So I recently installed Cachyos and I am now met with this problem.

There are kind of 2 main contenders here and I’m split between them. What do you use?

There is pacman + aur and then there is flatpak. Pacman has deep system integration and is much more lightweight but it has deep system integration and requires sudo to install. flatpak has sandboxing and easy permission management but it’s bloated and possibly less performant?

Of course if the package isn’t available on flathub then I will have to use the aur but when both are available it’s hard to decide.

  • milk@discuss.tchncs.de
    4·
    2 months ago

    I use native packages wherever possible, then flatpak’s after that, and then aur pretty much only for things that don’t run well in flatpaks. I really don’t want to have to look through 50 different pkgbuilds every time there’s an update and the downsides to flatpaks are, I believe, largely overstated

  • mub@lemmy.ml
    2·
    2 months ago

    pacman / yay

    I also like pacseek as it provides a simple tui for package search and getting info about packages.

  • AstroLightz@lemmy.world
    2·
    2 months ago

    pacman /w chaotic-aur.

    I don’t need the AUR directly, a GUI, or other managers. Just what came with my system + chaotic works just fine.

    edit: typo

  • Nibodhika@lemmy.world
    2·
    2 months ago

    Your question is not Arch specific, it’s “should I use flatpaks?” And the answer in my opinion is probably no.

    Flatpaks are a good idea to isolate certain applications and to provide a uniform way of installing packages. So there might be some apps that are not available in your native package manager, but do provide flatpaks. For those cases flatpaks are probably preferred. But Arch based distros have the AUR, so there are a lot of apps that aren’t packaged for Arch that you can still get as a native package. Sure, using the AUR is risky and if you’re not on actual Arch things might break sporadically because of mismatched dependencies (although I think CachyOS is full parity of packages with Arch, so that’s maybe more of a Manjaro warning).

    But flatpaks are clunky, bloated, require annoying permissions to be set to do basic things, and require you to update two package managers to do a full system update. They are more appealing for systems where you don’t want to give users root access but still allow them to install programs, but for your own computer I have never seen the appeal.

  • nothx [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    1·
    2 months ago

    I just reinstalled arch last weekend and have both paru and yay installed. Only real difference between them is yay is Go and paru is Rust. Both work great and very similarly. I think the paru dev originally worked on yay.

    I tend to choose the pacman and aur over flatpaks or snaps, something about the isolation layer never sat right with me.

  • thingsiplay@lemmy.ml
    1·
    2 months ago

    I use yay, as it comes by default with EndeavourOS. It’s basically an AUR helper that uses pacman and works quite the same.

    Flatpak is a different package manager and has nothing to do with your system packages. They are not exclusive, I use both. So what you basically asking isn’t which package manager people use, but rather which package format.

  • nothx [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    1·
    2 months ago

    Im running arch proper, nothing come pre-installed. But I originally used paru and then installed yay cuz I was troubleshooting something. Never removed it.

    Fo what it’s worth, it doesn’t hurt anything to have multiple installed so you can see which you like. They shouldn’t interfere with eachother.

  • bad1080@piefed.socialEnglish
    1·
    2 months ago

    i used their version of discover (forgot the name) and found it has mostly everything i was looking for (surprisingly so)

  • juipeltje@lemmy.world
    1·
    2 months ago

    You can choose between things like flatpak or aur packages, but you’re gonna have to use pacman either way, since your core packages are still managed by pacman even if you decide to install most things through flatpak. Just wanted to point that out in case you were thinking of not using it at all anymore, cause it’s definitely not good to have your system get extremely out of date overtime. Having said that, it’s a matter of preference. The aur has more packages available, but flatpak has verified packages available, so assuming you stick to those, it could be safer. It also offers things like sandboxing. When i was on arch i only used the aur. I usually go with whatever has the most packages available or whatever is most convenient.

  • TruePe4rl@lemmy.mlEnglish
    1·
    2 months ago

    pacman + yay + appman (in cases where appimage is more convenient)

    If you need something from AUR, Chaotic AUR builds some of them.

    Technically I also use managers for certain languages and environments, so sometimes cargo, pip, luarocks, … whatever.

    I did try to use flatpak in the past, but I just found it annoying. If you do not explicitly need it’s capabilities for a certain app it is mostly makes accessing app’s config and data a major annoyance imo.

  • communism@lemmy.ml
    1·
    2 months ago

    Yay

    I only use flatpak for one Python program because it has a lot of runtime dependencies I don’t want to bother with. I generally wouldn’t use flatpak.