this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2025
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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[–] bvoigtlaender@feddit.org 12 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (19 children)

iit: nerds unable to comprehend that building a piece of software from source in not something every person can do.

EDIT: or doesn’t want to do

[–] jwmgregory@lemmy.dbzer0.com 11 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (16 children)

one of my least favorite things about arch and other rolling distros is that yay/pacman will try and recompile shit like electron/chromium from source every few days unless you give it very specific instructions not to - which is annoying as shit bc compiling the entirety of chrome from source takes hours even with decent hardware.

granted, i fucking hate google products too but if you’re doing any web dev it’s necessary sometimes.

idk im definitely willing to admit i might be the idiot here. managing your packages with pacman might just be routine to some people. to me arch is the epitome of classic bad UX in an open source project. it’s like they got too focused on being cmatrix-style terminal nerds and forgot to make their software efficiently useable outside of 5 very specific people’s workflows. it’s not even the terminal usage that is bad about arch. plenty of things are focused on that and… don’t do it shittily? idk…

edit: yes to all the arch fanboy’s points in response to me. i used to be super into arch and am aware of the fact that this isn’t explicit behavior but to act like it doesn’t happen in a typical arch user experience is disingenuous. i also disagree with the take that arch doesn’t endorse this outright with its design philosophy, bc it does. the comparison of the AUR to other, similar things like PPAs doesn’t land for me bc PPAs aren’t integrated into the ecosystem nearly as much as AUR is with arch. you can’t tell people to just grab the binaries or not use AUR whenever it’s convenient to blame the user, when arch explicitly endorses a philosophy amicable to self-compilation and also heavily uses the AUR even in their own arch-wiki tutorials for fairly basic use cases. arch wants to have its cake and eat it too and be a great DIY build it yourself toolkit while also catering to daily driver use and more generalist users. don’t get me wrong, it’s the best attempt at such a thing i’ve seen - but at a certain point you have to ask if the premise makes sense anymore. in the case of arch, it doesn’t and it causes several facets of the ecosystem to flounder from a user perspective. the arch community’s habit of shouting “skill issue” at people when they point out legitimate issues with the design philosophy bugs the fuck out of me. this whole OS is a camel.

[–] ayaya 11 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

All of the normal Arch packages are pre-built, so the only way you'd be compiling things that often is if you installed a large amount of things from the AUR. Make sure you get the bin versions instead of git versions.

The google-chrome and chromium packages are already a binaries so my guess is you need ungoogled-chromium-bin. You can also use the Chaotic AUR repo to get pre-built binaries of a lot of the most common AUR packages. But ideally you should avoid using the AUR when it's not necessary.

While using the AUR is common, it's a bit frustrating you are blaming Arch for your experience. If you only use pacman you would never compile anything, or have very many conflicts. It's like if you added 20 different PPAs on Ubuntu and then complained about the problems that arose from that.

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