Can you elaborate on why? I'm genuinely curious.
It ain't complicated: the AUR is a blessing and a curse. For you, it's a blessing. I ain't taking that away from ya in the slightest. More power to you for enjoying it. For me, the AUR is a constant point of contention that I'd rather not deal with if I can afford to. I don't like using AUR helper tools because the AUR to me is more of a liability than an asset. The AUR isn't the same thing as the developer maintaining an official binary package repository that you can properly integrate into Pacman, and I vastly prefer the latter to the former.
I don't give an iota about compile time flags, tracking the latest git commit, or any of that nonsense. I just want the binary there so I can use the damn software right then and there. If that's an officially maintained repository for my distro by the developers in question, that's my go-to. AppImages and Flatpaks are also acceptable. What I ultimately give a shit about is
using the damn software.
When I built my new PC on Cyber Monday, Linux Mint didn't work well with my RX 9070 XT. I know they have HWE-enabled kernels
now (i.e. as of April 2026), but that's far too little and much too late for me. I considered Artix because I really loved using it on bare metal off a portable hard disk, but the AUR was effectively a non-starter for me. I prefer a GTK environment, Cinnamon is my go-to, MATE and Xfce are also acceptable, and I
need a functional X11 implementation. Above all else, I need a reasonably recent Linux kernel and accompanying Mesa stack.
- Mainline Debian variants are non-starters because their kernels and Mesa stacks are hideously outdated
- Arch and variants are non-starters because of the AUR.
- Non-LTS Ubuntu and related spins are non-starters because of Wayland and the
sudo-rs/
uutils nonsense
- That leaves only Xorg-forward Fedora spins as my next best option.
As fate would have it? Fedora 43 (and now 44) Cinnamon is basically "good enough." It's well and truly "the lazy man's bleeding edge Linux distro." RPM Fusion is quasi-official, AppImages cover my vidya gaem console emulators, Steam works as intended because everything's systemd-forward anyway, Xorg is better than Wayland even without XLibre niceties, and basically all my software's basically reasonably current thanks to both Fedora's official repositories being vast compounded by the quasi-official RPM Fusion. Most importantly: the Linux kernel and Mesa are 100% up-to-date. Fedora 44 even enables
ntsync in the kernel OOTB and that's like super good for gaming or whatever.
There
is a COPR repository for XLibre on Fedora, but the question still stands: why would I fiddle with XLibre as a matter of principle when Xorg is the more pragmatic option, and it still gives me my Dark Souls and 3DS retro vidya experience all the same? I'm not
happy that I'm basically using Fedora because my arbitrary criteria of selection rendered everything else non-starters. As it stands, my setup is "good enough" despite not being ideal in the slightest. I can live with that, you'll probably think ill of me, but whatever.