this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2023
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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
you probably only compile on one thread if you have a default /etc/makepkg.conf
though compiling a firefox browser on 12+ threads still takes several minutes up to half an hour
(try doing that with a chromium browser, thats hours rather than minutes)
Agreed. DaVinci Resolve Studio and Blackmagic hardware drivers are examples of that kind of niche software that I use on a regular basis. The only supported route for that stuff is RHEL/CentOS, and those don’t seem particularly well-suited to my main machine’s other purpose, which is games. If someone’s already done the legwork to solve the problem for Arch, and the build files check out, why reinvent the wheel?
Additionally, it’s the only distro I could get Resolve Studio working on with an AMD GPU consistently.
For the most part, though, the official repos and Flathub give me what I need.
Agreed. DaVinci Resolve Studio and Blackmagic hardware drivers are examples of that kind of niche software that I use on a regular basis. The only supported route for that stuff is RHEL/CentOS, and those don’t seem particularly well-suited to my main machine’s other purpose, which is games. If someone’s already done the legwork to solve the problem for Arch, and the build files check out, why reinvent the wheel?
Additionally, it’s the only distro I could get Resolve Studio working on with an AMD GPU consistently.
For the most part, though, the official repos and Flathub give me what I need.
I do really like AUR, but agree Flatpak is a good alternative. I can’t stand snap, snap packages just feel slower.
Flatpack vs AUR comparison
Chatgpt didn’t do a great job of contrasting them. Flatpak is also transparent
Comparing flatpak with AUR makes almost no sense
Why can it not be compared? It's a repository to install software...
Flatpak acts like its virtualizing the applications, AUR shipped binaries are build by trusted arch users. Those eco systems operate on totally different levels, there are (more) audits in AUR.
Flatpak or god forbid even Snap are fucked up software distribution platforms you should only use as last resort and when the software you are trying to get is not available on your OS repository/package manager and should be simply avoided.
Ah, it's subjective. You trust AUR users rather than flatpak users. Flatpak and snap are hardly comparable. The flaws of Snap are not the flaws of Flatpak. You also prefer binaries to sandboxed apps. You're old school?
It is not subjective. Its not any AUR user, there are big streams tested especially for that certain system by trusted people before releasing.
And for the record, your sandboxed apps are also binaries and to set it straight, flatpak is mostly not really virtualizing your app. It's complete garbage, have a look at how flatpak achieves this "virtualization" and how it's implemented in 9 out of 10 flatpaks.
A subset of AUR PKGBUILDs are downloading a prebuilt desktop application binary packaged for another distro (deb, rpm, tarball, appimage) from upstream and then unpacking it. Those packages are trying to solve some of the same problems as flatpak, distributing a generic desktop binary but often do it worse and people should be weighing the alternatives. More broadly AUR packages aren't comparable with flatpak.
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.
I tried arch and got rid of it after a couple months because of the aur. Do people just not check out what they're installing? Every time I wanted a new software i'd have to check it out to make sure it was legit, and every time I updated i'd have to check the diffs to make sure it was still legit. Otherwise, who knows what you're actually installing.
you don't have to use AUR if you don't want to.
Often the AUR file is very short and just a link to a repo.