Pacman, pamac, Octopi, and package management

We will start with pacman and then switch to the improvements in pamac. It is important to note that Flatpaks and Snaps cannot be installed with any of these tools in the terminal.

Pacman

At https://wiki.archlinux.org/, you can track the history of pacman back to October 2005, though it was created before this. It is stable, with great functionality, follows the Arch paradigm of providing only a CLI interface, and is based on the libalpm library. Pacman holds a local DB of all the available packages in /var/lib/pacman/ and downloads the packages in /var/cache/pacman/pkg/. It requires root privileges for commands changing local installations and settings but not for query and information commands. Keep in mind that some applications, libraries, or packages belong to groups, and when we use the group name for installation, all the group’s packages will be installed.

Let’s examine the short help with $ pacman -h. It...