I haven’t distro hopped much in the past few years, so I am near clueless. I know that Linux Mint has a graphical updater and I vaguely remember openSUSE having it, though I’m not so sure on that one, because as I mentioned, it’s been a while. Especially curious if any Arch-based distros have it.
the mostly populars probably
I think nearly all popular ones that come with a graphical interface at all. There is a graphical updater by KDE called Discover that works on a lot of different distros.
Most of them offer some sort of GUI updater. Zorin, Bazzite, Cachy, off the top of my head. How intuitive are they? Not. How much user input do they require? In the case of Zorin and Cachy, quite a lot.
All the Debian and RHEL based ones I’ve run into have it.
So Debian, Ubuntu, PopOS!, Rhel, Fedora, CentOS for the ones I’ve seen lately
All the Archlinux based ones, too. (Although I don’t accept the buggy mess that is Manjaro’s Pamac as an actual tool.)
The only way to get a distro with no graphical updater by default nowadays is using one that does not come with a graphical desktop by default (so archlinux and some server installations…).
CachyOS comes with a graphical package manager
As the “graphical update tool” is just a basic wrapper for the normal updater, I would be very surprised if any distro coming with a desktop environment by default has none…
So the answer would be “every single one but Archlinux (nothing by default but the base system) and server installations”
(PS: My “graphical” updater on Archlinux is a handful of very small scripts that a) runs
checkupdateandflatpak remote-ls --updatesfrom time to time writing the result into a temp file, b) displays an indicator if that file isn’t empty, c) prints out the file as a notification on clicking that indicator and d) runspacman -Syu && paru -Syu -a && flatpak update && pacdiffin a terminal window when I right click the notification.)(PPS: Small correction… Manjaro doesn’t have graphical updater but a buggy abomination prone to fucking the AUR instead.)
How are you using pacdiff? I hadn’t heard of it until now, and the man page didn’t help me.
Arch-based
It’s not recommended, but you can use any graphical updater you want, by installing
packagekit-qt6. The reason it’s not recommended, however, is that if something goes wrong, you’ll have a harder time figuring it out without pacman’s logs; also, it won’t merge .pacnew files, increasing the chance that something goes wrong after a reboot. If you just wanna use a graphical updater for flatpak stuff, that’d be fine, but you’d still need to usepacman -Syuto update system packages.What distro doesn’t? Beside a couple probably.
From my experience, most of Arch derivatives.
NixOS
not so much a specific distro. I know KDE has its own graphical updater in the “discover” app store, COSMIC DE also has its own app store. personally I always update my apps through the terminal as its just faster and easier.
Garuda has a good one
It would probably be easier to names the distros that don’t have have a graphical updater tool
Even then, would it not be possible to install a graphical updater on any distro?
Likely it’s included in most major desktops.
openSUSE Tumbleweed has a graphical installer you can use to install, remove, update applications, browse, search, etc. But you still need to run a command line ‘zypper dup’ to fully update the system.
Tumbleweed has Myrlyn or Discover.
Debian has Synaptic
If I’m not mistake CachyOs comes with Shelly preinstalled now. While it can be a bit flaky with some esoteric aur packages it works fine for most things: pacman, flatpak, aur, even AppImage but I have not tried that.
