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You will learn How to run Pamac GUI package on Arch Linux in this article. Pamac is Manjaro’s package manager based on libalpm that also supports Appstream, AUR, Flatpak and Snaps. As an alternative to pacman, Pamac focuses on providing an easy-to-use interface, whether GUI or CLI. Arch Linux relies on the pacman command for package management. You can get a GUI-based Software Center in your desktop environment.
Arch Linux is a free and open source Linux distribution that offers a lot of customization options and control over your computer. Arch’s lightweight and minimalistic nature is the main reason for its growing popularity in the tech community. The x86-64 based Linux distribution adheres to the KISS principle (keep it simple, stupid). As the name suggests, Arch believes in being a pure operating system that leaves all the decisions to the user. You won’t find any significant distro-specific changes in Arch, so transitioning from any other Linux distro is seamless. Below are the steps How to run the Pamac GUI package on Arch Linux.
How to run Pamac GUI package on Arch Linux
Method 1: Installing Pamac from the AUR
Step 1: If you already have an AUR helper like Yay installed, getting Pamac is very easy.
yay -S pamac-aur
Step 2: First, update your system as Arch is a rolling release distribution and does not support partial updates. Type the following command in the terminal to update your Arch Linux system.
sudo pacman -Syu
Step 3: Then you need to install all packages from base-devel package group and git by typing below command.
sudo pacman -S – required base-devel git
Step 4: Now you need to build and install archlinux-appstream-data-pamac, libpamac-aur and pamac-aur respectively.
Step 5: Enter the following commands replacing the package name with the packages you want to install for all 3 packages.
git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/archlinux-appstream-data-pamac.gitcd archlinux-appstream-data-pamacmakepkg -si
Step 6: In this case, the pamac-aur AUR package has other AUR packages as dependencies. So you have to compile and install them before installing the main package. This annoyance can be avoided by using an AUR helper.
Step 7: Building and installing packages from the AUR may fail due to the outdated PKGBUILD and there are too many of them in the AUR. Also, you need to manually update the AUR packages if there is an update, as the AUR packages are not updated when you update your system with Pacman.
Method 2: Installing Pamac from Chaotic-AUR
Step 1: Chaotic-AUR is a repository for Arch Linux maintained by the developers of Garuda Linux. The packages in this repository are signed and can be trusted. By adding this repository, you can install Pamac using Pacman directly.
Step 2: Let’s add the repository by typing the following commands.
sudo pacman-key –recv-key FBA220DFC880C036 –keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.comsudo pacman-key –lsign-key FBA220DFC880C036sudo pacman -U ‘https://cdn-mirror.chaotic.cx/chaotic-aur/chaotic-keyring.pkg. tar.zst’ ‘https://cdn-mirror.chaotic.cx/chaotic-aur/chaotic-mirrorlist.pkg.tar.zst’
Step 3: The above command just installs the keyring and mirror list for the repository. You also need to add the repository to the final from /etc/pacman.conf. Here we will use nano to edit the file.
sudo nano /etc/pacman.conf
Step 4: The resulting file should look like this.
…# An example of a custom package repository. See the pacman man page for # tips about creating your own repositories.#[custom]#SigLevel = Optional TrustAll#Server = file:///home/custompkgs
[chaotic-aur]Include = /etc/pacman.d/chaotic-mirrorlist
Step 5: Now update your system using Pacman and install Pamac by typing the following command.
sudo pacman -Syu pamac-aur
Step 6: Once installed, you can access the Application Menu GUI and CLI using the pamac command.
Step 7: In case you don’t like Pamac, you can remove it along with its dependencies and configuration files using pacman through the following command:
sudo pacman -Rns pamac-aur
Final words
We hope you like our article about How to run the Pamac GUI package on Arch Linux. Arch Linux offers its users insane amounts of customization. A clean install of Arch doesn’t even include a desktop environment or window manager. The user builds his system from scratch. This approach also makes Arch extremely lightweight because there is no pre-installed ballast on the system, you as a user have complete freedom to do what you want, when you want.