When I first started using Linux 15 years ago (Ubuntu) , if there was some software you wanted that wasn’t in the distro’s repos you can probably bet that there was a PPA you could add to your system in order to get it.
Seems that nowadays this is basically dead. Some people provide appimage, snap or flatpak but these don’t integrate well into the system at all and don’t integrate with the system updater.
I use Spek for audio analysis and yesterday it told me I didn’t have permission to read a file, I a directory that I owned, that I definitely have permission to read. Took me ages to realise it was because Spek was a snap.
I get that these new package formats provide all the dependencies an app needs, but PPAs felt more centralised and integrated in terms of system updates and the system itself. Have they just fallen out of favour?
Please keep in mind though that the reason the AUR tends to work well is because it’s a very loose wrapper over source packages. Compiling from source is a very flexible process which adapts well to system changes. But at the same time it’s resource-consuming (CPU time and RAM).
Most importantly, AUR is completely unsupported by any of the Arch-based distros including Arch itself. Anybody who mentions “AUR compatibility” either doesn’t know what they’re saying or are making a tongue-in-cheek observation about how their system happens to be coping well with a very specific selection of AUR packages that they are using at that particular moment. But there’s absolutely no guarantee that your system will do well with whatever AUR packages you attempt to use, or that they’ll keep working a month or a year from now.
AUR tends to work really well for me. There are binary packages for almost every software that I use. Things do go wrong occasionally, but when they do it’s almost always solvable. AUR packages are just scripts, so you can go and fix the problem yourself and then tell the maintainer how you did it.
Then i prefer Gentoo’s approach.
Arch and Gentoo basically approach this issue from the opposite sides. Gentoo is source-first with optional binaries as-needed, Arch is binary first with optional source as-needed. Gentoo also tends to support the exceptions (the binaries) much better than Arch supports AUR (which is not at all).
…and gentoo USE flags are so addictive…
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On the contrary AUR seems to have a lot more binary packages than source packages in my experience. Tons of package also have a “-bin” version (e.g. yay).
Your “unsupported” comment is a bit weird. It’s the AUR user community that supports Arch and makes AUR compatible with it. I don’t know why somebody would contemplate the other way around. I mean, it’s the while philosophy of the AUR.
I’ve been using it for the past 12 years and I rarely got any issues with it. I think you fear mongering quite a bit. Sure, you get over some abandoned packages from time to time and once in a blue moon you get a dependency that doesn’t install properly. When that happen you post a comment on the AUR or flag the package and it’s solved in a matter of days most of the time. It’s surprising that such a system would work so well, but it does.