this post was submitted on 31 May 2024
465 points (98.7% liked)
Technology
59555 readers
3436 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
You're right. I don't even know what Arch is to want to try and use it.
Arch is a Linux distribution that intentionally requires a bunch of relatively-complicated manual steps to install, so "I use Arch BTW" has become a meme among people who want to brag about how 'l33t' they are.
AUR is Arch's package manager.
A package manager is a software database that lets you easily install apps with a single command (e.g.
[tool-name] install [app-name]
) along with all the software libraries they depend on (i.e. their 'dependencies'), such that you only need one copy of each library no matter how many apps use it.(Without a package manager, there are two other ways installing apps can work: either an app can come with its own copy of all its dependencies, which means it takes up a lot of disk space unnecessarily, or the user can be responsible for installing all the dependencies separately, which is a gigantic pain in the ass. Windows takes the former approach, while Linux, before package managers were invented, tended to do the latter because open-source software was distributed mostly as source code you had to compile and link yourself.)