots so you can rollback right in the grub menu. You can even run an Arch container on top of Kinoite with distrobox and get apps from there. Or you can fork their image and make your own immutable OS.
^This. I run ublue-kinoite with Arch distroboxes for dev. Rock solid, implicitly rollback-able main OS with the AUR in your pocket. What’s not to love?
A chimera.
fedora rawhide lol
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Nobara. Bledding edge gpu drivers and kernel but it’s other than that litterally just fedora
Manjaro, even though not loved by most, does this, Arch based but few updates per time unit.
I don’t like tweaking my OS, I need something that just works, hence my madness over important dependencies not installing automatically.
Bruh, if you demand that the OS behaves a particular way, you’re going to have to configure something at some point.
Its also a lot easier than changing distros…
If you want something that “just works” don’t use a rolling release type distro or you’re going to have a bad time.
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