Does Arch have an official package manager yet? Was extremely weird to try it out last year and want to install some AUR packages, and every package getting tool seemed to describe itself as deprecated or unsupported.
Arch's official package manager is `pacman`. The official arch repos are tiny though, so you frequently need to interact with the AUR (which are just user submitted packages (they need to be built by the installer unlike the official repos)). I think the AUR clients are all unofficial, so I guess it makes sense that people would become disinterested in them, but I agree for such a core part of the arch experience it sucks.
Interesting, having used Arch for several years now after previously having used Ubuntu and Fedora, this isn't my impression at all. In particular, there are a lot of nonfree things that are in the core Arch repos that Ubuntu and Fedora don't tend to include. I tended to need things that weren't in the repos at least as often on Ubuntu as I do on Arch, but had to use either third-party PPAs or compile from source to get them.
Yes. In my experience, 95% of what I needed was in the official repos, and the rest in AUR.
Objectively speaking, Arch has ~60K official packages, which is more than Debian and Ubuntu at ~50K each. I don't think many distros even have more packages than Arch. The official repos aren't tiny at all.
And that's not even counting the fact that Debian/Ubuntu like to split the headers for libraries into separate packages from the libraries themselves! Arch doesn't tend to do that (other than the kernel headers)
pacman is for the official repos. There are a number of AUR helpers out there. Personally, I enjoy yay (https://github.com/Jguer/yay). It's very simple, it's been consistently maintained over a number of years, and it works for most commands if you just replace "pacman" with "yay". For instance, `yay -Syu` is the same as `pacman -Syu`, but it'll handle your AUR packages as well.
There are all sorts of "manually". I used to write and manage build scripts for entire GNOME when I was using Slackware 15 years ago. So occasional git pull ; # eyeball the build script ; makepkg is a breeze compared to that.
Automating AUR updates is asking for trouble anyway.
