I haven’t distro hopped much in the past few years, so I am near clueless. I know that Linux Mint has a graphical updater and I vaguely remember openSUSE having it, though I’m not so sure on that one, because as I mentioned, it’s been a while. Especially curious if any Arch-based distros have it.

  • Ooops@feddit.org
    5·
    46 minutes ago

    As the “graphical update tool” is just a basic wrapper for the normal updater, I would be very surprised if any distro coming with a desktop environment by default has none…

    So the answer would be “every single one but Archlinux (nothing by default but the base system) and server installations”

    (PS: My “graphical” updater on Archlinux is a handful of very small scripts that a) runs checkupdates and flatpak remote-ls --updates from time to time writing the result into a temp file, b) displays an indicator if that file isn’t empty, c) prints out the file as a notification on clicking that indicator and d) runs pacman -Syu && paru -Syu -a && flatpak update && pacdiff in a terminal window when I right click the notification.)

    (PPS: Small correction… Manjaro doesn’t have graphical updater but a buggy abomination prone to fucking the AUR instead.)

    • thanksforallthefish@literature.cafe
      1·
      7 hours ago

      I use bearhub which is a fork of bauh as a graphical updater on Arch when I need one (fairly rare but can be handy)

      KDE’s discover is not recommended on Arch but I can’t recall why.

    • TrickDacy@lemmy.world
      22·
      5 hours ago

      How are you using pacdiff? I hadn’t heard of it until now, and the man page didn’t help me.

      • Ooops@feddit.org
        1·
        46 minutes ago

        When config files change with an update pacman writes the new one as a .pacnew file instead of overwriting the existing one. That’s always an issue with updates on config files (although one less severe on slow updating distros). Do you keep the old config to keep your changes intact while ignoring new default options that should be in there or do you replace the old config with a recent one but risk using manual edits?

        pacdiff basically just searches for .pacnew files and then queries you what to do with each.

        You can define a viewer via a DIFFPROG= variable (I simply use vim -d because that’s already my editor of choice but the package pulls diffutils as a dependency so just diff works, too) and compare the new default config file with the existing one side-by-side (with differences highlighted), so you can either copy your personal edits to the new one or copy additional or changed default options to your old one, whatever is easier. After that you have the option to dismiss/delete the .pacnew file or rename it to replace the old one.

        PS: pacdiff is part of the pacman-contrib package. That package also provides checkupdates.

        Running pacman -Syu updates your package list to the recent one, then updates all your outdated packages. You are not actually supposed to update the list, then abort the update of packages or just update some of them because Archlinux always assumes up-to-date systems (see: unsupported partial upgrades). So pacman should not be used to just check for available updates without updating. That’s where checkupdates comes in, simulating pacman -Syu without actually touching your system and just getting a list of available updates.

        PPS: the AUR has a similiar aur-check-updates tools to do the same for AUR packages.