It should be noted that adding a PPA is equally unsupported, so in both cases you're trusting a third party.

Despite all the disclaimers (or perhaps because of them), the AUR is IMHO one of the more safe and well-thought-out ways of including third-party stuff. It's relatively simple to verify that the package is installing what it says it is, because you can check the PKGBUILD file, which is short and simple to read. I would have no idea how to go about verifying that a .deb file was what it said it was.

No

Enough people use it that it would make sense to have it in the official packages. However, having to download and build at least one AUR package (yay itself) manually is an important part of being familiar with the process so that you are more likely to take precautions with third party stuff you later install from the AUR.

Installing an AUR package without a helper (which you have to do to install a helper in the first place) basically amounts to:

    git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/yay.git
    cd yay
    makepkg -si

But then you would have to manually check for updates etc, so the helpers are pretty useful.

No, but I'll say that it is the single coolest feature of Arch, and I think it should be default. I have been able to install every single package with a `yay` command except for one.

My instructions I have for installing yay are:

Go to https://github.com/Jguer/yay/releases Download the yay release and extract it, a clone won't have the build files, download the release. cd to the extracted copy ./yay yay (install the AUR copy of yay using your local copy of yay)

Then `yay -S <package-name>` and done, it grabs the repo if it has to and runs the build steps to build from source. It is the most frictionless package management experience I have every experienced on Linux.

And I have used `apt-get` on Ubuntu for many (10?) years (go find the PPA yourself dammit) and also `yum` RHEL7 for the past year. Fedora and Debian need something like this too.