So I recently installed Cachyos and I am now met with this problem.
There are kind of 2 main contenders here and I’m split between them. What do you use?
There is pacman + aur and then there is flatpak. Pacman has deep system integration and is much more lightweight but it has deep system integration and requires sudo to install. flatpak has sandboxing and easy permission management but it’s bloated and possibly less performant?
Of course if the package isn’t available on flathub then I will have to use the aur but when both are available it’s hard to decide.
I partially disagree. I have found that some flatpaks are better than otherwise for updating the app. When I use the air branch of discord on arch, discord does not update automatically and I need to complete a system upgrade and modify a Jason file. The flatpak version updates automatically with no problems.
What is the air branch? Discord has a package on pacman, so it should just get updated with your normal system update, there’s no config or anything that could prevent that, pacman doesn’t care. What JSON do you have to edit and why?
Build_info.json
I have only ever had this issue with discord on arch. Whenever discord has an update, it will not fetch the update, but it tells me that an update can be downloaded.
This is the situation with discord through aur. https://karx.xyz/blog/discord/
I do not know the air branch
Also, I am trying to convince my friends to switch to element instead of discord, but they have been stubborn.
The issue you describe is not Arch specific and it’s not an issue. Using a package manager means using a program to manage your packages. Things can’t auto-upgrade, that breaks the point of a package manager.
Of course, if you install discord through pacman, then pacman manages the update.
As for the JSON file that’s a very hacky approach, discord shouldn’t outright fail to launch if there is an update. And in fact the Arch wiki says it has a flag to skip the version check completely:
{ "SKIP_HOST_UPDATE": true }More info on https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Discord
The flatpak version of discord is able to fetch for updates when launching the app without needing to system update. And for some reason it is specifically on a system update. Updating only discord does not update the version even after modifying the build_info.json. and I could disable updates, but that shouldn’t be necessary unless discord is pushing updates that are actively making the experience worse.
You’re completely missing the point. Discord is a chat app, not a package manager, therefore it should NOT update things EVER. You’re complaining that discord tries to do something it shouldn’t, fails and somehow you seem to think that’s pacman’s fault.
The “issue” doesn’t exist on flatpaks because discord probably checks if it’s installed via flatpak and runs an update using the flatpak command without your say so. The “solution” is to stop discord from trying to be “smart” and failing and let it be updated when pacman decides to.
The idea of a package manager is to let it manage your packages, if you want self-updating apps you don’t need a package manager, and good luck with dependencies and overlapping libraries.