The AUR still has a lot of niche software that hasn't been Flatpakked, but yeah. Flatpaks are way more convenient, especially for large software where AUR compilation can take a long time.

I do really like AUR, but agree Flatpak is a good alternative. I can’t stand snap, snap packages just feel slower.

Main reason I like the AUR is for really niche packages that aren't in any main repos. Smaller github projects, forks of main projects that fix bugs, basically anything that you would otherwise have to compile from source is on the AUR. And while you still might have to compile it, it's all setup and managed for you, which I really like.

Flatpack vs AUR comparison

I tried arch and got rid of it after a couple months because of the aur. Do people just not check out what they're installing? Every time I wanted a new software i'd have to check it out to make sure it was legit, and every time I updated i'd have to check the diffs to make sure it was still legit. Otherwise, who knows what you're actually installing.

I don't believe the setup is a fallacy, the AUR is one of the main reasons I use Arch. Sure, other distros may have similar systems in place, but the number of packages available on these systems just doesn't compare. I did a brief amount of research, according to the FreeBSD manual, there are "over 30,000" ports available. In comparison, there are over 90,000 packages available on the AUR, and all of those are in addition to the ~13,000 packages in the official Arch repositories. If I want to obtain a piece of software, even if it isn't in the arch repos, odds are, someone has already gone through the trouble of figuring out how to build/package it, and has added the PKGBUILD to the AUR.

This way of doing things is so much more elegant compared to how things are done on Debian or Red Hat-derived distros, where the solution to the problem of a piece of software not being in the official repos is to either (1) scour the internet and try to find if the developer maintains a repo for your distro, (2) look to see if a third party has packaged the software for your distro, and hope and pray that they maintain it, or (3), compile the package yourself, after manually hunting down all the various libraries the application needs, determining what they're packaged as for your particular distro. The third solution doesn't handle updates at all, unless the application's developer has built-in an update checker into it.

Things are getting better as snaps and flatpaks gain popularity, but both of those systems have lots of issues of their own, and arguably aren't anywhere near as good as a proper native package for your distro. Flatpaks don't really work for CLI tools. Snaps are stupidly slow. Both snaps and flatpaks still struggle with theming. Applications installed with either take up way more space than their natively-packaged equivalents.

Yeah, the Arch Wiki is incredible, even as a non-Arch user, it's such a valuable source of knowledge.

PPAs are fundamentally flawed. Since each repository is separate, they only care to maintain consistency internally, plus the packages of the Ubuntu version they were based on.

Adding a PPA and using its packages on your system takes your dependency tree into a "cul de sac" where only that PPA is reliable.

But of course people use multiple PPAs so what happens is that the dependency tree grows increasingly unrecoverable.

Eventually you get the dreaded "requires X but cannot be installed" errors which pretty much mean you've hit a dead end. You can recover your system from it (aptitude can provide solutions) but they are extremely invasive, basically come down to uninstalling and reinstalling thousands of packages to bring your tree back to a manageable state.

Ubuntu has Pacstall

OBS and COPR don't even come close to the AUR in terms of ease of use. AUR is one searchable index, OBS and COPR are more like separate repositories that you have to find and add manually. There's multiple people building the same packages and you have to figure out which one you want to rely on. You also can't easily edit the packaging instructions and rebuild a package if it doesn't work for you.

I wish i understood how to create a COPR repo tho.

Arch has many other advantages from my point of view. Like for example the wiki that also users of other distributions use.

I remember when started using #! and then Debian with Openbox. It didn't matter what problem I had, the answer and solution were always in the Arch Wiki.

Now I am full Arch user.

I think you misunderstand the typical use case for the AUR. It's generally used to install fairly niche software that might fly under the radar of distro maintainers. For example, I have CoreCtrl, a utility for managing AMD GPUs, on my install via the AUR. I'm not aware of any distro that packages it currently because it's just too niche of a use case right now for maintainers to pay it any mind.

Well that would apply to any distro I've used.. they're all going to have things that aren't in the main repos. It's a feature for Arch in that on nearly every other distro it's probably going to be more of a pain to install them.

I've been on NixOS for about a week now and I can say I've got access to pretty much all of the packages I was using on Arch just from nixpkgs. I even found it quite easy to package stuff myself!

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doesn’t even have any good pacman wrappers since yaourt (that I’m aware of).

paru is cool

AUR however, is untrusted (or rather shouldn’t be trusted), often out of date

So basically like a PPA which are used by many users of Ubuntu. The only difference is that the PKBUILD files used to build the packages are easier to check than the final packages in a PPA. And that's exactly what is a big advantage for me.

sometimes requires compilation,

This is often because a project does not offer ready-made packages that can be downloaded from Github, for example. There are also people who do not trust ready-made packages from unknown third parties. I wouldn't necessarily download and execute a binary file from a Dropbox of a user I don't know. Compiling is the safer way if the source code is downloaded from a more trustworthy source.

and doesn’t even have any good pacman wrappers since yaourt (that I’m aware of).

Personally, I don't think aurutils, paru and yay are bad. I currently use aurutils myself. But as far as AUR helpers are concerned, everyone has their own preferences. That's why there are so many ;-)

Yeah, AUR isn't great because it's engineered as a second class citizen given the necessity of third-party tools like yaourt, and that the whole process of installation can't be done directly through the first-party tool (pacman), such that updating the main packages can trivially cause third-party packages to suddenly stop working. ArchLinux offers just one way - their way - when it comes to dealing with software versions and if the user happens to depend on some thing they want to keep around, tough luck, and hope that future upgrades don't force a breakage that requires a recompilation which may no longer work.

That runs completely opposite to Gentoo, where the first-party repositories are defined the exact same way as third-party repositories, and that updates to first-party libraries generally don't immediately break existing binaries because the distribution was built with recompilation requirements from upgrade breakages in mind. Since third-party packages are treated no differently (no second class citizen treatment), their first-party tool (emerge) can manage the complete lifecycle of "third-party" packages in the exact same manner (as opposed to needing any third party tools to manage the build). This alone reduces the mental bandwidth for the end-users that are managing their set of required packages for their systems. All this flexibility is ultimately part of the various reasons that got me to switch from Arch back to Gentoo.

dupe

Great, why do you need a whole OS centering around a package manager?

(Edit for typo) With SUSE install OPI, it will search the OBS for you.

Thing is, the AUR isn't really meant to be your primary repo. You can really get anything into the AUR.

The reason why I love it so much is because if I need a package that's not in the main arch repo (which tbh isn't many), then I don't need to bother going to some github page and compiling from source, I can just find it in the AUR and it's all done for me. I did this with things like goverlay and it's one thing that I immediately miss when I distro hop away from something arch-based.

Nah, it is my MAIN reason using Arch-based distro. If not because AUR, I should still using rock-solid Linux Mint.. lol.. 😅

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Having to build from source is exactly why I don't think the AUR has a replacement. There are many similar package managers but non as extensive. Like NUR for NixOS.

PPAs aren't convenient at all compared to the AUR. Pacstall is the AUR for Ubuntu it just needs more packages. I would still be on Linux Mint if Pacstall was as extensive as the AUR.

PPAs and the AUR are very different. Where as PPAs contain prebuilt .deb packages, the AUR hosts PkgBuild scripts that typically pull from a git repo and compile a program for you.

I understand the confusion though, because they accomplish the same goal of installing software that is not in the main repos, but in different ways.

It's a single, central, community space for build plans, which are extremely easy for anyone to create and submit.

Edit: And easier to audit than prebuilt packages

It's so kino. Incredibly hard to learn and much more to master, but much more powerful. Nothing beats easily modifying a derivation's source, or adding patches or build options or whatever you want.

That's it. We'll create a new standard that unites them all!

Installing dependencies automatically mostly

It gives you a lot of convenience, auto updates, and dependencies. While it is nice being up to date by checking the git and making it by yourself it is much more convenient to have a package manager for it when you have many Make packages