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Comment by bachmeier | Hacker News Reader

Honestly, it's hard to see how Arch is a usable distro for most potential users without AUR. If you want a large selection of official packages, the Debian world is going to be the better choice.

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Obviously usages vary greatly, but I doubt it's that of big deal for majority of Arch users (maybe it's different for Arch derived distros). My AUR maintained package count has been in single digits for decades (both on my home PC and work station), and I don't think it as a heavy burden to update those packages. There's a certain selection bias going on here -- I drop AUR packages if they become too annoying (if they require updates too frequently or they want a slew of other AUR only packages as dependencies), I either find alternatives or alternative sources for them (e.g. flathub).

Arch still hits the sweet spot for me -- unobtrusive, close to upstream, and well-documented enough to keep full control over your own system. Both for the times when you want to go with the most default path and for the cases when you want to deviate and go play in the weeds.

I think the issue with AUR is that you get your foot in the door with packages like spotify[1]. It does its magic to allow you to install a .deb package on your distro. I don't know how else to install the Spotify desktop app without AUR. But once you're willing to do that, why not go a little further and trust other packages?

Now, someone could argue that the Spotify app isn't important, but there's a reason it has 268 votes. A better solution would be having packages like spotify in their own repo, and a separate, you-better-verify repo for the rest.

[1] https://aur.archlinux.org/cgit/aur.git/tree/PKGBUILD?h=spoti...

I don't have it installed, so I can't comment if it requires constant babysitting, but looks pretty okay to me -- it has no AUR-only dependencies (++), one extra shell script (--), popular (++ given enough eyeballs...). Should be fairly easy to review, anything fishy should be fairly visible in git diff. If I needed it I would be using this PKGBUILD. It's a net gain that it exists there, someone else done most of the work for me.

> Now, someone could argue that the Spotify app isn't important, but there's a reason it has 268 votes. A better solution would be having packages like spotify in their own repo, and a separate, you-better-verify repo for the rest.

I mean yeah, but everything is trade off of volunteer + user attention. There is no trusted user™ who uses spotify, so it's not in official packages. So you as user need to maintain it yourself or rely on AUR and verify.

> There is no trusted user™ who uses spotify, so it's not in official packages

That's not the reason why Spotify is not on extra.

Spotify is not on extra because it's not FOSS.

That is not true, there are plenty of non-FOSS packages in extra/multilib (e.g steam, discord, nvidia). The only criteria is if there is an interested packager to maintain it.

>The large number of packages and build scripts in the various Arch Linux repositories offer free and open source software for those who prefer it, as well as proprietary software packages for those who embrace functionality over ideology.

[1] https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Arch_Linux

[2] https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Nonfree_applications_packag...

[3] https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=272134

[4] https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=273609

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