I’m sure no one in this community needs to be convinced to try Linux. But I love it every time I see a non-Linux person trying Linux and showing other people that it works. (Also nice to see that Jeff Gerstmann is still around and doing alright after getting screwed over by Gamespot for like 15 years.)
Paru, aur and yay came up when I did some googling. I was left even more confused.
The AUR is the Arch User Repository. All it is is User uploaded software packages with a script that Arch Linux and its many derivatives recognize and know how to utilize to install a piece of software and the necessary libraries/dependencies on your system.
It is similar to Debian based systems when you install software that’s not in the officially repos by appending an unofficial mirror to :
Take installing Mullvad VPN on Debian for example. It’s not in the official repos, so you have to tell
aptwhere to go get it.Paru and Yay are what are known as AUR Helpers. All they are doing is automating the update process of the packages you installed from the AUR, which normally you’d have to update one by one manually. They also can help you easily search the AUR from the command line.
In essence, they are wrappers around pacman and makepkg.
Flatpak is different in that it is an OS agnostic package manager that sandboxes applications away from the main OS and essentially downloads/installs all its libraries and dependencies into
~/.local/share/flatpakinstead of/usr/lib, though this is a vast oversimplification.Very basically, paru/yay says “We install stuff on Arch and Arch based distros from unofficial, user maintained sources and keep them up to date so you don’t have to update them one by one once installed. When possible, you should probably default to just installing with pacman and using the official repos though.”
Very basically Flatpak says “I don’t care if I’m run on Debian, Arch, Gentoo, whatever, I’m bringing all my system libraries with me cuz I don’t know what version of what is on here, and I just need this app to run right the fuck now. So even though it’s heavier and less efficient, here’s plumbing and the kitchen sink so you have running water right fucking now. BTW, you probably shouldn’t run anything installed with me as root.”
This is a very oversimplified explanation, but hopefully that helps clear things up for you.
It’s actually somewhat curious that pacman supports third party repos just like any other package manager, and yet user repos are generally so unpopular in Arch community
Mostly because it’s a hassle and the AUR solves the same problem without needing to add a bunch of repos.
Did you try, I don’t know, reading more about the options?
Jesus Christ. You are not helpless.
This shouldn’t need to be said but, you can be right without being an asshole to people who are trying to learn.