Arch Packages You Might Want to Install | Hacker News Reader

Arch Packages You Might Want to Install

schoenitzer.de

17 pointsnudin24 comments

> followed by a long period where you regularly discover missing tools

Installing packages precisely when I need them helps me keep my system minimal.

That’s a nice list, but a brief explanation for each package would be very helpful. As a beginner I have no clue what most of them do. I chose Arch because I do not want to fill up my system with software I never use, copy pasting this list would defeat the purpose…

I have no Arch system at hand, but isn't that what pacman -Si would do?

   curl <the-list> | xargs -n 1 pacman -Si

(completely untested, requires at least filtering the comments the list already has and the headlines)

DRY, don't type what can be generated.

This is very bad advice. The point of Arch is to install what you need because you have learned why you need it.

Installing random packages because an Internet blog says you should? Many of these are specific to what choices you have made on your computer.

I have a list of explicitly installed packages through pacman, put it in a plaintext file, and then install those on a new Arch Linux that is supposed to be used for desktop use.

The most issues I have is related to Nvidia drivers because I need an old one. I think it is from AUR as well.

It explicitly states that that is not the intended use for it. If you use it like that it's your bad.

youtube-dl should probably be replaced with yt-dlp.. but I like Firefox, Thunderbird, vlc, git, keepassxc... I don't think that I ever needed to install sudo though... you are missing a lot of gems, like Blender, GIMP, Inkscape, nmap, mutt, irssi, gparted, jedit, go, unrar, wireguard-tools, syncthing, obs-studio, audacity...

the command below appears to list packages installed by the user:

    comm -23 <(pacman -Qqett | sort) <(pacman -Qqg base -g base-devel | sort | uniq)

source: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/409895/pacman-get-l...

TIL that you can redirect 2 stdout to comm. I use to pipe one of the thing I wanted to compare into a file and redirect the other one.

BTW you can replace

  sort | uniq

  sort -u

See Process Substitution: https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/bash.html#Process-S...

s/audacity/tenacity/

s/mutt/neomutt/

This is just a list of packages the author uses and isn't even specific to Arch. I am not sure it is actually useful to anyone.

pulseaudio should be replace pipewire and sudo by doas

I would also add:

  - htop
  - mc
  - fish (or zsh)
  - yay (from aur)

For my curiosity, why doas over sudo?

Not parent but, simpler configuration, more focused tool (that can be both good and bad), if you compile it’s faster as less dependencies, etc. Honestly, all depends on your use case and what you know (Simple all depends on where you’re coming from)

It has less features so it has a smaller attack surface. Unless you need a specific featurd found only in sudo, your probably safer with doas.

How do you fully replace sudo with doas on Arch? A bunch of packages depend on sudo, including glibc, and it's not obvious to me that they don't depend on the specific /usr/bin/sudo command being available.

sudo is an optional dependency for a lot of packages but it's a hard deps only for :

  - ceph
  - cloud-init
  - deepin-deamon
  - x2goserver

If you don't need one of the above packages, install and configure doas as described by the wiki, pay attention to that section : https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Doas#Smooth_transition_sudo... . When doas work correctly remove sudo or if you needed one of the listed packages, changes it's permissions to 000.

You're quite right. I had run `pactree sudo`, forgetting that the correct command was `pactree -r sudo`.

Screw it, just pull in the entire default repo and call it a day.

With how cheap disk space is now, I wonder how infeasible this would actually be. How much disk and bandwidth would this take for, say, Ubuntu, or Arch, or Arch plus the AUR?

Once everything is installed, the package manager could handle incremental updates rather painlessly if you ran them often enough. Conflicting packages might pose a bit of an issue. But we could just exclude any package with conflicts outside of the base install, leaving it to the user to resolve.

Per https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/DeveloperWiki:NewMirrors a full mirror of the arch repos would be over 50 GiB. AUR would be impossible to tell, as you have to grab sources and build it yourself. I'd imagine fairly massive though.

I can only really speak for arch as that's what I'm familiar with, but I'd imagine the mirrors would not be happy about all the wasted bandwidth. The whole idea sort of seems unnecessary to me.

What about pulling in binary packages the first time you try to run them. Or pulling in shared library packages the first time an app tried to load them.

There’s going to be a lot of duplication in AUR. Also a lot of package that don’t build too.

I think even with a performant machine, you'd struggle to keep up with the AUR - consider many -git packages that just track the tip of some git repo and may take arbitrary time to build.

The base repos would at least be theoretically possible, but I think the only way it would be useful would be to uncover undocumented conflicts...

Awk (as gawk) and iproute2 are part of a base arch install. There's no need to install them separately.

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