> It is probably a reference to the AUR, but its use is not as common as some people seem to think and is somewhat discouraged
Arch proper has like 60% the package count of openSUSE, fewer than 1/2 as many packages as Fedora, fewer than 1/3 as many packages as Debian, and fewer than 1/6 as many packages as NixOS.[1]
Maybe some of this is Arch having larger packages (splitting fewer of them out), but whatever fudge factor you wanna add in, the Arch repos are extraordinarily small. You have to get into really niche shit like Solus or Exherbo to find a distro with a smaller software selection than the Arch repositories.
The idea that Arch is as usable as most Linux distros without leveraging the AUR is ridiculous.
What matters is the relevance of the packages in the main repositories, not the quantity. While the quantity will affect some people, it will primarily affect those who use obscure packages.
As for the fudge factor, it would be difficult to even agree upon criteria. For example: should python or rust libraries be included, given they have their own package managers?
> What matters is the relevance of the packages in the main repositories, not the quantity.
This is a good point. It would be awesome if we had the metrics to look at this. I would not be surprised if Arch had a good focus on popular packages.
And yeah, what's relevant will vary between users.
> As for the fudge factor, it would be difficult to even agree upon criteria. For example: should python or rust libraries be included, given they have their own package managers?
I don't think this particular case would be too tricky. We can probably exclude them, or just count them separately. Libraries packaged in the distro package manager are useful, but they're mostly useful for simplifying the process of creating new packages for the distro.
> The idea that Arch is as usable as most Linux distros without leveraging the AUR is ridiculous.
Not really. I don't have a single AUR package installed. The paperkey software used to be the only AUR package I had installed. It eventually became part of the official repositories.
Arch proper has like 60% the package count of openSUSE, fewer than 1/2 as many packages as Fedora, fewer than 1/3 as many packages as Debian, and fewer than 1/6 as many packages as NixOS.[1]
Maybe some of this is Arch having larger packages (splitting fewer of them out), but whatever fudge factor you wanna add in, the Arch repos are extraordinarily small. You have to get into really niche shit like Solus or Exherbo to find a distro with a smaller software selection than the Arch repositories.
The idea that Arch is as usable as most Linux distros without leveraging the AUR is ridiculous.
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1: https://repology.org/repositories/statistics/total