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Comment by SlyShy | Hacker News Reader

If you haven't tried Arch Linux before, I highly recommend it. The configuration system is excellent, package management is both sane and fast, and the community is amazing (take a look at the Arch Wiki sometime, it is chock-full of good information).

The resulting system you get after setting up Arch is zippy, since you know what's running and what's installed. Compare that to Ubuntu, where there are any number of mysterious background processes happening--it's getting as bad as Windows these days.

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As nice as pacman is, I haven't had good experiences with the AUR. It's possible that I'm just terrible at choosing the right scripts (recipes?), but I haven't been able to get anything to work from an AUR installation, and any AUR script that depends on other AUR scripts becomes a chore to work with. And even if anything gets installed, it's not easy to stay on the bleeding edge of development (which I often want to do with projects I follow, especially on a system for my own personal use).

On the other hand, I agree with you about the wiki; there's a lot to be said for having such good documentation on installing and configuring something as complex as GNOME or KDE.

The AUR can definitely be tricky, but in my experience it is usually better than configuring and compiling packages without it. Usually you can figure out what is going wrong just by googling the error or looking at the PKGBUILD. In fact, the AUR, is one of the main reasons I prefer Arch.

edit: As noted by another comment, yaourt is the way to go.

Using yaourt makes this process as easy as pacman.

I use yaourt instead of pacman. I almost feel like that should just be the default, since the AUR is so useful.

I haven't had any trouble with AUR any time I've used it, most of the time a simple makepkg -s does the trick, but maybe it is just similar enough to slackbuilds for me not to mind.

To be honest though Arch moves too fast for me and there are quite a few advantages for not, I use ubuntu though because it is easy.

I generally come across errors if I attempt to install a port with yaourt that has many dependencies that are neither in the main repositories, such as the Yi text editor written in Haskell. Though I recognize that it is probably better than installing things without informing the package manager.

As others have mentioned, there are multiple pacman wrappers and/or alternate interfaces that include AUR functionality. AUR is really easy to handle for me and I almost never have problems using a somewhat popular package from there. If something is really esoteric, you may need to adjust the PKGBUILD, but typically stuff that doesn't have an actively maintained AUR install is obsolete anyway and won't build on newer versions of gcc.

I strongly recommend AUR and Arch. I use yaourt and I can update my AUR packages just as easily as I could if they were real packages -- just pass the --aur flag after -Syu (I also generally use --noconfirm, though this is dangerous and you shouldn't do it). Occasionally I use aurget to build a package if I know I will be using it a lot, because yaourt doesn't save the compiled project (it is saved in /tmp and deleted after the operation completes -- good for dependencies, bad for apps that you intend to modify or build often).

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