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Fan of Flatpaks ...or Not?
(lemmy.ml)
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this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2025
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iit: nerds unable to comprehend that building a piece of software from source in not something every person can do.
EDIT: or doesn’t want to do
one of my least favorite things about arch and other rolling distros is that yay/pacman will try and recompile shit like electron/chromium from source every few days unless you give it very specific instructions not to - which is annoying as shit bc compiling the entirety of chrome from source takes hours even with decent hardware.
granted, i fucking hate google products too but if you’re doing any web dev it’s necessary sometimes.
idk im definitely willing to admit i might be the idiot here. managing your packages with pacman might just be routine to some people. to me arch is the epitome of classic bad UX in an open source project. it’s like they got too focused on being cmatrix-style terminal nerds and forgot to make their software efficiently useable outside of 5 very specific people’s workflows. it’s not even the terminal usage that is bad about arch. plenty of things are focused on that and… don’t do it shittily? idk…
edit: yes to all the arch fanboy’s points in response to me. i used to be super into arch and am aware of the fact that this isn’t explicit behavior but to act like it doesn’t happen in a typical arch user experience is disingenuous. i also disagree with the take that arch doesn’t endorse this outright with its design philosophy, bc it does. the comparison of the AUR to other, similar things like PPAs doesn’t land for me bc PPAs aren’t integrated into the ecosystem nearly as much as AUR is with arch. you can’t tell people to just grab the binaries or not use AUR whenever it’s convenient to blame the user, when arch explicitly endorses a philosophy amicable to self-compilation and also heavily uses the AUR even in their own arch-wiki tutorials for fairly basic use cases. arch wants to have its cake and eat it too and be a great DIY build it yourself toolkit while also catering to daily driver use and more generalist users. don’t get me wrong, it’s the best attempt at such a thing i’ve seen - but at a certain point you have to ask if the premise makes sense anymore. in the case of arch, it doesn’t and it causes several facets of the ecosystem to flounder from a user perspective. the arch community’s habit of shouting “skill issue” at people when they point out legitimate issues with the design philosophy bugs the fuck out of me. this whole OS is a camel.
My understanding is that constantly triggering compiling like that shouldn't be happening in any typical arch + pacman situation. But it can happen in AUR. If it does, I think it's a special case where you should be squinting and figuring out what's going on and stopping the behavior; it's by no means philosophically endorsed as the usual case scenario for packages on arch.
There's certainly stuff about Arch that's Different(TM) but nothing about the package manager process is especially different from, say, apt-get or rpm in most cases.
saying it can happen in the AUR feels disingenuous to me when you consider how integrated the AUR is to the arch ecosystem. this is a genuine complaint from a user perspective and is an issue with the design philosophy imo. it is a special case but it’s so frequent as to be annoying, is my point.
not sure why everyone is replying like i’m unaware and totally ignoring the actual grievance i have. im very well aware of pacman and yay’s intended behaviors, i just think they’re shit in some cases. idk if people who say this have never tried to daily drive arch before or something but the AUR is absolutely not optional unless you want to constantly hand roll your own shit. see my edit to the original comment.
All of the normal Arch packages are pre-built, so the only way you'd be compiling things that often is if you installed a large amount of things from the AUR. Make sure you get the bin versions instead of git versions.
The
google-chromeandchromiumpackages are already a binaries so my guess is you needungoogled-chromium-bin. You can also use the Chaotic AUR repo to get pre-built binaries of a lot of the most common AUR packages. But ideally you should avoid using the AUR when it's not necessary.While using the AUR is common, it's a bit frustrating you are blaming Arch for your experience. If you only use pacman you would never compile anything, or have very many conflicts. It's like if you added 20 different PPAs on Ubuntu and then complained about the problems that arose from that.
Is there no -bin version available for those packages?
sometimes you’re working with particular releases or builds that don’t, but like i said i might be the idiot lol.
i like the concept of arch. i don’t like the way i need to come up with a new solution for how im managing my packages virtually every few days that often requires novel information. shit, half the time you boot up an arch system if you have sufficient # of packages there is 9/10 times a conflict when trying to just update things naively. like i said it’s cool on paper and im sure once you use it as a daily driver for awhile it just becomes routine but it’s more the principle of the user experience and its design philosophy that i think might be poor.
arch is for techies in the middle of the bell curve imo… people on the left and the right, when it comes to something as simple as managing all my packages and versions, want something that just works^TM^ - unless i specifically want to fuck with the minutiae.
Sounds like AUR problems. IMO using AUR helpers that tie AUR packages to your full system update command is a trap. AUR never professed to be a stable repository (in fact it's the opposite). AUR has a place, but it should be used sparingly and thoughtfully.
i agree with this but this isn’t the reality of the arch ecosystem. AUR is explicitly promoted on the wiki for a large amount of tasks the average user is going to do. it feels skeevy to acknowledge the problems with the AUR and then abscond arch’s responsibility for them, because the AUR is not like PPAs or anything. it is significantly more integrated into the ecosystem.
The wiki article :
The aur helper wiki has a fun red disclaimer at the top that no one reads
you (rhetorical you, not you) can recommend not using the AUR officially all you want. it doesn’t mean anything if a large number of tasks the average user is going to do require AUR packages. i’m kind of drunk rn but i’ll go find specific pages of the wiki that demonstrate what i’m talking about, i stg this isn’t nothing. the core system itself can entirely be managed with pacman, yes, but the average user is going to be doing a lot more than just that. there is a certain discord in the messaging of arch as a whole.
this is exactly my point. arch can either be a nuts and bolts distro or it can be made for normies. it can’t be both.
To reiterate, I don't think there is anything wrong with using the AUR. I think that using an AUR helper that ties updating AUR packages to your pacman -Syu is a trap that people keep falling into despite the warnings in the wiki.
I've been on Garuda for 4 years or so, not once has this happenoed to me
is garuda like endeavorOS or manjaro where it’s technically still an arch-based rolling release distro but the OS maintainers hold packages from upstream mainline arch?
i don’t hate that model, it’s more fun to use as an end user for sure, but i feel like it kind of defeats the point of arch’s entire ethos lmao.
I get that with NixOS even if I use a tablet as my release. It's pretty annoying if it is too new and not cached yet.