It really just comes down to the differences in goals and philosophies between each distribution. Some distros have large curated repositories containing most of everything a normal user would want to use. That’s what people expect from those distros, and people use them because they want that experience. Likewise, people don’t use arch just because it has the AUR. They want a more DIY experience, and arch provides that, with the AUR being an essential part of how it works.
You’re not going to get arch users to switch to ubuntu or whatever by duct-taping an AUR clone onto it. Furthermore, I believe trying to make one distro “to rule them all” that attempts to appeal to every niche would be not only a train wreck technically, but an abomination, antithetical to the principles of the OSS community as well.
The equivalent for Gentoo is the overlay system. gpo.zugaina.org (which is the best total package index) claims to list over 100000 ebuilds for 56000 different packages (some packages have multiple versions in-tree), and I know their database is not complete, since I contribute occasionally to an overlay that they don’t index. Oh, and that also doesn’t include things like perl library packages autogenerated by g-cpan.
Many distros have independent community generated package repositories though most aren’t on official infrastructure. Ubuntu has PPA which is close. I try and avoid AUR as much as I can. It is a potential attack surface and packages are sometimes poorly maintained and break. I like it for system stuff and I mostly review the PKGBUILD. It seems like a good way for software to find a path into the official repos. There was a lot of resistance from me initially but for most desktop applications flatpak has proven to be a better solution.
I kind of wish I had played with ROMs and stuff earlier. I still like the idea, but I don't use it because I use mobile payments so much that it would be a PITA not to have that working.
@InternetPirate I mean apt based distros do have ppa’s although I have found aur to have better support. theoretically though they are equivalent i believe?
The AUR is nice and all, but the reality is that most people will be served just fine (if not better) by the more curated repositories. Fedora’s bundled repositories are more than enough for my dev work - and thanks to Flatpak and AppImage, closing any gaps is pretty easy.
In my experience the AUR is a dumpsterfire where half of the stuff doesn’t work or breaks other things in your system. Definitely not a reason to switch to arch or manjaro for me.
Tails in proxmox in tails running on pure ramdrive system with no longterm storage, cpu, bios, mac serials overwritten with FFFFFFF, TPM chip desoldered or lasered off CPU, connected to TOR viato mullvad paid with crypto, through VPN running left behind sanitized device hidden in a library, through second sanitized vpn device connected to private insecure wifi in poor residential area with no cameras, after abolishing the state
Read my instructions to the end, always abolish the state before you start. This makes social security numbers powerless, look, 663 342 934. Nothing happened.
I think looking at the two major enterprise players (Red Hat and Canonical) can give hints.
Fedora: run by Red Hat, upstream of RHEL. No way they are going to allow an unreviewed repository to be shipped with fedora by default. But they do have guides to add RPM fusion, and copr repos (the closest equivalent)
Ubuntu: run by Canonical. No way they are going to allow an unreviewed repository to be shipped with Ubuntu by default. But they do host and have guides for PPAs (closest AUR equivalent)
Debian: kind of the base layer for a lot of other distros. Debian itself is kept very minimal, and has a whole philosophy on what packages are allowed.
Edit: I realized this implies PPAs, copr and the AUR are the same when I know they aren’t functionally. I am just trying to highlight the motivations behind the distros and how it may play a part
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.
I guess I was coming at it more from a “why doesn’t Ubuntu/fedora/debian promote or endorse something like the AUR in their official docs”
But yeah no distro really has an AUR, and it’s kind of a chicken and egg problem now because the barrier to entry for the AUR is much lower than anything else
Read up on the intel management engine. It’s an extra chip that was included in pretty much every intel CPU since 2008. It’s got pretty scary potential, but no alphabet agency has yet declassified their info on it (think CIA denying any involvement in shipping and selling heroin, but then declassifying documents that proved they shipped heroin in coffins and bodies of dead soldiers).
You’re pretty deep in the tinfoil hat zone now. CPU proprietary black box does not mean the NSA are trying to infiltrate your broken arch setup so they can let their FBI lizard agents steal ur hentai.
Oh for sure, but I’d be really surprised if the super secret black box that can’t be completely expunged from your machine doesn’t have anything to do with some alphabet agency.
I don’t know of any specific proof, but just look at Deepin’s EULA. You need to accept that pretty much all data that could be gathered will be gathered, even data like daily log in times. Stuff like that makes me believe stories that the CCP is forcing companies to add backdoors. Especially when you consider that Chinese hackers are analyzing and publishing findings on NSA Linux backdoors, and releasing new backdoor malware every few months.
I second this! If all you need is low end and Linux compatible laptop, Thinkpads are, almost annoyingly, regarded as the tinkerer/hacker Laptop. After some research (one search on ebay) they are going for very cheap, far within your budget.
I did a little research and found this which states that for the graphical installation, it will take “at least 2 GB of RAM and 20 GB of disk space” and in some cases certain apps/programs recommend 8 GB of RAM.
I recommend 8 GB of RAM for now and a 128 GB hard drive. If you can get a smaller drive go for it, but just stick with the main brands like Crucial or Western Digital when it comes to drives. I recently had my SSD corrupted in my thinkpad because the previous owner bought a cheap drive that randomly disconnected at times.
I believe RAM is replaceable and upgradeable in most thinkpads, but verify that before purchase, it’ll save you the disappointment of being stuck with 8 GB of RAM.
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