I don’t think AUR is a feature, but more of a hazard indicator. If the distributor isn’t packaging so many important things that most users have to turn to external services regularly, they’re lying down on the job.
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.
I think initially it was because the distro repositories were fairly small, agree now it is often a lot of niche stuff now which is one reason people who don’t use the AUR don’t really miss it either.
That package is in Fedora and Debian testing/Sid and the next Ubuntu. There is also an Ubuntu ppa for the and it’s on the opensuse build service.
I guess I was baffled when FVWM of all things was an AUR package. To me, that’s something that’s been available in the mainstream package set on almost any full-sized x86/x86-64 distribution made in the last 25 years. I suppose it’s not popular these days, but you sort of expect it to materialize because it was checked into auto-build processes in the late Clinton administration and never removed.
Yeah if the AUR can stop me from having to compile even just one package from instructions on a github page (like with corectrl, which I also use lol), then it’s enough for me to keep using arch. I will say, AUR is in the normal arch repo I think? But there’s other packages I’ve used in the past that I can’t find in there, like specific versions of mangohud or gamescope, goverlay, etc.
AUR still means you gotta compile sometimes, but it’s so much less of a hassle to just search the AUR and hit go then to mess around compiling something manually.
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.
The MX Snapshot utility & other built-in tools make it instantly functional as a daily driver, even for people new to Linux, and the Quick System Info is such a handy baseline for troubleshooting if you run into problems and need help from the community. All the stuff that’s provided out of the box just makes it a really practical distro to learn on!
Because the AUR is a pretty low quality repo. Not sure if anything has changed since 2 years ago, but last I used arch, the AUR was full of broken, abandoned, and unbuildable packages. The Debian repos, fedora+rpmfusion, etc, provide a comparable number of software packages with substantially higher quality, hence no need for the AUR. Fedora actually has COPRs which suffer from the same quality issues as the AUR for similar reasons.
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.
I enjoy their shows but the singsong way Wes talks really bothers me for some reason.
Edit: I just got through the episode. It is pretty disappointing, and doesn’t answer to all of the criticisms, specifically those against the restrictive customer agreements that violate the free software definition (freedom 2). The aggressive stance echoes Bill Gates’ letter to hobbyists so closely, it was in the blog posts, it’s in the employee they have in the episode.
Not putting in extra work is fine, restricting the rights of your users is shitty. Rocky is also shirt, and I don’t blame them for thinking so.
Absolutely! I haven’t had any problems setting up dependencies for various projects and have only needed overlays a few times. Sometimes USE flags can be tricky but most things are pretty well documented
There are dozens of us! And you can join us at !gentoo if you haven’t yet!
I love it because it’s super configurable, lets you choose compiler optimizations (and through USE flags, features that you need in your packages - you don’t have to include everything).
My Linux knowledge has skyrocketed compared to before I used Gentoo. Which of course means it’s NOT the distro for people who want something that just works, but honestly, now that it’s working properly, I feel it’s actually pretty hard to break, and when it does break, I know how to fix it! Versus with Linux Mint a decade ago, if I broke it, I had no idea where to get started and just reinstalled it.
Of course, about half a year ago I decided to move from x11 and OpenRC to Wayland and systemd. And I use KDE. And have Nvidia graphics. Soooo it was a fun ride both relearning how my init system works, and also running into problems with Steam, etc.
I also try to keep my kernel in single digit megabytes, but occasionally I find something missing and have to recompile with more “bloat”. So right now I believe it’s around 11 MB, but I’ll see about improving it over my next vacation. Not that 11 MB takes long to load off a gen4 NVMe drive, but the ePeen needs to be stroked! Also no initial ramdisk, to save even more boot time.
Great to hear! Though I will admit that it took me HOURS of reading the kernel config options I was disabling. But it was also very informative so it didn’t feel like a waste of time at all.
I usually run some commands while running the binary kernel that will disable every module not currently running in the config file, and then build the kernel from that.
I’m guessing you prefer building everything as a module if your kernel is that small?
I decided to go with Da Vinci Resolve for video editing and I might migrate to something to replace Lightroom in future, can’t now, because I have all my Lightroom catalogues at work.
I mostly use photoshop to remove objects from photos, place in images rendered with blender and retouch them to look like they were part of the photo, I think Darktabke doesn’t have tools similar to healing brush and patch tools in photoshop. Although photoshop is working perfectly so far, it would be nice to find a native application that is up to the task. I haven’t really tried hard to look for linux alternative that can do that.
EDIT:
Wait, I just looked into it and there are such tools! Thank you for suggestion! I might try it!
I’ve been trying to convert to linux since the mid-2000’s. Ubuntu and derivatives, fedora, and SUSE. Gaming and my lack on knowledge always brought me back to Windows.
In 2018 I tried Manjaro and loved it. But I broke it without the knowledge to fix it multiple times. The Arch BTW memes were strong at the time so I took the plunge and studied the wiki, and documented my own installation process and really learned a lot in the process. Proton was released and suddenly gaming got WAY better. I didn’t remove my windows install completely until 2022 but Arch has been my home on my main machine.
I have since put together a proxmox cluster and run many distros for various things but that’s a whole other rabbit hole!
I always am going to run into heavy issues when using Debian, Ubuntu or Fedora. On Arch, things also aren’t always smooth, but the issues are mild, always solvable and transparent.
The Arch Wiki is in a language made by users for users. Meaning that its easy to understand because the wiki allows to talk about issues, alternatives and more hints about each small topic, every other wiki has some structure where important details are missing or not taken seriously.
Starting with a blank slate is so refreshing. It takes time to build everything up from scratch and I understand that you can get a great experience out of the box with other distros, but I love the simplicity of not having any bullshit I didn’t install myself.
True, yeah, didn’t think about the downside that you need to build it up from scratch. But people could use arch based distros I guess? Never used them.
Websites prove their identity via certificates. Firefox does not trust this site because it uses a certificate that is not valid for thekernal.xyz. The certificate is only valid for the following names: *.xserver.jp, xserver.jp
edit: another old post showing up on top for me! I need to pay attention to the date before I comment
Do not forget to chmod +x the file to make it executable.
This way you will have additional command for your user only (no sudo require to create/update those), for system-wise command put it in /usr/local/bin.
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