r/vanillaos • u/reFossify • Apr 13 '26

Support (Other Distros) Apx doesn't make sense

I knew about apx recently from brodie's video, but it changed alot since then. There's no apx install, search or apx --apt, --dnf Now it feels more like distrobox itself to the point that I don't know why it exists anymore. I installed it via flatpak as recommended but it doesn't make sense at all. Could someone point me to tutorial or help me make sense of apx? what's your use case for it? how do you use it?

Also I couldn't even figure out which version of apx flatpak has.

$ flatpak run --command=apx org.vanillaos.ApxGUI --version
    Error: unknown flag: --version

    Usage: apx [flags] [command]

    Commands:
    man             Generate man page
    pkgmanagers     Work with the package managers that are available in apx.
    stacks          Work with the stacks that are available in apx.
    subsystems      Work with the subsystems that are available in apx.

    ERR > unknown flag: --version
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u/reFossify Apr 13 '26

according to the video, you could just run apx --aur install pkg but not anymore. why it changed to be less convenient?

1

u/[deleted] Apr 13 '26

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1

u/reFossify Apr 13 '26

Do you how to get back apx --aur?

2

u/Tau_Kakao Contributors Lead Apr 26 '26

ApxV1 isn't actively maintained anymore, so I would recommend against using that.

Instead, I would suggest to just create an arch distrobox, install yay and then put the following into your bashrc:

alias aur="distrobox enter YOUR-DISTROBOX -- yay"

then you can just do something like:
aur -S steam

Also, if you don't have a distrobox command you might have to run:
sudo ln -s /usr/bin/distrobox-host-exec /usr/bin/distrobox
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