Asbestos undies on.
I don’t think AUR is a feature, but more of a hazard indicator. If the distributor isn’t packaging so many important things that most users have to turn to external services regularly, they’re lying down on the job.
I think you misunderstand the typical use case for the AUR. It’s generally used to install fairly niche software that might fly under the radar of distro maintainers. For example, I have CoreCtrl, a utility for managing AMD GPUs, on my install via the AUR. I’m not aware of any distro that packages it currently because it’s just too niche of a use case right now for maintainers to pay it any mind.
I think initially it was because the distro repositories were fairly small, agree now it is often a lot of niche stuff now which is one reason people who don’t use the AUR don’t really miss it either.
That package is in Fedora and Debian testing/Sid and the next Ubuntu. There is also an Ubuntu ppa for the and it’s on the opensuse build service.
I guess I was baffled when FVWM of all things was an AUR package. To me, that’s something that’s been available in the mainstream package set on almost any full-sized x86/x86-64 distribution made in the last 25 years. I suppose it’s not popular these days, but you sort of expect it to materialize because it was checked into auto-build processes in the late Clinton administration and never removed.
Yeah if the AUR can stop me from having to compile even just one package from instructions on a github page (like with corectrl, which I also use lol), then it’s enough for me to keep using arch. AUR still means you gotta compile sometimes, but it’s so much less of a hassle to just search the AUR and hit go then to mess around compiling something manually.
