Your sample rate is 55 people on lemmy. DistroWatch has more than tripple the amount of arch users hitting the page per day. There are about 5500 registered accounts on the official arch forum.
For my needs I found that that flatpak just werks for anything not on the distros repos. And for the really obscure stuff I’ve used, I could just build from source
Having to build from source is exactly why I don’t think the AUR has a replacement. There are many similar package managers but non as extensive. Like NUR for NixOS.
Don’t know. The AUR is a big reason I use Arch. Obviously there’s PPAs/OBS or whatever but they’re not implemented nearly as well, I don’t need to go searching for new repos with the AUR or messing with repo priorities (fun times on Suse…) since everything is in the one place and there’s procedures for taking over orphaned packages. I use about twenty or so packages from it, many of them not packaged for any other distro. Personally not interested in using Flatpak since two package management systems is not my idea of KISS. Poor man’s AUR imo :).
Probably for the same reasons why there are so many packaging formats in the first place. If everyone settled on deb, rpm, or arch style tar packages. Then we wouldn’t need the aur, flatpak, snap, appimage or anything else.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 (lists.archlinux.org/pipermail/…/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.
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.
It gives you a lot of convenience, auto updates, and dependencies. While it is nice being up to date by checking the git and making it by yourself it is much more convenient to have a package manager for it when you have many Make packages
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.
NixOS has NUR, but it’s not necessary because they take everyone’s pull requests in the official repo. I’ve been maintaining the software I use myself on the official nixpkgs, so I don’t need to use the NUR.
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.