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.
The other day I died of old age compiling Librewolf from the AUR
What’s wrong with librewolf-bin? Would you choose the Flatpack or the bin from the AUR?
I ended up going with librewolf-bin. The flatpak version had some issues for me because my configs are a spaghetti nightmare
Install librewolf-bin
Chatgpt didn’t do a great job of contrasting them. Flatpak is also transparent
I do really like AUR, but agree Flatpak is a good alternative. I can’t stand snap, snap packages just feel slower.
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.
deleted by creator
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.
Asbestos undies on.
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’mma let you finish, but Nix had one of the best package managers of all time.
dupe
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.
Yeah that’s true.
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
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.
So, um, yeah, useful but not unique.
deleted by creator
It’s so kino. Incredibly hard to learn and much more to master, but much more powerful. Nothing beats easily modifying a derivation’s source, or adding patches or build options or whatever you want.
What’s so special about it? Isn’t it just a repository? Or am I missing something? If it’s just a repo, Ubuntu has PPAs and everyone and their mother is creating PPAs.
PPAs and the AUR are very different. Where as PPAs contain prebuilt .deb packages, the AUR hosts PkgBuild scripts that typically pull from a git repo and compile a program for you.
I understand the confusion though, because they accomplish the same goal of installing software that is not in the main repos, but in different ways.
It’s a single, central, community space for build plans, which are extremely easy for anyone to create and submit.
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.
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.
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.
Arch is special 😁
@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.
Fedora has COPR, Opensuse has the OBS (which also works for other distros), NixOS (my beloved) has overlays…
I’ve been on NixOS for about a week now and I can say I’ve got access to pretty much all of the packages I was using on Arch just from nixpkgs. I even found it quite easy to package stuff myself!
Same. Exactly. Packaging can be a bit more complex, but once you get it, it’s great. There’s even the NUR, but I havent used it.
The power of flakes is unparalleled
