TROMjaro Forum

Use the Chaotic AUR

If you are an older TROMjaro user and did not yet implemented the Chaoric AUR into your system, we highly recommend you to do that. Our Library of apps also relies on it. It is super easy to implement.

Open the terminal, do these:

You will be asked for your password and such.

First:
sudo pacman-key --recv-key FBA220DFC880C036 --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com

Then
sudo pacman-key --lsign-key FBA220DFC880C036

Lastly:

sudo pacman -U 'https://cdn-mirror.chaotic.cx/chaotic-aur/chaotic-keyring.pkg.tar.zst' 'https://cdn-mirror.chaotic.cx/chaotic-aur/chaotic-mirrorlist.pkg.tar.zst'

Edit 1 file

Go to the file /etc/pacman.conf, open as root (right click the file), and at the very bottom of it (very important) add this:

[chaotic-aur]
Include = /etc/pacman.d/chaotic-mirrorlist

Open Add/Remove Software.

Refresh your database:

Close Add/Remove Software, Open again. Then check to see if you can access the repository. For example if you search for Ungoogled Chromium you should be able to find it in Repositories.

If not try to do this command in the terminal: sudo pacman-key --populate chaotic

That’s all! Enjoy!

I have some questions around this, if it is ok to ask them in this thread (or I can move it to a new thread if preferred).

If I understand correctly the AUR builds the software from source on your system following a pre-supplied build script (from the original developer?). The biggest trouble I have had with this is that it can be a lengthy process with no indication ahead of time of how long it might take, and no clear way to pause or cancel it while in process. It seems reasonable therefore that this should be the lowest priority choice. I guess it is also the least tested and most likely to cause stability problems? On the other hand, I was wondering if there are any potential performance improvements from building the software locally where it can detect things like what CPU feature flags are available etc.?
(BTW, I have noticed instances where the AUR result is served as the highest result in the search in the case where there are additional suffixes like “-bin” on the Chaotic AUR builds).

My understanding of the Chaotic AUR is that it contains community pre-built packages from the AUR. Which is obviously a big improvement in avoiding having to go through the build process yourself, but I was wondering how it otherwise is expected to compare to the AUR in terms of stability or security? I was guessing it should be about the same in this regard with just some additional security risk for having to also trust whoever built it?

So far I have found myself preferring to use the Chaotic AUR over Flatpak, simply because the Flatpaks can be multiple orders of magnitude larger by comparison, and don’t even advertise the true size ahead of time (e.g. I have seen cases where it is claimed to be a few tens of kB, but actually results in many hundreds of megabytes). But I’m wondering if this is really wise, and what risks to stability I might be running which is of prime importance to me. Maybe it is worth having all those cleanly separated sets of dependencies if it really does make the system more stable?

Another related question I have as a new Linux user is why there is such a thing as “incompatible dependencies”. I find it strange to have to uninstall dependency “X” (which presumably other software might like to make use of) when installing some new piece of software which requires dependency “Y”. Why can’t X and Y coexist in peace such that one or the other can be called by at different times by different pieces of software?

The main downside of the Chaotic AUR is that the system they use to build these packages for Chaotic AUR is not identical with what TROMjaro provides in terms of packages. So at times some Chaotic AUR packages may not work on TROMjaro…

They also seem to check these packages on top of what the AUR maintainers and such check. So it may be even more secure.

Well it is not a good idea to manually install or remove dependencies. Packages should take care of that. The reason why you can’t have multiple of, I’d suspect is because they will conflict. For example library XCETERA will always install in say path/folder/xcetera regardless of the version, and will be accessed by other programs from there. So how can you have another version of XCETERA when they use the same path!? Probably that’s how it works.

OK, thank you for the clarification! After thinking about it a bit more I think I will continue to use the Chaotic AUR for the time being. Since it is not yet my main system, it is not the biggest problem if something breaks, and this way I can find out for myself how likely it is to cause issues, and provide feedback if it does.

I was also thinking that two versions with the same name/path could be one reason, but the case that happened with my install appeared to be two different packages… actually by going through my update history now I’m pretty sure it was
nodejs (19.6.0-1)
that had to be removed during an install so that
nodejs-lts-gallium (16.19.0-1)
could be installed. I guess they both do much the same thing, but it just struck me as strange that they couldn’t both be installed at the same time and left me wondering how any application that was previously dependent upon nodejs is supposed to make do without it, or know to use nodejs-lts-gallium instead. Maybe they both install conflicting files to the same path? Well, I guess if everything still works we can say it’s not important :smile:

I personally always use Chaotic over the AUR, and so far rarely anything breaks. And if it does, it is temporary.

About that conflict at times the package maintainers will specify that this conflicts with that, and so it won’t let you have both. I guess depends from case to case.

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