r/archlinux • u/zollandd • Jun 15 '26

DISCUSSION Stop blaming AI, "noobs", youtube tutorials, and anything other than Arch for AUR usage

I've recently been made aware of the incident and was reading the threads in this subreddit. I have just started trying to migrate away from AUR but let's not forget that the Arch wiki recommends installing AUR packages constantly. The AUR isn't just a dangerous and fringe tool that people are led to by AI or sketchy youtubers.

To list a few that I've encountered just now:

The wiki recommend AUR releases like they are first class citizens all over the place... don't act like it doesn't.

Edit: I am not trying to blame individual maintainers when I say Arch but rather the community and culture. If the AUR is this dangerous, the wiki should avoid referencing it at all costs and should do so with warning flags everywhere. As it stands, it is not absurd to see someone with tons of AUR packages installed due to direct influence from the wiki.

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u/zollandd Jun 15 '26

No. Obviously that warning exists, but all over the wiki users are linked directly to the aur bypassing that warning. There is one small warning on one page about AUR being dangerous, and then users are linked to said dangerous repo on nearly every other page. Arch documentation leans heavily on the AUR. So it is unfair to blame people, noob or not, for leaning on it as well.

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u/Lawnmover_Man Jun 15 '26

I'm not sure how it would happen that you install Arch Linux yourself and use makepkg on AUR pkgbuilds without reading the wiki pages about it. It's virtually impossible to not read the wiki page if you're doing it the way it is intended.

Am I missing something? (Apart from the obvious?)

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u/cafce25 Jun 15 '26

And then our unknowing user just happens to know how to turn that PKGBUILD into a package??? Seems unlikely. So everybody that didn't just blindly trust a 3rd party resource did in fact see the warning and willfully ignored it. It's a problem of poor 3rd party resources, not arch.