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Is updating KDE Neon with apt bad?

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Poggo
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Is updating KDE Neon with apt bad?

Wed Feb 09, 2022 8:49 am
TL:DR- Got fed up with manjaro and started looking for another distro. Reminded about KDE Neon, tried it on vm and tried to do apt update. Got a message saying that i should use pckon and i'm left unsure if apt would cause harm to the system

Hello I came here with question. I want to switch my current distro (manjaro) to another because well it was hard to maintain, and for me was buggy as hell. I was thinking of another arch based distro when i rememberd from years ago KDE Neon. I'm a big fan of kde so i decided to give it a try and fired it up on a vm. Everything was good and smooth. I'm used to arch way of doing commands so i installed pacapt. Pacapt is just a shell wrapper that makes you execute commands the arch way but still you are using apt or another default package manager on your distro. So i typed just like i'm used to
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sudo pacapt -Syyu
(this is equivalent to sudo apt upgrade) and i got a message that says that apt shouldn't be used and that you should use
Code: Select all
pkcon refresh && pkcon update
and now i'm here wondering if updating with apt would do something bad. I was on couple of distros before but i'm used with manjaro that it would just go ape crazy when you install a newer package while still the arch version that manjaro used was older (because of the fact manjaro holds the new arch version to "test it" and relases it 2 weeks later [also that;s one of the reasons i'm leaving manjaro]). So i know this question sounds funny and that for some of you think that i'm a total fresh newbie that mistook kali linux forums (oh boy if you sometimes saw what happens here ;D ) with kde ones but still i wanna be sure if it wouldn't cause any harm because i'm thinking to going bare metal soon because this distro is very polished.
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claydoh
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No.
Pkcon is the command line interface to Packagekit, which is what Discover (and Gnome Software iirc) uses under the hood.
Packagekit/Discover/Pkcon uses a distro's native packaging system to do the work. In the case of Neon, this would be apt. In Manjaro, using pkcon would be using pacman.

So there is no danger per se, but you do have to use it correctly. In Ubuntu based distros, apt is set up somewhat differently than it is in Debian, so the proper formats to use would be
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sudo apt update

and
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sudo apt full-upgrade


In Debian, the usage would be sudo apt upgrade. People were using this format to update, and due to the differences in how each command option works, not all updates get installed in some instances. Early on, this was a very common problem, as many people were using the Debian method, and not getting fully updated.

Neon decided to push the use of Pkcon to help reduce this user error. They even patched things so that if you try to run apt incorrectly, it will give you a message instead of running, as you saw.

Pkcon is a good choice to use, as the same command is used no matter the distro or packaging system.

Using apt if also fine, and usually preferable if there are errors or issues, as the native packaging tools will give better messaging to help troubleshoot.

Packagekit/Pkcon is a bit more involved than a simple wrapper 'faking' another packaging system's commands. Setting up personalized bash aliases is quite simple, and probably is what that pacapt script is doing.


claydoh, proud to be a member of KDE forums since 2008-Oct, and KDE user since 2001
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Poggo
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Thanks for the information! Yes pacapt is just baisically just bunch of aliases but i prefer that i have done it automatically than setting this all by myself. Again thanks for help :D


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