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The security situation with the Arch Linux AUR got a lot worse
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this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2026
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But is Arch sufficiently complete without AUR packages? It is being criticized - and rightly so - that the magnificient Arch Wiki is full of references to AUR packages. That could in fact mislead new users.
I am an happy Arch user, since about ten years... But I use it differently. I am running Debian stable on the hardware, which has all the drivers I need (after getting rid of NVidia graphics, which was just a mistake to buy). I use Debian for my work / office / productivity system, to read email, and so on.
But for some stuff, I need newer software: For trying out new features or libraries (I am a developer). For testing out new window managers. Leisure programming. And so on. I use Arch for this. After a few years of dual booting (which caused occasional breakage), I settled on running Arch in a VM. Which works fine for me.
And the last shift I am experiencing is that I use more and more the Guix package manager. The reason for this is that when one tries out a lot of things, and does only system upgrades for many years (which means not doing a reinstall, but replacing the oldstable packages with the newer stable packages), the system becomes a bit untidy over time. Old packages, scripts, and configurations accumulate, and it is hard to get rid of it without breaking things, because one just cannot delete everything one does not remember what it was needed for. And there is so much stuff in software that, after all, turns out to be not such a good idea. Yes, a fresh OS install leaves a tidy system, but it would cost a few days. (By the way, accumulating cruft in the long term is also somewhat of an disadvantage of rolling release distros.)
Now, Guix solves that, because I have a temporary, deterministic environment for every programming project (just like a Python venv). And by this way, stuff does not contaminate the base system, and is garbage collected when it is not used any more.
And, Guix has quite recent packages, similar to Arch.
Now I use Arch less and less.
Is Guix the GNU approach to NixOS?
Yes! And everything is based on hashed source code - this guarantees long-term reproducibility, avoids vendor-lock-in with proprietary binaries and drivers (and that's why some companies hate it), but above all makes much easier to inspect what is in a package.
Interesting, unfortunately I still rely on proprietary binaries but I could try it on a secondary device. Reproducibility is one of the reason I chose to learn NixOS.
Unless something changed in a big way in the last few years, that's not really true. When I was running arch, I had maybe a dozen AUR packages installed, none of which I would consider essential. And yes: I was one of those weirdos who would actually take a good look at the pkgbuild diff before installing an update.