No trust me, I know. It's extremely unintuitive, wasn't trying to argue otherwise, just wanted to be helpful :) 

Yeah, that sounds right. You're making my point btw :)

Maybe this is a common criticism but I don't recall ever hearing it. Honestly, it kinda seems intentionally obtuse and I get that really. The types of questions you see on forums for Mint are... very different from other distros like Arch.

kepford

-U uppercase allows you to install a package from a local file, while still downloading dependencies from the db, so if you do for example 

 will download all the dependencies for firefox specified in the tar.gz, but then install the version in your .tar.gz not the one in the sync db.

And if I remember correctly, there's also another -u, that only works with -R, which removes packages only if they're not needed as a dependency of something else.

devs

Is it just me or is pacman package manager not intuitive

-U uppercase allows you to install a package from a local file, while still downloading dependencies from the db, so if you do for example ```pacman -U ~/firefox.tar.gz``` will download all the dependencies for firefox specified in the tar.gz, but then install the version in your .tar.gz not the one in the sync db.

And if I remember correctly, there's also another -u, that only works with -R, which removes packages only if they're not needed as a dependency of something else. 