A lot of people probably won’t like this, but personally I feel like Arch is a terrible OS from an average user’s perspective. It offers nothing notable of value to its users, while making sacrifices in critical areas.
Unstable as hell and constantly breaks for no reason. On top of that, it’s seriously insecure, as shown on exhibit A. It’s not the first time, and it won’t be the last.
Why not use Mint, Fedora, Zorin, Pop!_OS, or any of countless Linux distros that work perfectly and don’t suffer from Arch’s issues?
Note: I’m not an OS developer and mean no hate towards Arch devs or users. I’m simply speaking from a user experience perspective.
AUR is supposed the last resort, after distro repos, building from source, Flatpak, and Appimage. Ubuntu’s equivalent to the AUR would be PPAs.
Personally, I have fewer problems gaming on Arch than any other I’ve tried.
Edit: Snap is bad for software freedom. I won’t touch Ubuntu anymore; if I use apt, I meant apt and not snap. Hijacking my command is Microsoft-style rug-pulling.
I’m not a fan of Ubuntu either, but at least it doesn’t break or get hacked every week.
AUR is supposed the last resort, after distro repos, building from source, Flatpak, and Appimage. Ubuntu’s equivalent to the AUR would be PPAs.
That’s the problem. AUR is not the last resort. There’s nobody who would build an app from source before installing it through AUR. Most people wouldn’t even use appimages over AUR.
Even on the official Arch Linux website, ‘AUR’ is literally right next to ‘Packages’, making it seem like a good and secure way of installing applications. Which it isn’t.
Arch is deliberately minimal making it a good base system in the same way Debian or Fedora is. It’s smaller, simpler, updates faster than the others and is far more configurable. It is however not built for the average user and most distros built on top of it that try to make it more “usable” are IMO pretty dangerous ideas. I think the only derivative i’ve tried that was good was SteamOS because they made it Atomic like nix or silverblue.
None of this really has to do with the AUR. That was always labelled as “use at your own risk”. And to their credit they caught and addressed the attack within a day of it happening. Still, hosting user PKGBUILDs and leaving it to individual users to audit them is not a secure solution, its just punting on the responsibility.
“More easily configurable” would be more accurate, because there’s less things that could get in your way. The system is designed to make it as simple as possible from a developers perspective.
Its the same config file designed in the exact same way. The only difference is on Arch the user may know how their system fits together but they very well may not.
Or maybe I can agree with “more configurable” if I shift my perspective of configuration to be taking a default and adding/removing. Because arch users will add a lot of things and pre configured distros wont need to add as many things and maybe that means more configuration is happening. Even though both users can theoretically add and remove the same amount.
The reason I started using Arch is because I got tired of waiting (and waiting and waiting and waiting) for upgrades to hit the repos. That’s if the software was even available in the repos in the first place (and many times it wasn’t).
When I tried out Arch, it was like a breath of fresh air. Not only did it have the latest versions of everything, almost every program was available somehow (either official or from AUR).
Yes, it does break sometimes. That’s why Garuda takes a snapshot of your system when you upgrade. If your system breaks, you can roll back to a previous working version. I haven’t had Garuda break in years, though.
Sounds like you were using Debian or Debian-based distros. It’s pretty much the only one with severely outdated packages. That’s the cost of stability, though not always a strictly necessary one.
As for AUR - you can just build from source on any distro. AUR is only really different if you use AUR helpers, which are not officially supported or recommended. And it’s insecure, as we’ve seen time and time again.
Personally I’m not aware of any program that is available in the AUR, but isn’t available as a .deb or an .rpm. There are probably some, but I’ve never encountered one.
A lot of people probably won’t like this, but personally I feel like Arch is a terrible OS from an average user’s perspective. It offers nothing notable of value to its users, while making sacrifices in critical areas.
Unstable as hell and constantly breaks for no reason. On top of that, it’s seriously insecure, as shown on exhibit A. It’s not the first time, and it won’t be the last.
Why not use Mint, Fedora, Zorin, Pop!_OS, or any of countless Linux distros that work perfectly and don’t suffer from Arch’s issues?
Note: I’m not an OS developer and mean no hate towards Arch devs or users. I’m simply speaking from a user experience perspective.
You said Ubuntu three times. /s
AUR is supposed the last resort, after distro repos, building from source, Flatpak, and Appimage. Ubuntu’s equivalent to the AUR would be PPAs.
Personally, I have fewer problems gaming on Arch than any other I’ve tried.
Edit: Snap is bad for software freedom. I won’t touch Ubuntu anymore; if I use
apt, I meantaptand notsnap. Hijacking my command is Microsoft-style rug-pulling.He said Debian 3 times
I had heard that Ubuntu is an old African word for “can’t configure Debian”
I’m not a fan of Ubuntu either, but at least it doesn’t break or get hacked every week.
That’s the problem. AUR is not the last resort. There’s nobody who would build an app from source before installing it through AUR. Most people wouldn’t even use appimages over AUR.
Even on the official Arch Linux website, ‘AUR’ is literally right next to ‘Packages’, making it seem like a good and secure way of installing applications. Which it isn’t.
Arch is deliberately minimal making it a good base system in the same way Debian or Fedora is. It’s smaller, simpler, updates faster than the others and is far more configurable. It is however not built for the average user and most distros built on top of it that try to make it more “usable” are IMO pretty dangerous ideas. I think the only derivative i’ve tried that was good was SteamOS because they made it Atomic like nix or silverblue.
None of this really has to do with the AUR. That was always labelled as “use at your own risk”. And to their credit they caught and addressed the attack within a day of it happening. Still, hosting user PKGBUILDs and leaving it to individual users to audit them is not a secure solution, its just punting on the responsibility.
How is it any more configurable than other distros?
“More easily configurable” would be more accurate, because there’s less things that could get in your way. The system is designed to make it as simple as possible from a developers perspective.
Get off my lawn!! …mumbles something incomprehensible about Slackware.
Its the same config file designed in the exact same way. The only difference is on Arch the user may know how their system fits together but they very well may not.
Or maybe I can agree with “more configurable” if I shift my perspective of configuration to be taking a default and adding/removing. Because arch users will add a lot of things and pre configured distros wont need to add as many things and maybe that means more configuration is happening. Even though both users can theoretically add and remove the same amount.
The reason I started using Arch is because I got tired of waiting (and waiting and waiting and waiting) for upgrades to hit the repos. That’s if the software was even available in the repos in the first place (and many times it wasn’t).
When I tried out Arch, it was like a breath of fresh air. Not only did it have the latest versions of everything, almost every program was available somehow (either official or from AUR).
Yes, it does break sometimes. That’s why Garuda takes a snapshot of your system when you upgrade. If your system breaks, you can roll back to a previous working version. I haven’t had Garuda break in years, though.
Sounds like you were using Debian or Debian-based distros. It’s pretty much the only one with severely outdated packages. That’s the cost of stability, though not always a strictly necessary one.
As for AUR - you can just build from source on any distro. AUR is only really different if you use AUR helpers, which are not officially supported or recommended. And it’s insecure, as we’ve seen time and time again.
Personally I’m not aware of any program that is available in the AUR, but isn’t available as a .deb or an .rpm. There are probably some, but I’ve never encountered one.
When you build from source, how do you pull in the dependency tree?