I’ve put together a front-end for the pacman package manager on Arch Linux.

It’ll list what packages you have installed, which ones can be upgraded, and which ones are available for download. You can then install new ones or remove them at the click of a button. Upgrades and syncs are also a mouse click away.

The idea was to provide a simple and accessible interface “that my mom could use.”

I coded this up using Python and QML. There are still some issues around flickering, the initial load times can be off-putting as it parses through all of the locally installed packages on start, it has hard-coded paths for looking up the locally installed icons, there’s a fair amount of technical debt, and it doesn’t look at the AUR at all. These are all things for which there are solutions, with more work.

To install, first download the PKGBUILD file from the source code here. From the directory in which you downloaded the PKGBUILD file, run the following commands:

makepkg

sudo pacman -U archplay*.xz

To run the program after installation, invoke the following command from the terminal emulator:

archplay

Again, all source code is available here.