Pacman Packages

This page lists the pacman commands to install various packages. For general information about pacman usage, see Pacman.

Generally speaking, installing packages through pacman is a little bit easier and more streamlined than apt-get.

Note that some of the below packages are considered "AUR packages". See Enabling AUR Packages for details.

System Utilities

Gparted

A helpful hard drive management tool, with a user-friendly GUI.

sudo pacman -Syu gparted

Extra Hard Drive Utils

Used, for example, in network share mounting.

sudo pacman -Syu cifs-utils

System Other

DKMS

A packaged used to rebuild system kernels after a kernel update.
Generally needed if you manually upgrade kernels on your machine, or if running as a VM.

sudo pacman -Syu dkms

If asked to choose system headers, use the following command in a terminal to see what kernel your system is running:

uname -r

Nvidia Graphics Drivers

General Nvidia drivers:

sudo pacman -Syu nvidia nvidia-utils nvidia-settings xorg-server-devel opencl-nvidia

Additional CUDA packages:

sudo pacman -Syu cuda

Font Packages

For some distributions, it seems the default font packages will be missing some characters (mostly emoji but eh, they're getting more common lately and officially utf8 supported). Particularly on chat programs and social media, you might see placeholder square characters instead of the correct text.

To fix this, run:

sudo pacman -Syu xorg-fonts-misc xorg-fonts-type1 gnu-free-fonts noto-fonts-emoji ttf-arphic-uming ttf-bitstream-vera ttf-dejavu ttf-indic-otf ttf-joypixels 

If the above doesn't solve the issue, you can also install the following AUR Packages:

otf-openmoji ttf-symbola ttf-twemoji ttf-twemoji-color

General

Chrome

Installs the standard Google Chrome web browser.

Note that this is an AUR Package:

chromium

Dropbox

Dropbox is a free file-sharing utility for cross-computer sharing.

Note that this is an AUR Package:

dropbox

Gimp

Gimp is a free image editor tool.

sudo pacman -Syu gimp

VLC

VLC is an all-encompassing media player. It can handle just about any standardized media format you could throw at it.

sudo pacman -Syu vlc

LaTeX

For creating and editing pdf files.

sudo pacman -Syu gnome-latex

Blender

Blender is a free, open-source 3D modeling program.

sudo pacman -Syu cuda blender

Communication

Discord

sudo pacman -Syu discord

Slack

Note that slack is a snap package.

slack

General Programming

Git and Gitk

Installed on most distro's by default, but not always. Pretty essential for anything programming. If not present, can be installed with:

sudo pacman -Syu git tk

VirtualBox

VirtualBox is a free way to create and run Virtual Machines.

sudo pacman -Syu virtualbox

If asked to choose system host modules, use the following command in a terminal to see what kernel your system is running:

uname -r

Docker

Docker does to software what VirtualMachines do to operating systems.

Essentially, docker creates individual, stand-alone environments (or containers) that allow a set of software to run.

sudo pacman -Syu docker

NPM

Originally a tool for NodeJS and various JavaScript libraries, it increasingly seems to be used to store all sorts of different programming packages.

sudo pacman -Syu npm

MySQL Workbench

A useful and easy interface for interacting with MySQL servers.

sudo pacman -Syu mysql-workbench

Programming Languages

Php

Laravel

Laravel is a Php based web framework.

Python

See Python for details.

The latest version of Python will come installed on Arch by default. To aquire an older version, use snap or AUR Packages.

Programming IDEs

Sublime Text

A text editor that, by itself, isn't very impressive. But it has a lot of support for extensions and customization, which make it as good as most standard IDE's.

Either install sublime-text-3 from the Software Updater GUI (Note that this is an AUR Package) or install via:

curl -O https://download.sublimetext.com/sublimehq-pub.gpg
sudo pacman-key --add sublimehq-pub.gpg && sudo pacman-key --lsign-key 8A8F901A && rm sublimehq-pub.gpg
echo -e "\n[sublime-text]\nServer = https://download.sublimetext.com/arch/stable/x86_64" | sudo tee -a /etc/pacman.conf
sudo pacman -Syu sublime-text

Pycharm

An IDE created specifically for Python. Made by the JetBrains people.

sudo pacman -Syu pycharm-community-edition

VsCode

A lightweight version of VisualStudio. Has support for many different languages.

sudo pacman -Syu code