Is it better to install software from the AUR or from the web?

I am a beginner user. I wanted to know what is the best practice in terms of installing software that is not on the official repos. I have this particular software as an example: Remnote. It’s not in the official repos. However, it is in the AUR and I also have the option of downloading it via Remnote’s official website. In this context, should I use the AUR or the web? And why?
From my current perspective, AUR is good but the package could be from anyone so it is risky in terms of security and web is not preferred because the package manager is not able to manage packages downloaded and installed from the web without using the package manager. Please correct my understanding if it is wrong.

Welcome to the forum!

Use the AUR — see below.

Because the way the AUR works is that the software will be packaged and installed in a manner consistent with pacman and pamac, so that it will first of all be installed systemwide, and secondly, so that you can also remove it again by way of the package manager later if you were to wish so.

Look at the PKGBUILD. It’ll tell you exactly where it is pulling in its data from, and if it’s some proprietary software, chances are that the PKGBUILD — which is simply a bash script — pulls it in from the official website and repackages it into a package compatible with the Arch Linux Package Managers.

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Another option to use software from the official website is not to install it. In many cases, you can simply extract the archive somewhere and run the software from there.
And as you correctly guessed, such extracted software cannot be kept up-to-date with the package manager.

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How am I able to look at the PKGBUILD of an app in the AUR?

Clone the repo or go to aur.archlinux.org

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Got it. Thank you! I see the sources used under Sources in the AUR webpage for the package. Is there a way to take a look at sources using pamac itself?

Indeed. In Add/Remove Software, search for an AUR package and click on it. You’ll see there’s a Build files tab.

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