I love Gentoo precisely because of Portage, but I think the most badass package install/uninstall syntax has to be that of (the defunct?) Sorcerer Linux:
Sorcerer’s tool terminology is based upon magic words. For example:
- a tool to download, compile, and install software is called a “spell”
- to install a package is “cast”
- to remove a package is “dispel”
- a set of available spells is called a “grimoire”
I mean alias is a thing and nothing is stopping you…
I think I will do it in my system.
I have
paru -Rnsabbreviated toyeetin my fish config. On my non-Arch systems, I also usually abbreviate/alias the equivalent command toyeet.Any package manager can have that syntax if you use aliases. I prefer “yeet” myself.
Unmerge is a great way to end up with 10000 circular dependencies, I prefer using deselect and then depclean
I still like pacman’s syntax the most due to it being close to what one expects from a normal cli program. Also, I’m lazy, and
pacman -Syu, for example, is way faster to type thanapt update && apt upgrade.yay
Someone said they found the pacman syntax confusing at the 37c3 arch user meetup
yeah that was not well received lol.
It’s very clean and I love the categories of actions (Database/Files/Query/Remove/Sync/Deptest/Upgrade) that each support -h individually.
How else can you pretend you are ordering the Hulk around?
apt update
apt upgrade
…actually, now I want to see if I can set up an alias like that.
hulk smash firefox
I’m lazy, so I prefer to not remember what half a dozen cryptic flags stand for.
I just find disappointing that there’s no long form to these options and they don’t make much mnemonic sense either. Feels like the authors just picked the first letter available they came across with zero regard to readability or usability.
pacman -Rns $(pacman -Qqdt)It’s so semantic it almost reads like a sentence!
And who needs simplicity when you can teach people about advanced shell techniques like command substitution?
Perfection.
What does -Qqdt do?
Find orphans packages
I have it alised to
orphankiller
Pacman is not a great package manager. It blows up way to easily.
The most badass package syntax: never having to use any because you’re on an atomic OS.
You will need to use it at some point. With silverblue it is rpm-ostree and with bootable containers it is dnf in a Dockerfile.
I’m on Aurora. I don’t have to use rpm-ostree (bootc in the future). I can use it, but I don’t have to. Most of my software needs are covered by flatpak and homebrew. I also don’t have to update packages in my distrobox containers. Those are managed for me, too.
I love tinkering with stuff, but updating packages is nothing more than a chore. I’d rather be doing the fun stuff.
