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.
The setup is kind of a kind of a logical fallacy here. More people are using Debian and RPM based distributions than Arch Linux. That being said:
Arch Linux has the AUR because at the time it was developed, the standards for distributing software on Linux were either RPM or DEB repositories. AUR was a necessity because one could get software on those distributions from the official vendor, but nobody was supporting Arch Linux. So it was a stopgap, an equalizer for one outlier platform.
It’s hardly the first such repository: FreeBSD ports and NetBSD pkgsrc predate the AUR by over a decade. Slackpkg predates AUR by a couple of years as well, though possibly not slapt-get. Gentoo has portage. Anyway, they took an idea that was already well-established, and catered it to a distribution that had fewer software options than major distributions.
These days it’s still the same scenario: a placeholder, to equalize what’s available for Arch Linux users versus other distributions.
People use Arch because it is a rolling release with a well-documented wiki. AUR is a nice perk, but hardly the main reason that people are using Arch Linux, given that other similar systems have existed for older distributions and operating systems for longer.
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.
I’m wondering why flatpaks don’t work for command-line tools
I dont have links in hand, but I remember the flatpak devs saying they targeted/care about desktop gui apps. It’s one of the reasons why I won’t use flatpaks anytime soon if ever
Fair arguments. The AUR is huge compared to the operating systems that inspired it (no idea how packages/metrics are counted between different operating systems but it’s safe to say that more packages exist for Linux than in the FreeBSD realm), and it solves a problem that the Debian/Red Hat distributions are being faced with now that Flatpaks are essentially another packaging system ON TOP of whatever they have used for decades.
Yeah, the Arch Wiki is incredible, even as a non-Arch user, it’s such a valuable source of knowledge.
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 (https://lists.archlinux.org/pipermail/aur-general/2018-July/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.
With https://build.opensuse.org and https://mpr.makedeb.org there are also at least two offers that are somewhat similar to AUR.
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.
Now I am full Arch user.
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.
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
I am only using them and they seem very kino. I don’t do anything complex with them, but, I like that adding new repos is as simple as reponame.url = repourl and then you can use its stuff after adding it to your outputs
What resources would you recommend for a complete beginner that wants to learn NixOS? I’ve been using it for a few weeks now, but I want to actually learn it and use the power of the nix language
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.
Well that would apply to any distro I’ve used… they’re all going to have things that aren’t in the main repos. It’s a feature for Arch in that on nearly every other distro it’s probably going to be more of a pain to install them.
AUR is definitely not the reason people choose arch haha
Fellow Linux folks, this direction is one of the main problems and you know it very darn well.
Nah, it is my MAIN reason using Arch-based distro. If not because AUR, I should still using rock-solid Linux Mint… lol… 😅
Same here. If Pacstall was as extensive as AUR I would still use Linux Mint.
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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.
What makes you think there aren’t equivalents out there?
Gentoo’s Guru repository, for one, and any of the multitude of ebuild repositories available through the
eselect repositorycommand.The AUR is not particularly special.
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And the AUR is not as extensive as the Nix Store.
That sounds suspiciously like some shifting goalposts.
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 :).
(Edit for typo) With SUSE install OPI, it will search the OBS for you.
Just a clarification: It’s opi, not obi.
Oops I will edit and fix that
AUR is really not that great? Who moves to Arch for it? It’s been my main OS for I don’t even know how long but AUR has been my primary pain point. PKGBUILD is cool and useful useful. AUR however, is untrusted (or rather shouldn’t be trusted), often out of date, sometimes requires compilation, and doesn’t even have any good pacman wrappers since yaourt (that I’m aware of).
Am I missing something?
doesn’t even have any good pacman wrappers since yaourt (that I’m aware of).
paruis coolAnd the older
yayI have an hard time moving out of yay… TBH if AUR could be installable from pacman it would be awesome
AUR however, is untrusted (or rather shouldn’t be trusted), often out of date
So basically like a PPA which are used by many users of Ubuntu. The only difference is that the PKBUILD files used to build the packages are easier to check than the final packages in a PPA. And that’s exactly what is a big advantage for me.
sometimes requires compilation,
This is often because a project does not offer ready-made packages that can be downloaded from Github, for example. There are also people who do not trust ready-made packages from unknown third parties. I wouldn’t necessarily download and execute a binary file from a Dropbox of a user I don’t know. Compiling is the safer way if the source code is downloaded from a more trustworthy source.
and doesn’t even have any good pacman wrappers since yaourt (that I’m aware of).
Personally, I don’t think aurutils, paru and yay are bad. I currently use aurutils myself. But as far as AUR helpers are concerned, everyone has their own preferences. That’s why there are so many ;-)
Yeah, AUR isn’t great because it’s engineered as a second class citizen given the necessity of third-party tools like
yaourt, and that the whole process of installation can’t be done directly through the first-party tool (pacman), such that updating the main packages can trivially cause third-party packages to suddenly stop working. ArchLinux offers just one way - their way - when it comes to dealing with software versions and if the user happens to depend on some thing they want to keep around, tough luck, and hope that future upgrades don’t force a breakage that requires a recompilation which may no longer work.That runs completely opposite to Gentoo, where the first-party repositories are defined the exact same way as third-party repositories, and that updates to first-party libraries generally don’t immediately break existing binaries because the distribution was built with recompilation requirements from upgrade breakages in mind. Since third-party packages are treated no differently (no second class citizen treatment), their first-party tool (
emerge) can manage the complete lifecycle of “third-party” packages in the exact same manner (as opposed to needing any third party tools to manage the build). This alone reduces the mental bandwidth for the end-users that are managing their set of required packages for their systems. All this flexibility is ultimately part of the various reasons that got me to switch from Arch back to Gentoo.
I’mma let you finish, but Nix had one of the best package managers of all time.
dupe
Great, why do you need a whole OS centering around a package manager?
nix and the other nix tools on NixOS is more than just the package manager, they cover all aspects of system management, including the packages.
What system management are you talking about? Sounds like Kernel to me.
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.
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.
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.
That’s it. We’ll create a new standard that unites them all!
Yep and then it’s back to square one.
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.
