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Comment by royjacobs | Hacker News Reader

It's user-friendly if you think having a package manager that's broken out of the box is user-friendly.

I get that Linux is about choice, but if you're trying to make something that's user-friendly maybe also don't provide a dozen window manager options if your user can't meaningfully decide between them.

This reads as an article by someone who knows their way around Arch and has wildly different opinions about friendliness than most regular users would have.

Btw, nothing against RebornOS itself, I just don't understand the tone of the article.

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> It's user-friendly if you think having a package manager that's broken out of the box is user-friendly.

Are you referring to pacman here? If so, why do you believe it to be broken? Plus one could make a GUI front-end for it that is user-friendly.

His comment is very clear after you read the OP link.

> I did have a small issue with Pamac after the installation. When I tried to run the app, it refused to sync with the update databases and wouldn't show any applications available for installation. Fortunately, I knew how to update Arch manually (with the command sudo pacman -Syu). After running that command (and rebooting), I expected Pamac to behave exactly as expected. It did not.

TFA describes trouble with the included GUI front-end, resorting to installing a different one after manually updating pacman in the terminal.

User friendly, that ordeal is not.

So the issue is with the GUI, and not the package manager itself?

I do mean this in the nicest way possible:

You could read the linked article and quickly find out for yourself :-)

OK, but I was responding to:

> It's user-friendly if you think having a package manager that's broken out of the box is user-friendly.

The package manager here is pacman, and it implies that pacman is broken out of the box.

If the primary way the user is interacting with the package manager in this user-friendly distro is via the GUI then of course I mean the GUI when talking about the package manager.

Alrighties, got chu. In that case I agree.

You still haven't read the article, have you? :-(

Shush, I have! I am just nitpicking here. :P

Does nitpicking often yield good information in your experience?

Sometimes. I already told you why I asked the question, it did not specify the GUI per se, only the package manager, and the GUI front-end to that package manager is NOT the package manager itself, which is exactly what has been said. It has already been answered though. But again, if someone mentions the package manager and not the GUI, why would I believe otherwise? I was simply asking for clarification. Does asking for clarification often yield good information in your experience?

Sometimes, re-reading the source material can elucidate questions I have about comments :-)

In this case, it's really obvious what everyone was talking about with the context of the article fresh in my mind.

`pamac`, an unofficial third-party GUI frontend for the Arch Linux package management system is recently broken because the underlying API by Arch Linux got updated. The update I refer to came with the package `pacman` (not to be confused with pamac above).

Ironically the tone of your comment suggests hints of elitism.

My guess is that you think pacman is inferior to apt or rpm. But for some reason you don't want to go into depth with what is actuallly wrong with pacman and you just regurgitates a comment or article you've read at some point that bashes pacman.

The article describes having trouble with the included graphical package manager.

>Turns out, Pamac is fairly broken, so the solution is to install the bauh GUI…

Take a deep breath next time you think someone is criticising your preferred software.

Maybe the elitism was the friends we made along the way.

As skyyler pointed out, my gripe is not with pacman but the fact that the author of TFA asserts that an OS is user-friendly even though it ships with a broken package management GUI out of the box.

I don't have a horse in the pacman/apt/rpm race since life is too short for those kinds of arguments and I'm sure they all have their pros and cons. Having said that, I'm not sure why having a preference for apt or rpm would be elitist though.

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