My guess is it’s called sync because it’s the “do stuff directly relating to remote repository” sub-command, including remote repo search (–sync --search) and syncing package database/updating packages (–sync --refresh --sysupgrade). Notably, installing or updating a local package file you do with --upgrade.

A lot of package managers just have separate commands instead. It’s just a matter of organization.

To me that’s part of the ideology I associate with Arch. If you actually use -h in pacman, I find that the help is presented in a nice and contextual way. You only need a few commands on a daily basis, and most of the other things you might need are easy to figure out when you need them.

In regard to -S being confusing, I think it’s basically making the external operations map to how the software works internally. I feel like learning what the software is doing, rather than expecting the software to hide away the details, is also part of it. When you want to do more complex operations, or when something breaks, you’ll have a better understanding of what happened.

I wouldn’t mind a better interface, I’m not claiming it’s the best it can be or even close to it, but I wouldn’t want the improvement to come at the cost of obscuring how the software works. I don’t want the commands categorized just by convenience rather than logic, or magic buttons that automatically perform a sequence of hidden operations. I want something I can learn, understand, commands I can dissect into their components, not something I’m expected to use in the 10 ways provided and hope it does what I need.

I see this in the same way as people tend to use git - some GUIs will offer convenient buttons with their own made up names, and when git throws an unexpected error, the user will have no idea what the error means, or what the software did to get there.

People often complain that git doesn’t make sense. They might have a point in terms of it being unintuitive… But I find that with a general understanding how it’s built and what the commands do, the complaints are often people trying to force the issue using the wrong tool for the job.

And, honestly, sorry for the rant. In the end it’s just my opinion, I don’t want to force it on anybody, I just started writing and kept finding things I wanted to elaborate on. If you’re reading this, I hope you have a good day!

You can use an alias for that. Or even a wrapper script that intercepts that.

For example you could place this script in your PATH named idk mmm installpkg (install might be an issue for a name)

Which would do the following:

#!/bin/sh

sudo pacman -S $@

So when you type installpkg vim it will run sudo pacman -S vim

You can repeat that for pacman -Syu, pacman -Rsn, etc. You can even replace pacman for your aur helper instead. (remove the sudo if you will use an aur helper instead).

There where Times when Ubuntu was Marks baby, but nowadays with pro, advertisement and tracking in the terminal an AppStore, everything has to have a businesscase.

I would recommend just plain Debian either with flatpak or in the testing branch. It’s almost the same, stable as a rock and driven by a community.

The common recommendation is Linux Mint, but there are lots of Ubuntu derivatives out there. Another common recommendation is Debian or a Debian derivative, and those will generally be similar to Ubuntu since Debian is the upstream of Ubuntu.

You can feel free to ignore it if you aren’t open to other options, but my personal distro recommendation for a Gnome-based desktop is Fedora. It has a much quicker update cycle, so you’ll actually get feature updates on your packages (which is great if you use neovim plugins, since the neovim packages in the Ubuntu repos are ancient at this point, or you know, any other package that benefits from being updated). Of course it obviously isn’t as bleeding edge as Arch, though I personally see that as a benefit because I found Arch to be unstable (haven’t really experienced any instability with Fedora in the past few years though). But don’t be mistaken, I’m not saying Fedora is similar to Ubuntu, just providing an alternative perspective since you seem to be open to switching to a different distro (though the differences may be more minor than you think from an end-user perspective).

BTW, Linux Mint isn’t just a “beginner distro”, it’s perfectly fine for anyone to use, and it fixes a lot of the Canonical BS from Ubuntu. I feel like some people get caught up in the thought that Mint is the distro that you ditch for another one when you become more comfortable with Linux, but that doesn’t have to be the case.

Thanks for the links! I updated my config from z3fold to zsmalloc and adjusted the vm.page-cluster to test these out.

Reading a bit more, I think when using large max_pool_percent (>30) with Zswap the two solutions are more similar than not. A crucial difference is what use-case is more acceptable since Zswap can cause unresponsiveness (and potential lockup) under high memory pressure. While Zram could result in an OOM crash in a similar worst-case scenario.

I think the reason that doesn’t exist is that it doesn’t make sense to install all of them usually. In this case, unless you have a scanner, you won’t want sane, if you don’t have a printer, you won’t want cups, I guess samba might be for AD or SMB network shares which many also don’t use, v4l is for webcams, it’s probably very rare to use opencl inside of wine, and I don’t even know what wine uses dosbox for. And so on. These are optional dependencies for a reason.

–asdeps installs a package as “not explicitly installed”, so it’ll be removed again when uninstalling unneeded packages. So yeah, that’s something else.