Arch Linux

fft2000

Member

Registered: 2020-04-08

Posts: 13

KDE discover/GUI frontends for system updates: is it reliable?

Hi,

Some time ago I gave discover a short look. Starting it immediately synced the repos and listed the available updates.
It also set a notification in the plasma systray that updates are available.
I come from Gentoo and in general trust only what I know and type in the terminal.
As I do not know which commands are run by discover in the background I uninstalled it again.
I read in the AUR wiki that several commands are unsafe. I waited another day (to make sure all repo databases get updated properly) and ran pacman -Syu manually.

But I am still curious
I converted my dad's desktop to arch. He is a total noob regarding system administration.
But I sometimes happen to be away for several weeks and seeing his computer exposed without updates for such a long period makes me feel uncomfortable.
So I am now coming back to discover, as it would be an easy way for him to stay safe.

I wanted to know from you all:
Is anybody using a gui frontend, specifically discover, to manage system updates and package installation?
How is your experience? Any breakage caused by the frontends?
Other bad/weird behavior?

Thx
Franz

arojas

Developer

From: Spain

Registered: 2011-10-09

Posts: 2,304

Re: KDE discover/GUI frontends for system updates: is it reliable?

Discover uses packagekit to interact with the Arch repos. The current version of packagekit runs repo updates regularly on the background (pacman -Sy) which can lead to partial upgrades if you are not careful. I would recommend against using Discover (or any packagekit-based UI) for managing your repo packages unless you know what you are doing.

There have been some changes in packagekit lately that will make it behave better in this regards, but they haven't made it to the Arch package get.

d_fajardo

Member

Registered: 2017-07-28

Posts: 1,687

Re: KDE discover/GUI frontends for system updates: is it reliable?

If you are using conky, I would recommend Xyne's paconky. You won't have issues with partial upgrades and works with AUR packages as well.

fft2000

Member

Registered: 2020-04-08

Posts: 13

Re: KDE discover/GUI frontends for system updates: is it reliable?

Thx for the replies.
@arojas: I think fixes are in the 1.2.0 update from some days ago, right?
https://github.com/hughsie/PackageKit/commits/master
As I see it things should work as long as my dad won't install new packages but only do updates.
Partial updates should only happen when the database gets synced but only single packages get installed, am I right?

@d_fajardo: Thx for the link.
I don't use conky. But it for sure is an inspiration to have a look at pyalpm usage.
Probably in the long run I might write a small PyQt app that handles the basic stuff that's needed for package management.

FriedrichNietzsche

Member

Registered: 2018-09-05

Posts: 46

Re: KDE discover/GUI frontends for system updates: is it reliable?

To be honest I currently find Discover to be quite bad for Arch Linux with KDE. I ended up using Pamac. It still works best and also offers very convenient access to AUR. The downside is that it's based on GTK and that the supposedly exiting QT version is not really going anywhere. You can make it blend into the system quite neatly though.