Shelly -- pacman/yay alternative

I’m just trying Shelly, a pacman or yay alternative, not a wrapper around either. I normally use yay, so having a GUI is an odd experience. Anyone having any issues using it?

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I haven’t run Shelly myself but I took a quick look at it. How’s the AUR side feeling compared to yay? That’s usually where these alternatives either shine or fall apart. I’m curious if package builds and updates feel snappier or if there’s any weirdness.

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first time heard of Shelly and it’s even written in dotnet.

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Yes, the dotnet thing caused me a bit of anxiety when I saw it.

But I like the way it gives a full transcript of what it’s up to. I’ll keep using it for a while, hopefully nothing bad happens.

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Update: Just had a humongous Chromium/webqt update with Shelly. I’ll try the same on my Omarchy partition using yay. Shelly seemed to get stuck for a while retrieving package objects, but all my 16 +16virtual cores were flat out for many minutes (e.g. 15+ mins) as Chromium was being compiled. Otherwise no issues. It asked politely for a reboot, everything was fine. :slightly_smiling_face:

EDIT: Sorry, I meant Chromium, not Chrome (I’ve now correct the post).

Omarchy did not need an update to Chromium, so I couldn’t compare Shelly with yay this time.

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Omarchy !
that distro by DHH is like 7743139840 byte ~= 7.2 GB iso
if shelly had tui version Ig david will make it the default,

aren’t you on vanilla arch ?

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I use Endeavouros, I have two SSDs, one with Endeavouros and one with Omarchy, boot is managed by Limine. Shelly has a very nice, noob friendly, CLI interface, but I don’t think there’s a CLI only version.

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Apologies there IS a CLI version! And it works so beautifully with Omarchy! Just have to do a manual install:

git clone https://github.com/ZoeyErinBauer/Shelly-ALPM.git
cd Shelly-ALPM
makepkg -si

Then do this:

dotnet publish Shelly-CLI/Shelly-CLI.csproj -c Release -o publish/shelly-cli

and you can use the very friendly CLI, e.g.:

shelly list-installed

See Shelly CLI for more! :grin:

EDIT: Just noticed a bug! The above command seems to only list the first 100 packages and it claims that each is 0B. I’ll go RTFM.

OK: For the first page, you need:

shelly list-installed -p 1

To see the next page you need:

shelly list-installed -p 2

and so on. It would be nice not to have to keep re-issuing the command, but it is working! There’s still a bug about the installed size but that is being looked into by the developer.

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The bug is fixed now. Very responsive developer!

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why shloud I use this? pacman is easy and fast.

It reminds me: I only use Internet Explorer to download another browser

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No reason whatsoever. Except perhaps for someone very new to Linux who would prefer a slightly more friendly package manager. I may have saved 15 microseconds yesterday.
I believe it is the de-facto standard in CachyOS, but equally I could be 100% wrong about that.

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Yeah, that’s a valid point, but do beginners really start with Arch Linux?

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