Linux

Fedora has a pretty good amount of software in the repositories, so a lot of the time that's enough. When it's not, flatpak with flathub have most gui software covered, and outside of that, if we're talking about terminal or command line stuff, most of those have their own custom way to install them, or they just have self contained binaries that you can put in ~/.local/bin/.

I haven't run into many issues with flatpak like it sounds like you have, so that really covers a lot of it for me honestly.

Apt is quite good for the debian based systems. I've never had a problem in the last decade installing anything on debian or Ubuntu

80% of the time, compiling something from source is just a matter of downloading the code, opening a terminal and changing to the directory containing the source and running these commands:

./configure
make
make install

It's the same 3 commands, 80% of the time.

Installing the prerequisites can be tricky, if the docs are lacking.

Let's see... "anyone who wants to upload their files can". "This gives a windows-like install experience". "Any program is free to be uploaded and installed by anyone". Read those again and realize what a massive security hole that is.

I used arch for a long time and only recently switched over to fedora silverblue. One of the things I missed most was the AUR (and pacman), for sure. However, I discovered something called distrobox. It allows me to install an archlinux container and from there I can use the AUR with no problems. It's pretty seamless, too. So, if there is something I can't find something then it's no problem now.

Though, fedora has pretty much everything anyway. Flatpaks are getting damn good.

Be careful with AUR. You're essentially running a bash script you found on the internet. At least check if the package is made by the dev, and not some random dude. If it's not, definitely check how the package is built, and check every diff.

Niche software is especially dangerous, as there aren't that many people looking into the build process.

In my years of maining arch, I've only had at most 3-4 AUR packages installed at a time. And I've used it for stuff like Skype and Dropbox, which I'll try moving to flatpak.

I'm currently experimenting with guix. It's a bit insane, but pretty amazing.

I use Void, so basicially, the equivalent of the AUR is xbps-src, so... you compile everything from source based on templates.

For Fedora I feel like usually the default package manager really is enough, and when its not, theres the COPR which allows you to install stuff kinda like the aur. There's also flatpaks.

For very niche software you can install from source (which is what the AUR is doing for you a lot), and Flatpak/Flathub tends to fill in the gap on a lot of distros.

I'm a noob too but apt and flatpak are enough for me on Pop!_OS. I've added a couple repos here and there. I don't really see flatpaks as annoying, I prefer them as they generally make dependencies easier for me. They few pieces of niche software I have weren't that difficult to build/install.

I use Gentoo. We have what's probably the most flexible and powerful package manager for Linux.

Adding new packages is trivial; an ebuild script is created which describes how to build the package, along with a little metadata. This is placed into an ebuild repository - I like to contribute to the Gentoo one, but any folder structure will do (however git is by for the most common method). It's not uncommon for a Gentoo user to package software outside the official repos. These will have all of the features (like configurability via USE flags) that ebuilds in the official repo have.

These repositories, for convenience, may be registered with Gentoo and linked on https://repos.gentoo.org/ where the eselect repository tool can be used to add them by name from the index. http://gpo.zugaina.org/ indexes known ebuild repos and can help you to identify whether or not something has already been packaged.

I use Arch but you are kinda over zealous about how good AUR is. It is completely unmoderated and, as others have said, a security risk. But it can also pretty easily bork your system because of a bad package. I don’t know how long you’ve been using Arch but it’s only a matter of time before you’re pulling your hair out trying to fix a broken dependency.

Arch is also not the only distro with giant repositories. Void has a pretty massive repository but it’s better moderated. The Debian universe is just as big if not bigger but you have to add repositories, it’s not as central. Same with the Red Hat world. Arch just dumps it all in to one chaotic bucket which is very convenient but there are downsides.

I've used Linux Mint for nearly a decade now and it's kinda rare something isn't in the standard repos or on flatpak, both of which are handled by Mint's software manager GUI, so...I'm fine.

I'm on OpenSUSE, so we have OBS, which is kind of like the AUR except packages are built on the distro's servers instead of end user machines.

I used Arch for ~5 years, and I honestly don't miss the AUR much. I only have a handful of packages installed from OBS because the repositories have everything else I need.

If I need something that isn't packaged (very rare), I just build it from source myself. It's not a big deal.