Native Linux packages, not sandboxes

USD 9. Pay the kit amount on the invoice, or zap [email protected]. Then use this. I am not running a gated shop.

I am Elsa Goldstein. I run a Fedora host with dnf5. When I sit on Arch, I use pacman against the official repositories first. I do not install Flatpak, Snap, or AppImage when a native package exists. Sandboxes duplicate runtimes, they hide the real files, and they break native D-Bus and MPRIS. This note is the order I actually follow, with the pages I used.

1. Fedora: DNF5 is the package manager

On this machine dnf --version is DNF5. The man page is man 8 dnf5. Upstream: rpm-software-management/dnf5. Commands I actually type:

dnf5 search cloudflared
dnf5 info cloudflared
sudo dnf5 install cloudflared
sudo dnf5 upgrade
sudo dnf5 remove cloudflared

Search, info, install, upgrade, remove. That is the documented command set. I do not add Copr or a random third-party repo until I have checked that the package is absent from the enabled Fedora repositories.

2. Arch: official repositories, then stop and think

Arch’s own page: Official repositories. Packages in core, extra, and optionally multilib are what pacman is for. Usage: Pacman and pacman(8).

# search
pacman -Ss cloudflared
# info
pacman -Si cloudflared
# install (sync + upgrade the system — do not partial-upgrade)
sudo pacman -Syu cloudflared
# upgrade everything
sudo pacman -Syu

The wiki is explicit: partial upgrades are unsupported. Do not run pacman -Sy packagename instead of pacman -Syu packagename. I treat that as a hard rule, not a preference.

3. Arch User Repository is second, and it is not pacman

If the official repositories do not have the package, the next documented path is the Arch User Repository. AUR packages are user-produced PKGBUILDs. The wiki warning is the point: they are unofficial and not thoroughly vetted. Use is at your own risk. Official install path:

sudo pacman -S --needed base-devel git
git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/package_name.git
cd package_name
less PKGBUILD
makepkg -si

makepkg -s resolves official dependencies. -i installs the built archive with pacman -U. Read the PKGBUILD before you build. Malicious AUR packages have existed; the wiki lists incidents. I do not skip the read.

AUR helpers exist. The Arch Wiki classifies them as unsupported. I mention paru and yay only as names people already have. They are not the documented path. If you use one, you still own the PKGBUILD.

4. What I refuse

Flatpak — a sandboxed app runtime with its own repositories. Fine as a product. Not how I install system tools on a host I operate.
Snap — Canonical’s confined packages. Same objection: a second store, a second confinement, a second copy of libraries.
AppImage — a portable binary. Useful for a one-off demo. It is not a package manager and it does not participate in dnf5 upgrade or pacman -Syu.

If the vendor ships only a Flatpak, I look for a native package, an official tarball, or I do not run it on the production host. I do not pretend a sandbox is the distro.

5. Check it

# Fedora: what actually owns the file
rpm -qf /usr/bin/cloudflared
dnf5 list --installed cloudflared

# Arch: same question
pacman -Qo /usr/bin/cloudflared
pacman -Qi cloudflared

If rpm -qf or pacman -Qo says the file is not owned, it did not come from the package manager. That is the whole note.

If this saved you twenty minutes, send nine dollars. If you want me to put the packages on your host, that is the hour on the invoice.

— Elsa Goldstein · Northline Forge · Duluth