What's so special about it? Isn't it just a repository? Or am I missing something? If it's just a repo, Ubuntu has PPAs and everyone and their mother is creating PPAs.

Arch is special 😁

It really just comes down to the differences in goals and philosophies between each distribution. Some distros have large curated repositories containing most of everything a normal user would want to use. That's what people expect from those distros, and people use them because they want that experience. Likewise, people don't use arch just because it has the AUR. They want a more DIY experience, and arch provides that, with the AUR being an essential part of how it works.

You're not going to get arch users to switch to ubuntu or whatever by duct-taping an AUR clone onto it. Furthermore, I believe trying to make one distro "to rule them all" that attempts to appeal to every niche would be not only a train wreck technically, but an abomination, antithetical to the principles of the OSS community as well.

Probably for the same reasons why there are so many packaging formats in the first place. If everyone settled on deb, rpm, or arch style tar packages. Then we wouldn't need the aur, flatpak, snap, appimage or anything else.

@InternetPirate I mean apt based distros do have ppa’s although I have found aur to have better support. theoretically though they are equivalent i believe?

The AUR is nice and all, but the reality is that most people will be served just fine (if not better) by the more curated repositories. Fedora's bundled repositories are more than enough for my dev work - and thanks to Flatpak and AppImage, closing any gaps is pretty easy.

In my experience the AUR is a dumpsterfire where half of the stuff doesn't work or breaks other things in your system. Definitely not a reason to switch to arch or manjaro for me.

Brew on Linux?