I’ve been using arch for a while now and I always used Flatpaks for proprietary software that might do some creepy shit because Flatpaks are supposed to be sandboxed (e.g. Steam). And Flatpaks always worked flawlessly OOTB for me. AUR for things I trust. I’ve read on the internet how people prefer AUR over Flatpaks. Why? And how do y’all cope with waiting for all the AUR installed packages to rebuild after every update? Alacritty takes ages to build for me. Which is why I only update the AUR installed and built applications every 2 weeks.
AppImage !
- Open format? Yes
- Free format? Yes
- Fully Contained Single Executable Support . Like an exe file for Windows systems Yes (the only one)
- App Size** The lowest** !
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AppImage
Matrix
https://www.fosslinux.com/42410/snap-vs-flatpak-vs-appimage-know-the-differences-which-is-better.htm
https://phoenixnap.com/kb/flatpak-vs-snap-vs-appimage \
I always use Flatpak over AUR.
AUR is my last resort
An AUR package has been done for Arch by (supposedly) someone who knows what they are doing and needs it on their Arch Machine
A Flatpak is something done by someone, to (supposedly) work everywhere, untested on Arch, that may or may not work. And crash (Ardour on Asahi). Or waste hours or you life to render files incorrectly (kdenlive on arch and asahi).
Native versions work perfectly.
I thought I was clever in using arch/aur for everything, but pull KDE or QT apps from Flatpak to keep my gnome install a bit more tidy… For this, you’d have to have those Flataks to work, and sometimes they don’t.
people prefer AUR over Flatpaks. Why?
Some stuff doesn’t work as Flatpak, or I actually prefer for it to be compiled against what’s actually on my system rather than a generic one-size-fits-all binary, or simply isn’t in Flatpak.
Flathub is tiny (under 3k packages), AUR has over 85k – and yes I know that many of those are abandoned or maintained very loosely but even if you only count the packages updated in the last year that’s still over 10x bigger than Flathub.
Examples: kernel modules, CLI tools, libraries, versions of apps compiled against old UI frameworks (like Claws-Mail with GTK2), obscure apps, drivers for obscure hardware, stuff with dubious legal standing like file sharing apps etc.
how do y’all cope with waiting for all the AUR installed packages to rebuild after every update?
I don’t. I disabled AUR updates and only update AUR packages when they break. Sometimes if I’m bored I’ll run a pamac checkupdates --aur and do a pamac build <package> on anything I see there that might be interesting to have a new version of. But most of the time like I said I wait for them to break, which happens surprisingly seldom.
Alacritty takes ages to build for me.
Yeah some apps are ridiculous. Pika Backup is another example, RPCS3, and so on. For some of those I actually resort to Flatpak.
The choice is not always so clear cut because Flatpak stuff will tend to have random features present or missing. For example a while ago the Flatpak Handbrake could do accelerated encoding on the GPU, now it can’t. So I was forced to go back to native Handbrake.
