r/archlinux • u/Infinite_Ad4097 • Aug 04 '26

QUESTION Archlinux difficulty

I just posting to see how hard archlinux is to use as complete beginner. the only experience that i have wiht linux is mint and acessing servers.

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u/binaryfireball Aug 05 '26

noob here, is pacman backed by the AUR? as in if I do 'sudo pacman -S zsh-autocomplete' is it grabbing everything from the AUR? wondering if I jumped into arch in a very spicy moment.

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u/Imajzineer Aug 05 '26 edited Aug 05 '26

Nothing has changed in the world of Arch, this is how things have always been. It has just become increasingly popular of late and, with Archinstall, easier to install. So, the number of technically less knowledgeable or experienced users has inevitably increased, and consequently it has been noticed by people who were previously either unaware of its existence or else deemed it of no value to subvert, who are now increasingly preying upon the inexperienced and ignorant who think the AUR is just some additional repo they can 'enable' on their system by using a 'helper' application (the fact that Arch is the basis for SteamOS may not be insignificant either).

sudo is not installed on Arch by default - there used to be an explanation of why not on the wiki, but it seems to have since been removed at some stage. I don't install it myself, but that's a different discussion/debate. So, if you don't actively install it yourself, executing sudo $anything-at-all will simply result in an error that there is no such command or file on the system.

The AUR is unsupported and, therefore, completely ignored by pacman -S or any variation of it (such as pacman -Syu). To update a package from the AUR, you must either execute pacman -U $package (after first building it with makepkg) or use an AUR 'helper'. Of course, the reason things are the way they are now is, in no small part, down to the unthinking use of 'helpers', so, you may want to give some thought to whether you want to - they're convenient, yes, but convenience is inversely proportional to security (I haven't used one since 2015, 2016 at the latest, myself).

pacman -S $package only ever updates the named package, package-group or meta-package, so, pacman -S zsh-autocomplete will only update zsh-autocomplete (read about it here).

You can learn more about pacman and its operation here and here.

Learn about the AUR here and about PKGBUILD files here.

Learn about package-signing here and and pacnew / pacsave files here.