Feyd did a pretty good job of outlining the AUR disclaimers in a different comment so I won’t do that here. It’s true that Arch won’t stop you from shooting yourself in the foot, but again it’s nuts to claim that routine compiling is the usual case for all rolling distros and belies your claim that you’re familiar with usual case experience. There’s absolutely no routine experience where you’re regularly compiling.

I’ve used debian and apt-get most of my life, I’ve used arch on a pinetab 2 for about 6 months, regularly playing with pacman and yay and someone who’s never met me is saying I’m a fanboy for being familiar with linux package management. 🤷‍♂️

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Gimp is a gigabyte larger as a flatpak

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

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™ but nothing about the package manager process is especially different from, say, apt-get or rpm in most cases.

iit: nerds unable to comprehend that building a piece of software from source in not something every person can do

huh? Using package managers almost never involves compiling. It’s there as a capability, but the point is to distribute pre-compiled packages and skip that step in the vast majority of cases.

Also pretty much everywhere you’re using flatpaks (or snaps or…), you are doing it on top of a Linux system that’s still getting its core system updates via traditional dependency management. And flatpaks, despite trying not to, make assumptions about your kernel, your glibc version, architecture, ability to access parts of your filesystem or your devices, that can break things, and doesn’t bother to track it.

And the closer you get you tracking that stuff (like Snap tries to), you hilariously just get back to where you started, with traditional dependency management that already exists and has existed for decades.

It destroys the beautiful and carefully cultivated ecosystem of distributed packages that has been the bedrock of Linux for decades. They’re bloated, often not quite as sandboxed as claimed, have created packaging chaos, and assume availability of system services that may not be there.

Exactly this. A lot of the stupidest political arguments, imo, are about playing fast and loose with completely different degrees of offense.