I know I said in my last post I’m a noob, and, i still am, I’m just a noob who can follow a YouTube tutorial. I installed Arch, not only for its minimalistic install, but also because I love the AUR. Everything I could ever want to install is there, and anyone who wants to upload their files can. This gives a windows-like install experience, which, pardon my… spanish, is actually pretty good. Any program is free to be uploaded and installed by anyone.
My question to you is: If you do not use an arch-based distro, how do you go about installing software? I’ve heard people say that “the default package manager is enough” but I can’t be the only person who installs niche software. I wouldn’t want to only be able to install packages hopefully approved by my distro. Flatpaks are kind of annoying, in my opinion? It’s not a native install of a package, it’s sandboxed (which can be good in some cases, but in general just an inconvenience.) Compiling from source is too hardcore for me, so props if that is you, however, non-FOSS software has to be moved by hand to its specific folders and .desktop files have to be made by text. If you don’t use the AUR, how do you go about your Linux experience?
P.S. Hope you like the new sux/teal logo!
I use Arch but you are kinda over zealous about how good AUR is. It is completely unmoderated and, as others have said, a security risk. But it can also pretty easily bork your system because of a bad package. I don’t know how long you’ve been using Arch but it’s only a matter of time before you’re pulling your hair out trying to fix a broken dependency.
Arch is also not the only distro with giant repositories. Void has a pretty massive repository but it’s better moderated. The Debian universe is just as big if not bigger but you have to add repositories, it’s not as central. Same with the Red Hat world. Arch just dumps it all in to one chaotic bucket which is very convenient but there are downsides.
I use Gentoo. We have what’s probably the most flexible and powerful package manager for Linux.
Adding new packages is trivial; an ebuild script is created which describes how to build the package, along with a little metadata. This is placed into an ebuild repository - I like to contribute to the Gentoo one, but any folder structure will do (however git is by for the most common method). It’s not uncommon for a Gentoo user to package software outside the official repos. These will have all of the features (like configurability via USE flags) that ebuilds in the official repo have.
These repositories, for convenience, may be registered with Gentoo and linked on https://repos.gentoo.org/ where the eselect repository tool can be used to add them by name from the index. http://gpo.zugaina.org/ indexes known ebuild repos and can help you to identify whether or not something has already been packaged.
I used arch for a long time and only recently switched over to fedora silverblue. One of the things I missed most was the AUR (and pacman), for sure. However, I discovered something called distrobox. It allows me to install an archlinux container and from there I can use the AUR with no problems. It’s pretty seamless, too. So, if there is something I can’t find something then it’s no problem now.
Though, fedora has pretty much everything anyway. Flatpaks are getting damn good.
I would try fedora but I’m still skeptical about flatpaks. Seems like it would introduce bloat and a lot of complexity that I don’t want or need.
80% of the time, compiling something from source is just a matter of downloading the code, opening a terminal and changing to the directory containing the source and running these commands:
./configure
make
make install
It’s the same 3 commands, 80% of the time.
Installing the prerequisites can be tricky, if the docs are lacking.
Let’s see… “anyone who wants to upload their files can”. “This gives a windows-like install experience”. “Any program is free to be uploaded and installed by anyone”. Read those again and realize what a massive security hole that is.