Avoid packagekit

Introduction

Graphical package managers like KDE Discover or GNOME Software are convenient and present themselves as a comfortable and familiar software management user interface.

Unfortunately, these utilities use PackageKit. PackageKit, and by extension KDE Discover and GNOME Software are not specifically designed for libalpm based distributions (like Garuda Linux), which means that they are unaware of certain best practices and specifics.

By extension, PackageKit can often be the source of problems and/or obscure problems that would have happened either way.

To quote Archlinux maintainer heftig:

Handling system packages via packagekit is just fundamentally incompatible with our high-maintenance rolling release distro, where any update might leave the system in an unbootable or otherwise unusable state if the user does not take care reading pacman’s logs or merging pacnew files before rebooting.

Removing PackageKit

garuda-health can detect and remove PackageKit if necessary:

garuda-health --fix

Otherwise, ensure packagekit and packagekit-qt6 have been removed from the system.

Tip

Using GNOME Software or KDE Discover for installing, managing and updating Flatpak applications is a non-issue. The advice in this article relates specifically to PackageKit.

The Alternative

The only supported method of updating Garuda Linux is through Garuda Update. This program performs additional steps that may be necessary for a smooth updating experience. The linked article elaborates on this.

For installation or browsing of new software, a GUI frontend for pacman like Octopi may be convenient:

sudo pacman -S octopi

A TUI frontend for pacman, called pacseek, also exists:

sudo pacman -S pacseek