The AUR is the reason I don’t use Arch. It’s a huge pain in the ass and the opposite of lazy. I truly don’t understand this comment.

Maybe I’m misunderstanding the point of the AUR, but my understanding of it is that it fills a similar role as PPAs/third party repos in debian/ubuntu. To use the AUR, you have to first:

1. Install base-devel.
2. Install an AUR helper (unless you want to do all this fully manually). But the AUR helpers are themselves on the the AUR so you have to learn to use it and go through all these steps yourself at least once.

Then, for every package you have to:

1. Download the package build file. (The AUR helper can do this for you)
2. Review the package build file. AUR helper tools don’t let you skip this step, despite it being mostly security theater.
3. Install the build dependencies. (The AUR helper can do this for you)
4. Compile the software on your own machine. (There are some binary packages on the AUR, but it seems most are source packages). This takes time and replicates work, wasting electricity. This step must be done as a normal user. None of the tools I found will de-escalate privileges if you are already superuser for the build step.
5. Install the resulting package using pacman, as a superuser. Note that if you have an AUR helper, you have install sudo and run as a user that has sudo privileges.

Then, every time you want to upgrade the software, you have to do it all again.

Admittedly, this is not a ton of work. But having to do it for every package and every upgrade is a very real hassle, when most of the time I just want to be using my computer.

Contrast this to a PPA/third party repo in debian/ubuntu.

1. Search for the repository.
2. Copy/paste the commands to enable it.
3. apt update && apt install package

… and you’re done. You get seamless automatic upgrades. There’s no compilation or need to install extra build dependencies. It’s so much easier.

I truly do not get why Arch users put up with the AUR.