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.
Interdependency is a large part of issues; If you have an aur package that breaks but has no other packages that depend on it, you have a minor problem. If you have an aur package that breaks which many packages depend on, you have a major problem. Keep your libraries as unchanging as you can; out of AUR if possible, definitely not -git packages.
An AUR pkgbuild can also perform arbitrary actions to install the package, the security implication is obvious but many also miss that, yes as you install more AUR packages your system will diverge from the expected Arch state. Normally this is minor and fine, but it could trip you up here and there.