I’m looking for the opinions and experience of unbiased Linux enthusiasts whose daily driver uses an arch based distro.
When I was using and learning EndeavourOS I frequently (enough) came across posts and videos that stated that although the AUR is useful, but it’s use should be limited to keep your system stable. If someone was having issues or a discussion about stability came up, there was always a seemingly condescending tone of “well my system has always worked fine, just don’t install too many AURs and it won’t break”.
However, whenever I see posts that relate to package managers, I always see praises for the AUR that seem to imply that there aren’t really any issues.
Unless its a rare and obscure package (and thus more prone to be outdated and unmaintained), AUR packages are quite stable.
I use Arch almost because of the AUR. Depending on the package maintainer, you could run into some issues and you’ll have to check the AUR threads to see how to fix it. For example, a package can fail to compile and update, and the fix suggests to clear the cache. For the most part, I never really had a “broken” system because of an AUR update. YMMV
The most common issue is you find out the package is out of date, so you might need to update it yourself if you want the latest release. But the alternative is not having the package at all
AUR is a user repo, which means that If you install any aur package, you’re trusting the user who is maintaining this package.
But if you install aur enough, you may install packages and libraries in your system that may break stuff.
AUR is not containerized, which means that these packages shares libs and files with your system. If a package installs a lib unsupported by official repo, it will certainly break your system.
I like aur, but I always try to install the least amount of packages from this source as possible.
Probably about a fifth of the packages I have installed on my daily driver are from the AUR, and most of the time I forget they came from the AUR.
