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.)

  • blackstrat@lemmy.fwgx.ukEnglish
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    8 months ago

    Try using yay with EndeavourOS. It’s much easier than pacman for most standard stuff but if you have to you can use pacman too as yay is basically a wrapper around pacman.

    To do a full update you literally just type yay. To install something it’s yay <searchterm> and then you’re given a list of possibilities including your related sub packages and can make multiple selections at once.

  • lemmyreader@lemmy.ml
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    8 months ago

    Manjaro, even though not loved by most, does this, Arch based but few updates per time unit.

  • Aniki 🌱🌿@lemm.eeEnglish
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    8 months ago

    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.

    • demesisx@infosec.pubEnglish
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      8 months ago

      It’s not dangerous if you’re using NixOS. I roll my configuration every single day. If it doesn’t evaluate because someone broke something important, I don’t switch to it. Otherwise, I just comment out that package or even fix the broken component (fairly easily 99% of the time) and go about my day.

    • poinck@lemm.ee
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      8 months ago

      Why is it not dangerous to update only once a week or month on Arch?

      • Aniki 🌱🌿@lemm.eeEnglish
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        8 months ago

        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.

        • poinck@lemm.ee
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          8 months ago

          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.

  • demesisx@infosec.pubEnglish
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    8 months ago

    NixOS might interest you. It’s basically the new Arch with a much more elegant paradigm than I ever thought possible for handling conflicting dependencies. It’s the ultimate tweaker OS while miraculously also being one of the most stable.

    • Trashboat@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      8 months ago

      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

  • Joker@discuss.tchncs.de
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    8 months ago

    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.

    • MalReynolds@slrpnk.netEnglish
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      8 months ago

      ^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?

  • Nibodhika@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    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.

  • think1984@lemmy.mlEnglish
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    8 months ago

    To speed up DNF:

    /etc/dnf/dnf.conf  
...
max_parallel_downloads=5
max_parallel_connections=20

    I have found that RHEL/Rocky/Alma are very much faster at updating using DNF than Fedora, though I don’t know why.

  • Yardy Sardley@lemmy.ca
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    8 months ago

    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.