GUI pacman? [update: new screenshots on page 7]

Dusty · 2004-05-25 23:42:10

Zephirias wrote:

Still liking Ion, Dusty?

Yeah, if only it was scripted in Python instead of Lua...

I had plans to rework a python window manager (pywm or plwm, maybe), but Ion is pretty much perfect. My productivity is really flying lately...

Dusty

Zephirias · 2004-05-25 23:51:41

I just wish that there was one with more base functionality options...like something with gDesklets-quality applets that you can install in a package format without all of those stupid little dependancy problems that you get... :cry:

sarah31 · 2004-05-26 20:07:10

ew... who needs a frontend? i mean really what benefits will a front end offer over knowing the cli commands? frontends are high maintenance and really unnecessary in a distro with such a small repository. maybe if arch had multiple repos like debian with their stable, testing and unstable and 10,000 packages it would make sense but it is not rocket science to maintain arch. it never has been.

a front end is a grand waste of time. time that could be better spent either building or testing packages or filing bug reports. arch still has a problem of releasing buggy packages and that should not be happening now. daemontools and arts were buggy and the week isn't even out yet.

Zephirias · 2004-05-26 20:12:38

sarah31 wrote:

ew... who needs a frontend? i mean really what benefits will a front end offer over knowing the cli commands? frontends are high maintenance and really unnecessary in a distro with such a small repository. maybe if arch had multiple repos like debian with their stable, testing and unstable and 10,000 packages it would make sense but it is not rocket science to maintain arch. it never has been.
a front end is a grand waste of time. time that could be better spent either building or testing packages or filing bug reports. arch still has a problem of releasing buggy packages and that should not be happening now. daemontools and arts were buggy and the week isn't even out yet.

Well, just remember that the size of the repositories (Extra particularly) are going to to continue to get larger...it could be useful in the future, but that's just my opinon.

Dusty · 2004-05-26 20:47:35

Zephirias wrote:

Well, just remember that the size of the repositories (Extra particularly) are going to to continue to get larger...it could be useful in the future, but that's just my opinon.

Not likely. The official repos are going to get smaller, at least for the short and medium term.

Zephirias · 2004-05-26 21:04:50

Dusty wrote:

Zephirias wrote:
Well, just remember that the size of the repositories (Extra particularly) are going to to continue to get larger...it could be useful in the future, but that's just my opinon.
Not likely. The official repos are going to get smaller, at least for the short and medium term.

But we're looking at the long term here, aren't we?

standsolid · 2004-05-26 21:28:27

sarah31 wrote:

ew... who needs a frontend? i mean really what benefits will a front end offer over knowing the cli commands? frontends are high maintenance and really unnecessary in a distro with such a small repository. maybe if arch had multiple repos like debian with their stable, testing and unstable and 10,000 packages it would make sense but it is not rocket science to maintain arch. it never has been.
a front end is a grand waste of time. time that could be better spent either building or testing packages or filing bug reports. arch still has a problem of releasing buggy packages and that should not be happening now. daemontools and arts were buggy and the week isn't even out yet.

The GUI Front-end is advantageous because it has the ability to add features that are nearly impossible to do via CLI.
* package browsing
* incremental search
* quick,useful information display (like links)
* little-to-no learning curve (depending on the App design)

NOTE: I DID NOT SAY A CONSOLE CAN'T DO THIS-- I SAID COMMAND-LINE-INTERFACE (for the record)

A front-end empowers users that would usually be helpless, lost in a sea of man-pages that confuse them instead of help them. And for others, It means not having to open a console every 5 minutes, or not having to grok the man-pages learning these commands.

It's also a lot less intimidating to a user to see an easy-to follow dialog than an easy-to-follow manpage. Gentoo and Arch (sometimes Debian, depending on my mood) are the only distros that I consider to be near viable on the desktop because of their dependency-solving meta-distro style, their simplicity, and ease-of day-to-day use (system updates, etc). All three follow Gentoo's philosophy of "let the user work how they want to by providing the tools to do so", IMHO.

Look at people installng Windows -- some will install a ton of extra software, while some will only install a POS. Some will go as far as to hack the registry apart and not include system files trying to slim it down, so the OS will get out of the way and let the user do his/her work.

Now, before you argue with "why do we need a front-end when pacman is so easy to use", consider this. Why do you use pacman? Why not "./configure && make && make install" for install/updates for everything? or why not switch to a non-dep-checking RPM-based distro?

Most Arch users probably could use LFS and mantain it all yourself just fine, but if there is an easier way to do it that gets the job done just as well--if not better, why stick to the "old way" of doing things?

//standsolid//

Zephirias · 2004-05-26 21:49:37

Yeah, I think that you're right in some aspects. It's just that Arch was designed to be a more "complex" distro in a sense, and if we start modulizing it with "user-friendly" tools, it will appear that we're changing the face of the distro to be more newbie-ish, and that isn't what we want.

What I think would be great, like I said before, is for Arch to have the best of both worlds: GUI programs that can assist you to maintain the system and make your life easier, or just give you the option not to use those programs (or install them), and let you do everything via CLI. This is just my opinion, though.

standsolid · 2004-05-27 01:40:52

Zephirias wrote:

Yeah, I think that you're right in some aspects. It's just that Arch was designed to be a more "complex" distro in a sense, and if we start modulizing it with "user-friendly" tools, it will appear that we're changing the face of the distro to be more newbie-ish, and that isn't what we want.
What I think would be great, like I said before, is for Arch to have the best of both worlds: GUI programs that can assist you to maintain the system and make your life easier, or just give you the option not to use those programs (or install them), and let you do everything via CLI. This is just my opinion, though.

Yes! that is exactly it. That is exactly my attitude -- if your GUI tool messes up what you already have in CLI, then screw that -- it's getting in the way of how you want to work. Arch linux is easily managed from CLI already, I just want to extend it even further.

sarah31 · 2004-05-27 04:16:35

personally i think frontend for the most part shield the user form actually learning how to use their OS. the more gui tools that are added the more people will be tempted to use them and risk forgetting how to actually use the core cli tools. this is the weakness of OS X. while it is a great OS apple shields their users too much from knowing actually what they are sitting on. but while a users ignorance is apple's benefit it is not arch's benefit. arch, and the linux community in general, does not benefit from stupid users.

many people get cross at me for preaching about learning the cli but when i started using linux i was an idiot and it wasn't until i had to work in console or i was forced to use terminal apps that i realized all the smoke and mirrors that the gui world is. sure i use X and X apps but if it all goe s to pot i can be productive. applications such as mp3blaster and cli ogle never fail me. transcode works regardless of whether i am in x or not. rip is small and functional no matter if x is there or not.

i won't argue that there are neat features you can have when you have a gui but guis shouls only be used once one knows the system. hell if people just took some time to poke around their distros they would find out all sorts of really good things. arch's biggest benefit is that it is a distro that an teach a user a hell of alot. lets not ruin that eh?

kakabaratruskia · 2004-05-27 04:30:36

well,in that case the next time you eat something, I think you should learn perfectly all the process of planting and growing the potatoes, and know the name of the cow you're eating. I mean, a GUI is helpful for people that don't want to learn everything about the OS. I am interested, and probably wont use the GUi, but if someone is willing to do it, good for him.

standsolid · 2004-05-27 08:40:28

sarah31 wrote:

personally i think frontend for the most part shield the user form actually learning how to use their OS. the more gui tools that are added the more people will be tempted to use them and risk forgetting how to actually use the core cli tools. this is the weakness of OS X. while it is a great OS apple shields their users too much from knowing actually what they are sitting on. but while a users ignorance is apple's benefit it is not arch's benefit. arch, and the linux community in general, does not benefit from stupid users.
many people get cross at me for preaching about learning the cli but when i started using linux i was an idiot and it wasn't until i had to work in console or i was forced to use terminal apps that i realized all the smoke and mirrors that the gui world is. sure i use X and X apps but if it all goe s to pot i can be productive. applications such as mp3blaster and cli ogle never fail me. transcode works regardless of whether i am in x or not. rip is small and functional no matter if x is there or not.
i won't argue that there are neat features you can have when you have a gui but guis shouls only be used once one knows the system. hell if people just took some time to poke around their distros they would find out all sorts of really good things. arch's biggest benefit is that it is a distro that an teach a user a hell of alot. lets not ruin that eh?

Good point you made about OS X -- it does sheild the user from the productivity you could have if you were to learn the power of unix and what have you (the amount of sed one-liners i've done in my time... that's great stuff, I have this one that automatically generates Earthlink phonebooks for Windows by ripping the numbers from their support.earthlink.net... enough tangent) -- but another good thing about osX -- is it simply just works. just like Portage or pacman.... just work.

Why should you deprive a new user the benefit of such an easy system and force them to learn a foreign system when all they want to do is run an up-to-date linux with web browser and email?

And are we really shielding the users by providing an optional GUI package manager? now, granted, I want my tools to go beyond package management -- But configuration among other things (project utopia comes to mind) need to be handled as well

And if you want to say that other Linux distros are for those people... I'm here to tell you they're not. Meta-distributions are the way to go. lightweight or heavywieght -- and they just work.

Look at debian -- obviously aimed at the geek, but sucsessful commecial-only n00bed-out linux distros are based off of it (Linspire, Xandros, knoppix)

So why can't we make a pacman respritory called "n00bui" that can take care of holding these user's hands?

I mean... arch even has an installer and a pre-compiled kernel -- that suprised me for a "geek" distro

sarah31 wrote:

... applications such as mp3blaster...

ah ah, mp3blaster is NOT a cli app. mpg123/321 is. you choose to use mp3blaster because it's a better GUI solution for playing music, right?

Don't you know hw much you're being shielded by not being forced to make a bash script to play your music instead of using a simple, intuitive GUI?

You did make a very good points tho

sarah31 wrote:

but while a users ignorance is apple's benefit it is not arch's benefit. arch, and the linux community in general, does not benefit from stupid users...
arch's biggest benefit is that it is a distro that an teach a user a hell of alot. lets not ruin that eh?

you would learn a hell of a lot more grabbing the LFS manual and sitting down for a week. You could install arch and still have no clue what is going on inside your box.

Your heart is in the right place -- Not a "oh that sux0rz. my distr0 used to be teh l337, now it's teh n00b", but it acctaully teaches the user -- I respect that.

But then again, why does a user have to know about how to use a package manager secific to one distibution?

Things to ponder...

Moo-Crumpus · 2004-05-27 09:28:05

From my point of view, pacman is quite easy to use. I can't see anything a gui could do better.

But I can't follow the "should use console to learn a lot" paradigma. If the railway would follow the same paradigma, we would still walk. More than that, we had to build the tracks again and again, because one would never learn about railways if you just buy a ticket and use it.

If users demand a pacman gui, once a developer will satisfy the demand. If other users still want to do it with comand line, they still can do, there is no force to use the gui.

I wonder if the no-pacman-gui fraction still burns cds using cdrecord via console - how could they learn all the options if they don't, create folders by mkdir and copy / search / move files not by xfree and mouse but using cp, grep, mv.

For my taste, I take this discussion for overdrawn.

deepfreeze · 2004-05-27 14:36:52

Pink Chick wrote:

From my point of view, pacman is quite easy to use. I can't see anything a gui could do better.
But I can't follow the "should use console to learn a lot" paradigma. If the railway would follow the same paradigma, we would still walk. More than that, we had to build the tracks again and again, because one would never learn about railways if you just buy a ticket and use it.
If users demand a pacman gui, once a developer will satisfy the demand. If other users still want to do it with comand line, they still can do, there is no force to use the gui.
I wonder if the no-pacman-gui fraction still burns cds using cdrecord via console - how could they learn all the options if they don't, create folders by mkdir and copy / search / move files not by xfree and mouse but using cp, grep, mv.
For my taste, I take this discussion for overdrawn.

For the record, I hope this distro (the devs) do not lose sight of what they set out to accomplish when they started Arch. More to the point, I hope they do not cater to the GUI-loving crowd. Regarding the pacman-GUI, I think this has been a debate ever since I've been at this board, and have had at least 20 debates on it. The bottom line always is: How difficult are pacman -Syu and pacman -Ss <package> to use? If you don't want the average "n00b" user (which is already condescending) to open xterm to update pacman while in X, then how is it easier that you require they open your GUI to do the same? I really fail to see what is gained by a pacman GUI, except for added complexity (moving away from the Arch idea of simplicity), and more stuff that can go wrong. The community gains nothing through it.

And, yes I do use the CLI for a large majority of my tasks, including burning CDs, manipulating files, etc. They are much faster and easier to me than using kludgy GUIs. Of course, that's why I came to Arch and continue to stay here. If I preferred GUI management of my box, I would have stuck with RH or Mandrake.

sarah31 · 2004-05-27 17:00:05

standsolid wrote:

Good point you made about OS X -- it does sheild the user from the productivity you could have if you were to learn the power of unix and what have you (the amount of sed one-liners i've done in my time... that's great stuff, I have this one that automatically generates Earthlink phonebooks for Windows by ripping the numbers from their support.earthlink.net... enough tangent) -- but another good thing about osX -- is it simply just works. just like Portage or pacman.... just work.

OS just works because they have bridged many gaps with respect to application that many users are not inclined to learn on and frankly too many Mac OS user want nothing to do with. That is fine for OS X as far as i am concerned because Apple knows that the more they shield their users the more the and others can make dollar wise. Same holds for Windows ... hell the same goes for almost anything.

Why should you deprive a new user the benefit of such an easy system and force them to learn a foreign system when all they want to do is run an up-to-date linux with web browser and email?

god i hate this type of arguement. you intend to demonize us users that want arch to maintain the kiss philosophy. so let me put it this way .... if you want point and click use windows or mac OS that is what they are designed for. if you look for more control in your OS then use linux or bsd.
but, as my friend said long ago before i got into linux, don't be afraid (or be too lazy) to get your hands dirty.

as far as i am concerned disguising linux or bsd as something else risks the loss of system security. the more you have your system turn it on and go the larger your risk that you will compromise systtem security.

And are we really shielding the users by providing an optional GUI package manager? now, granted, I want my tools to go beyond package management -- But configuration among other things (project utopia comes to mind) need to be handled as well

if someone asked you to take care of a large back pack full of ten thousand dollar bills would you NOT. try and steal/spend some of it? if you had a choice between a standard or automatic transmission car which would you take? if you had a choice of your favorite meal slightly over cooked or the ingredients to make yourself fresh what would you do? In short human are lazy and getting worse every day the idea is to do whatever without even turning on our brains or moving more than one finger. Even though it may actually cost us more money or time.

i watched someone on the irc channel spend a better part of their time over a few hours try and figure out why k3b was not working. in that time they could have burned several data dvds or even regular cds with simple (and i mean simple) cli tools.

like i said i am not opposed to gui tools but why should a few studied people have to continue to provide all the support here or on irc because some fool has no time to learn how to properly use their OS? why should some package maintainer keep maintaining some package they would likely never use or that will create even more work for them. why should the work harder for someone who was too lazy to learn something that takes like five minutes to learn.

And if you want to say that other Linux distros are for those people... I'm here to tell you they're not. Meta-distributions are the way to go. lightweight or heavywieght -- and they just work.

yes meta-distributions are the way to go but lets not compare arch to debian ok? arch is not in the same league as debian in many ways. when i used debian i used a gui to apt often because i was using the unstable repo which frequently had bugs and apt was not designed to detail where complications were and suggest alternatives synaptic did. if wanted a stable system with fewer headaches i needed synaptic. but for a year i used nothing but straight cli.

Look at debian -- obviously aimed at the geek, but sucsessful commecial-only n00bed-out linux distros are based off of it (Linspire, Xandros, knoppix)

sorry not a geek distro. pure debian though requires one to be less lazy. debian is not point and click for alot of things. sure lots of commercial only distros were based on it and why not it has a great package manager and huge repos that you don't have to maintain yourself. all you have to do is design and maintain the infrastructure you build over it.

btw it makes me kinda angry looking at all the work that the debian based distros provide for the package maintainers and just how little money the float back to the debian project. take libranet for example these guys have maybe ten megs of scripts overlaying a debian system and a few "cutting edge" (expiremental) packages all they have to do and get paid handsomely for it is tweak here and there. it is a joke how much this distro leaches from debian and its users.

So why can't we make a pacman respritory called "n00bui" that can take care of holding these user's hands?

beacuse arch's philosophy is not to be a handholding noob distro.

I mean... arch even has an installer and a pre-compiled kernel -- that suprised me for a "geek" distro

so does gentoo and rock and crux and .... so forth

sarah31 wrote:

... applications such as mp3blaster...

ah ah, mp3blaster is NOT a cli app. mpg123/321 is. you choose to use mp3blaster because it's a better GUI solution for playing music, right?

Don't you know hw much you're being shielded by not being forced to make a bash script to play your music instead of using a simple, intuitive GUI?

Paul · 2004-05-27 17:05:51

Imho, there should not be a GUI for pacman.
A: pacman is quite simple, and fully functional if you take the time to learn it.
B: A GUI doesn't conform to this distros philosopy

I'm essentially saying this:

I really fail to see what is gained by a pacman GUI, except for added complexity (moving away from the Arch idea of simplicity), and more stuff that can go wrong. The community gains nothing through it.

Zephirias · 2004-05-27 19:53:11

Alright, let's just quit the fighting...because you know what they say...

[Note: I am not intending to be offensive, but this is just too funny]

Dusty · 2004-05-27 23:02:04

Never argue with Sarah31, she's always right.

And its not that she refuses to admit it when she's wrong... she just never is.

Dusty

xerxes2 · 2004-05-28 00:20:35

sarah31 is very smart for beeing Walrus.
Working, coding and dominating in forums.

Neje · 2004-05-28 02:30:08

Amidst all the arguing about what is right for Arch, don't forget that this Pacman-GUI would be a third-party-like app.

I don't see apeiro immediately saying "Oh, thank God, somebody wrote a Pacman-GUI, I now will integrate it into the Arch base system immediately although it completely tosses out whatever philosophy I had, but hey, I was getting kinda sick of philosophy anyway. Now for the next task: making controlling Pacman in the CLI impossible. We are now a noob-hand-holding distro, there's no point in confusing the noobs with nonsensical possibilities like controlling things in a CLI."
;-)

By the way, synaptic didn't immediately turn pure Debian into a noob-hand-holding distro, did it? I used synaptic a few times, for scrolling around the categories to see how many packages Debian had to offer. That was it, really. If I could do stuff like that in pacman-gui, maybe I would.

So, you have my blessing for a pacman-gui. If it turns out to be crap, I'll know it probably was a bad idea right from the start, and I will not use it again ;-). If it turns out to be kinda handy for some operations, maybe I'll use it for those. If it turns out to be absolutely magnificent for everything you throw at it, I'll use it, and use it a lot. That's all there is to it.
If you however decide that it's probably not worth it to spend time programming this pacman-gui, I will respect your decision as well. Really ;-)

And about forcing people to learn, we're not the Arch Linux Educational Program, are we? Where does it end? I'm not worthy to use Samba because I don't really understand its inner workings? I'm not worthy to compile programs because I don't know why it just compiles instead of spitting out an error?

Neje

P.S. I'm not trying to offend anyone, honestly, I'm just trying to say that standsolid can write a pacman-gui if he wants to, and we can use or not use his pacman-gui if we want to. Let's not turn every idea into a "is this idea in accordance with the direction in which Arch should be headed"-debate.

standsolid · 2004-05-28 02:31:26

sarah31 wrote:

god i hate this type of arguement. you intend to demonize us users that want arch to maintain the kiss philosophy. so let me put it this way .... if you want point and click use windows or mac OS that is what they are designed for. if you look for more control in your OS then use linux or bsd.
but, as my friend said long ago before i got into linux, don't be afraid (or be too lazy) to get your hands dirty.

Keeping it simple is what it's all about. I have no intention of demonizing anybody -- In fact I think it would be great to have users like you tell me waht sucked about my GUI. You will be the most critcal and improve my applicatin the most because of it.

sarah31 wrote:

as far as i am concerned disguising linux or bsd as something else risks the loss of system security. the more you have your system turn it on and go the larger your risk that you will compromise systtem security.

Well, I dont see how making things visually appealing and more apparent is hiding anything... You would still need to know what you wanted to do.

Now i'm going to respond to this next section literally,,,

sarah31 wrote:

if someone asked you to take care of a large back pack full of ten thousand dollar bills would you NOT. try and steal/spend some of it?

I have scruples -- i would not spend one red cent if that were the intention of the owner.

sarah31 wrote:

if you had a choice between a standard or automatic transmission car which would you take?

My last two cars have been stick, and the one i'm saving for only comes in manual

sarah31 wrote:

if you had a choice of your favorite meal slightly over cooked or the ingredients to make yourself fresh what would you do?

Oh, yes i'll cook it. It's a pleassure cooking for yourself or friends

sarah31 wrote:

i watched someone on the irc channel spend a better part of their time over a few hours try and figure out why k3b was not working. in that time they could have burned several data dvds or even regular cds with simple (and i mean simple) cli tools.

Why should the user be force to use CLI tools? Why go back to the age of terminals if (s)he doesn't have to?

Keeping it simple means keeping it the way you wnat it, really. Some people find using 8 RDP sessions to your rack of windows server easier than a bash script that can ssh to eight linux boxes. Simplicity is in the eye of hte beholder.

What is a Linux distribution without users?

sarah31 wrote:

like i said i am not opposed to gui tools but why should a few studied people have to continue to provide all the support here or on irc because some fool has no time to learn how to properly use their OS? why should some package maintainer keep maintaining some package they would likely never use or that will create even more work for them. why should the work harder for someone who was too lazy to learn something that takes like five minutes to learn.

You said it yourself,

well sure but i have niot gotten the time to teach myself BASH yet i am too busy working 8 hours a day at my job...

How can you say the smae person who works Twelve hour days and can't afford the time to take 5 minutes to learn pacman? All they want to do is check their email, read some news, and go to bed. Yourself, me, and many other archers have gripes with other distros because of certain lacking features. Arch is the closest thing to perfect I've seen, and I certainly wnat to share such a simple, quick, lightweight distro with others -- even if they don't want to learn the syntax for pacman.

sarah31 wrote:

yes meta-distributions are the way to go but lets not compare arch to debian ok?

Completely fair. Apt is way behind pacman -- I'll give you that. I just was using it as an example of a meta-distro

sarah31 wrote:

sorry not a geek distro. pure debian though requires one to be less lazy.

Not a geek distro? really? I'd say it's more geek than Mandrake. But here is an issue of not agreeing on what "geek distro" means, so let's agree to dsagree on that definition.

sarah31 wrote:

btw it makes me kinda angry looking at all the work that the debian based distros provide for the package maintainers and just how little money the float back to the debian project. take libranet for example these guys have maybe ten megs of scripts overlaying a debian system and a few "cutting edge" (expiremental) packages all they have to do and get paid handsomely for it is tweak here and there. it is a joke how much this distro leaches from debian and its users.

Couldn't agree more. I would love to see debian get more back from those companies

sarah31 wrote:

Becasue arch's philosophy is not to be a handholding noob distro.

But simplicity is, right?

sarah31 wrote:

standsolid wrote:
arch even has an installer and a pre-compiled kernel -- that suprised me for a "geek" distro
so does gentoo and rock and crux and .... so forth

I haven't used crux since pre-1.0 days, so I couldn't tell you there (i forget, you're probably right tho)
but I'm pretty sure gentoo has source-only for it's kernel.

from the binary gentoo Install Doc wrote:

Code Listing 1.6: Installing the Kernel
(Install the kernel sources) # emerge <kernel-package-here>
(Configure your kernel using genkernel...) # emerge genkernel; genkernel --menuconfig all
(or (1) manually build your kernel) # cd /usr/src/linux; make menuconfig;
( (2) Include VM fs, /proc fs, /dev fs, /dev fs auto mount at boot)
( (3) Compile your kernel) # make dep && make clean bzImage modules modules_install
( (4) Copy over the kernel) # cp arch/i386/boot/bzImage /boot; cp System.map /boot

/me shrugs. looks like it compiles a kernel there...but they could just be joking.

sarah31 wrote:

standsolid wrote:
you would learn a hell of a lot more grabbing the LFS manual and sitting down for a week. You could install arch and still have no clue what is going on inside your box.
sorry i don't have enough time it is enough work to keep on top of my crux install and everything else i do or try to do. I would do an LFS but only if i had a month where i had nothing to do ... but unfiortunately i need money to live.

Thank you for re-iterating my point.

sarah31 wrote:

what it take like five minutes to learn packaman and anoth day or so to learn how to make packages. i did it can you? or a better question is " are you willing to foot all the repetitive questions people ask because they were too lazy to actually find out the answers themselves"?

I dont answer the lazy questions, i'll usually answer their question with a link to a google search with the text of their question, or a guide on how to search the boards. The questions that aren't so easily found, like, "Do I need scsi-emulation for my cd-burner?" are better answered by Wiki, IMO

sarah31 wrote:

For the record, I hope this distro (the devs) do not lose sight of what they set out to accomplish when they started Arch. More to the point, I hope they do not cater to the GUI-loving crowd. Regarding the pacman-GUI, I think this has been a debate ever since I've been at this board, and have had at least 20 debates on it. The bottom line always is: How difficult are pacman -Syu and pacman -Ss <package> to use? If you don't want the average "n00b" user (which is already condescending) to open xterm to update pacman while in X, then how is it easier that you require they open your GUI to do the same? I really fail to see what is gained by a pacman GUI, except for added complexity (moving away from the Arch idea of simplicity), and more stuff that can go wrong. The community gains nothing through it.

We obvioulsly disagree here. You want to use these tools in a way you're confortable, but the user who has never seen a console in their life you want to make them read a book to figure out where to begin. A gui, that clearly tells the user what is going on, and is obvious in it's interface design is 100X easier (once again, IMHO) than a console and a manpage. SImple as that.

sarah31 wrote:

And, yes I do use the CLI for a large majority of my tasks, including burning CDs, manipulating files, etc. They are much faster and easier to me than using kludgy GUIs. Of course, that's why I came to Arch and continue to stay here. If I preferred GUI management of my box, I would have stuck with RH or Mandrake.

You and I both know RH and Mandrake suck. If I wanted to be stuck on the windows paradigm of configuration, I would be using windows, not Mandrake or RedHat

dusty wrote:

Never argue with Sarah31, she's always right.
And its not that she refuses to admit it when she's wrong... she just never is.
Dusty

sarcasm I hope... She was wrong several times in the post I just replied to.

EDIT: submit and preview look awfully damn close to each other

Zephirias · 2004-05-28 03:09:27

Hey, I'm just letting you know that I still support this, regardless of whether or not I'll specifically use it, but for the fact that it could be a nice, useful tool.

Dusty · 2004-05-28 04:00:56

standsolid wrote:

dusty wrote:
Never argue with Sarah31, she's always right.
And its not that she refuses to admit it when she's wrong... she just never is.
Dusty
sarcasm I hope... She was wrong several times in the post I just replied to.

Hehehehehehehehe!!!!!!!!

<straight face>I'm never sarcastic with her.</straight face>

Well, not anymore. Once I was like you, try to argue with her... got myself into so much trouble. She always wins the arguments cause she's just plain right. If you think she's wrong, you misunderstand something. :-D

Actually, I don't think its any of Sarah's (or my or anybody else's) business if you write a GUI frontend to pacman. I don't even think its that big a deal if you release it for people to use. In fact, I honestly don't care if anybody else uses it. I just know I won't use it. I hate using my mouse, its so much slower than keyboard.

Dusty

standsolid · 2004-05-28 04:16:11

you've all been officially mocked-up

what do you think? (it's similar to my gentoo one, but different still)

imagine that "vnc" is selected, as this is just qt-designer. I'll play with my code existing for gentoo (that was a beautiful regex, reading portage output), and make it grok pacman -Ss output and -Qii output

potentials · 2004-05-28 09:30:52

I didn't read all of the 4 pages of posts but going through it one might guess that there's been alot of bashing only because someone thought of writing a GUI for pacman!

I understand that you bash someone demanding or requesting a GUI but that's not the case, the guy is willing to work on it himself and is asking if someone is interested, not if someone is NOT.

So those whining or shouting to keep arch simple or "kiss philosophy" or whatever just don't make sense, somebody made GUI for pacman and it made its way as a pacakge into the repositories, so what?! Don't use it, period.

Keep the good work standsolid, and stand solid

Arch Linux

#26 2004-05-25 23:42:10

Re: GUI pacman? [update: new screenshots on page 7]

#27 2004-05-25 23:51:41

Re: GUI pacman? [update: new screenshots on page 7]

#28 2004-05-26 20:07:10

Re: GUI pacman? [update: new screenshots on page 7]

#29 2004-05-26 20:12:38

Re: GUI pacman? [update: new screenshots on page 7]

#30 2004-05-26 20:47:35

Re: GUI pacman? [update: new screenshots on page 7]

#31 2004-05-26 21:04:50

Re: GUI pacman? [update: new screenshots on page 7]

#32 2004-05-26 21:28:27

Re: GUI pacman? [update: new screenshots on page 7]

#33 2004-05-26 21:49:37

Re: GUI pacman? [update: new screenshots on page 7]

#34 2004-05-27 01:40:52

Re: GUI pacman? [update: new screenshots on page 7]

#35 2004-05-27 04:16:35

Re: GUI pacman? [update: new screenshots on page 7]

#36 2004-05-27 04:30:36

Re: GUI pacman? [update: new screenshots on page 7]

#37 2004-05-27 08:40:28

Re: GUI pacman? [update: new screenshots on page 7]

#38 2004-05-27 09:28:05

Re: GUI pacman? [update: new screenshots on page 7]

#39 2004-05-27 14:36:52

Re: GUI pacman? [update: new screenshots on page 7]

#40 2004-05-27 17:00:05

Re: GUI pacman? [update: new screenshots on page 7]

#41 2004-05-27 17:05:51

Re: GUI pacman? [update: new screenshots on page 7]

#42 2004-05-27 19:53:11

Re: GUI pacman? [update: new screenshots on page 7]

#43 2004-05-27 23:02:04

Re: GUI pacman? [update: new screenshots on page 7]

#44 2004-05-28 00:20:35

Re: GUI pacman? [update: new screenshots on page 7]

#45 2004-05-28 02:30:08

Re: GUI pacman? [update: new screenshots on page 7]

#46 2004-05-28 02:31:26

Re: GUI pacman? [update: new screenshots on page 7]

#47 2004-05-28 03:09:27

Re: GUI pacman? [update: new screenshots on page 7]

#48 2004-05-28 04:00:56

Re: GUI pacman? [update: new screenshots on page 7]

#49 2004-05-28 04:16:11

Re: GUI pacman? [update: new screenshots on page 7]

#50 2004-05-28 09:30:52

Re: GUI pacman? [update: new screenshots on page 7]

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