Basically, I’d like to make desktop mode look and feel a little more like MacOS, and this app is kind of essential. Unfortunately I don’t know anything about what’s happening when it doesn’t install. I’ve set a sudo password, I’ve disabled read-only, I’ve initialized the pacman keys (whatever that means), now it says “unknown trust”…

Is there a straightforward tutorial somewhere on how to do something like this for an absolute beginner? I assumed changing the appearance and layout of my desktop should have been an easy and harmless first step for a Linux noob to try, but I already feel like I’m just smashing my head up against a wall.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

  • FubarberryMEnglish
    5·
    8 months ago

    I agree with the others that you would likely be better off modifying KDE to suit your needs.

    If you do want to install pacman packages and have them persist between updates, you could try rwfus which makes an RW overlay that lets you install packages. There are some catches though, mostly you can’t update using pacman -Syu and you can’t install glibc.

    There’s another way to install packages, where you create a temporary folder, download the package there, and then install it in your home directory instead to keep it between updates. I don’t have a guide for it, but I do have an example of using it to install the package fakeroot. You’ll have to set pacman up first, but then instead of doing a normal pacman install you do the following:

    mkdir -p ~/.local/bin

    sudo pacman --cachedir /tmp -Sw --noconfirm fakeroot

    tar -xf /tmp/fakeroot-*.pkg.tar.zst -C ~/.local --strip-components=1 usr/bin usr/lib

    sudo rm -f /tmp/fakeroot*.pkg.*

    Swap out “fakeroot” for the package name you’re trying to install and it should work.