I admit AUR was a huge reason why I made the move to Arch. But with Flatpak gaining more and more traction, the benefits of AUR are shrinking fast.
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.
What’s wrong with librewolf-bin? Would you choose the Flatpack or the bin from the AUR?
Agreed. DaVinci Resolve Studio and Blackmagic hardware drivers are examples of that kind of niche software that I use on a regular basis. The only supported route for that stuff is RHEL/CentOS, and those don’t seem particularly well-suited to my main machine’s other purpose, which is games. If someone’s already done the legwork to solve the problem for Arch, and the build files check out, why reinvent the wheel?
Additionally, it’s the only distro I could get Resolve Studio working on with an AMD GPU consistently.
For the most part, though, the official repos and Flathub give me what I need.
Agreed. DaVinci Resolve Studio and Blackmagic hardware drivers are examples of that kind of niche software that I use on a regular basis. The only supported route for that stuff is RHEL/CentOS, and those don’t seem particularly well-suited to my main machine’s other purpose, which is games. If someone’s already done the legwork to solve the problem for Arch, and the build files check out, why reinvent the wheel?
Additionally, it’s the only distro I could get Resolve Studio working on with an AMD GPU consistently.
For the most part, though, the official repos and Flathub give me what I need.
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.
A subset of AUR PKGBUILDs are downloading a prebuilt desktop application binary packaged for another distro (deb, rpm, tarball, appimage) from upstream and then unpacking it. Those packages are trying to solve some of the same problems as flatpak, distributing a generic desktop binary but often do it worse and people should be weighing the alternatives. More broadly AUR packages aren’t comparable with flatpak but some are.
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.
The majority of other distros value package managers that allow for complex graph evaluation of dependencies, and the ability to roll back. This is granted with rpm and Deb, but not for pkgsource, which is a pretty lightweight format compared to those.
As for AUR, the major distros (Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora) support 3p repositories as well. The main concern is security. IIRC one of major complaints for AUR in the past was that it didn’t foresee a strongly secure distribution system.
The setup is kind of a kind of a logical fallacy here. More people are using Debian and RPM based distributions than Arch Linux. That being said:
Arch Linux has the AUR because at the time it was developed, the standards for distributing software on Linux were either RPM or DEB repositories. AUR was a necessity because one could get software on those distributions from the official vendor, but nobody was supporting Arch Linux. So it was a stopgap, an equalizer for one outlier platform.
It’s hardly the first such repository: FreeBSD ports and NetBSD pkgsrc predate the AUR by over a decade. Slackpkg predates AUR by a couple of years as well, though possibly not slapt-get. Gentoo has portage. Anyway, they took an idea that was already well-established, and catered it to a distribution that had fewer software options than major distributions.
These days it’s still the same scenario: a placeholder, to equalize what’s available for Arch Linux users versus other distributions.
People use Arch because it is a rolling release with a well-documented wiki. AUR is a nice perk, but hardly the main reason that people are using Arch Linux, given that other similar systems have existed for older distributions and operating systems for longer.
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.
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.
Flatpaks would beat native packages if they didn’t have a trillion papercuts and issues. I’m on NixOS because I want to avoid using flatpak.
quantity doesn’t always mean quality and when the subject is aur, i wouldn’t count that as a metric. there are lots of orphaned packages, packages that have their source / binary / git versions, older libraries etc.
it USED TO be a nice repository, i don’t why. but it’s one of the main reasons i’m keeping away from arch because i cannot trust those packages anymore.
Fair arguments. The AUR is huge compared to the operating systems that inspired it (no idea how packages/metrics are counted between different operating systems but it’s safe to say that more packages exist for Linux than in the FreeBSD realm), and it solves a problem that the Debian/Red Hat distributions are being faced with now that Flatpaks are essentially another packaging system ON TOP of whatever they have used for decades.
openSUSE has OBS, Fedora has COPR, and I’m pretty sure both Gentoo and NixOS have similar stuff. Do Ubuntu’s PPAs count? Flatpaks and AppImages are also similar, although they are more limited and they aren’t exactly “standard” packages.
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.
I admit I haven’t used Ubuntu in years, so I didn’t think they were that bad. Thanks for the info, it made me learn a dependency hell scenario I never thought about before.
It’s basically one reason I stopped using Ubuntu.
I wanted to use the up to date version of FFMPEG, had to download the binary from the website. Wanted to install some program that needed the latest version of KDE, had to install a PPA which updated a LOT of packages and at the end it would break many other apps installed from other PPAs.
At some point I realized using Arch was just much less work than worrying myself about all the dependencies that could break when you don’t stick to what’s available in their official repositories.
Debian technically has the same issue but people who want Debian usually stick to stable + backports so it’s less frequent.
Yeah that’s why distributions which put all their community packages in one place with the same dependencies are more resilient in this respect.
Arch’s AUR is not perfect either, you can have packages that list dependencies badly or replace core packages so you can still mess up but in a different way.
NixOS seems to have hit on a very robust formula that lets packages coexist with minimal friction.
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.
when it’s the main reason why so many people use Arch Linux?
AUR is one reason why I use Arch. But not the reason. Besides AUR, Arch has many other advantages from my point of view. Like for example the wiki that also users of other distributions use. Or the many vanilla packages. Or that you can easily create your own packages through the PKGBUILD files. Or that, based on my own experience, Arch is quite problem-free to use despite the current packages.
One reason why other distributions don’t have something like AUR could be that AUR is not an official offering, so no verification is done in advance either. Thus, it has happened at least once that someone has manipulated PKGBUILD files in bad faith (https://lists.archlinux.org/pipermail/aur-general/2018-July/034151.html). The Wiki does not warn against the use for nothing.
However, it is much easier for the user to check the files in the AUR in advance than it is, for example, with ready-made packages in an unofficial PPA.
With https://build.opensuse.org and https://mpr.makedeb.org there are also at least two offers that are somewhat similar to AUR.
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.
