I’m looking for the opinions and experience of unbiased Linux enthusiasts whose daily driver uses an arch based distro.
When I was using and learning EndeavourOS I frequently (enough) came across posts and videos that stated that although the AUR is useful, but it’s use should be limited to keep your system stable. If someone was having issues or a discussion about stability came up, there was always a seemingly condescending tone of “well my system has always worked fine, just don’t install too many AURs and it won’t break”.
However, whenever I see posts that relate to package managers, I always see praises for the AUR that seem to imply that there aren’t really any issues.
AUR is a user repo, which means that If you install any aur package, you’re trusting the user who is maintaining this package.
But if you install aur enough, you may install packages and libraries in your system that may break stuff.
AUR is not containerized, which means that these packages shares libs and files with your system. If a package installs a lib unsupported by official repo, it will certainly break your system.
I like aur, but I always try to install the least amount of packages from this source as possible.
Thank you for your input and insight.
Knowing that it is not containerized does help me understand the risks.