You do realize Manjaro has the largest userbase of all the arch based Distros, right? Don’t answer that it was rhetorical. Second you can’t use Arch as a comparison since the vast majority of them do not use Pamac.
I apologize for any misunderstanding on my side.
You do have a point and the comment was not entirely directed at you even I quoted - but generally for thread as a whole.
I don’t see the Manjaro use of AUR as offensive or offending but merely a use of wellknown public service provided by upstream Arch - and my comment was meant as an attempt to oil the water a bit.
Meaning of the phrase "oiling the water"
In earlier times, the pouring of modest quantities of oil into the sea was done deliberately in order to forestall rough seas. This phrase alludes to the calming effect of that oil has on wave action as it spreads over the surface of the sea. Very small quantities of oil can cover a surprisingly large area as it spreads into a layer just a few molecules in thickness. The surface tension of the oil layer has an effect similar to that of a thin skin and is highly effective at calming ‘troubled’ water. - https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/288150.html
Now I have to address - in the most polite and friendly way - please @grazzolini
I acknowledge - the AUR repo is not created with the intention of providing downstream scripts to child distributions.
I have been with Manjaro since 2016 and before that - I used Arch. Manjaro must have done something right with the approach to the upstream Arch since the userbase has grown so much as your statistic on AUR clearly shows.
I agree that something has slipped in the search function of Pamac and I am quite sure this has not been intentional and with my knowledge of the team it will be addressed.
But to shame a distribution because they have a large userbase and call their use of a well known public service - the AUR - offending is probably not the way to address the issue (but it may as well be me as non-native english speaker which is misinterpreting the word).
7 Likes
With respect, I haven’t seen any user behaving like a rude vandal and bully towards the AUR from the moment all of us became aware about what Pamac Manager was doing in the background all the time, without anyone knowing about that, not even its software engineers, who happen to be the Manjaro devs, and Pamac Manager Manjaro’s officially endorsed package manager.
So there’s a contradiction in what you are saying about not casting blames in any direction while you do clearly blame the users for not knowing it, when your very informative and educating post was missing all this time not only from the forum but from the wiki as well -in fact you should not evade the fact that the wiki, while informing users about potential risks and disadvantages about using the AUR, nowhere warns the user that searching too much with Pamac can cause DDOS upstream so it should be used responsibly, despite having a similar incident some months ago.
Instead it contains further “useful” info promoting the use of it like:
If you enable AUR support, it is usually wise to also select, “Check for updates from AUR” so software you install from AUR won’t become outdated.
Checking for “development package” updates will allow updates on *-git packages which are built from the latest source code to also be updated.
Further, you said you agree with jonathon’s post so unfortunately I had to read it, but if you agree with that you agree that it is Manjaro’s fault and not the user’s.
Quoting:
when your tool depends on a third-party service you’d better make damned sure you don’t take that service down. This is not simply polite, it’s in your own best interests.
meaning Manjaro’s official tool developed by Manjaro’s devs should be better engineered, not the user’s “business” and not his/her fault.
That could take the form of talking to the provider of the service, contributing to its development, or just sending them money to provide for additional capacity for horizontal scaling.
again meaning Manjaro should take all the necessary steps above and not the user (other than being asked -by Manjaro again- to financially contribute for the infrastructure).
So in conclusion “see what can be done for the user and everyone involved, before blaming the user”.
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I think so, to me “the biggest offender” means the one responsible here (the biggest culprit, the main issue, and so on), which regarding the numbers provided, it is. There is no shaming or whatever, it is simple numbers and fact.
Now that everyone’s had their say and that the usual doses of unwarranted mud have been slung back and forth ─ you’ve all kept the mod team quite busy at cleaning up this thread 
─ here’s how yours truly uses the AUR…
If there is a need for me to search whether a package exists in the AUR ─ which usually means that a newbie is asking about a certain functionality that’s not offered by anything in the Manjaro repositories ─ then I open up Octopi.
As mentioned by @openminded higher up this thread, if you type something in the Octopi search field on account of the AUR, then you have to explicitly hit Enter, and you also first have to enable the AUR search by clicking this button below… 
Now, as for searching for updates to the AUR software I have installed, I only do this whenever there is an actual Manjaro update. So I update my Manjaro system first ─ with pacman, from the command line, while completely logged out of my desktop environment ─ and then I will check for AUR updates afterwards with…
yay -Syu --aur --devel
Yes, I know that I can use yay for doing Manjaro updates as well, but I have to become root anyway in order to remount several of my read-only filesystems as read/write first before trying to update anything, so I might as well run pacman right away.
Anyway, this only happens on average about twice a month. And when there is nothing from the AUR requiring an update, then I just leave it at that until the next Manjaro update comes along. “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”
The only time I ever fire up Pamac ─ or at least, its GUI ─ is when there’s a newbie who has a problem with it and I need to verify that for myself.
That said, the Pamac GUI is pretty much unusable for me anyway, because it somehow doesn’t like the colors of my chosen GTK theme, and therefore I cannot read what it shows me ─ white text on a white background in certain parts of the GUI. But I don’t care, because I simply have no need for it.
Do I need to know the name of a package? Octopi will tell me all I need to know. Do I need to install software? The command line, while completely logged out of the GUI, is the ultimate way to go. No conflicting situations due to libraries that are in use while they are being overwritten, no interfering processes, and I can easily clean up the cache afterwards.
And, I get to see everything that the package manager is doing, because it’s all scrolling by on the tty. It’ll tell me when there’s a .pacnew file, or when something is installed that has a new optional dependency, or if there’s an issue with the permissions set in the package differing from the permissions set in my filesystems, and so on.
And now that I’m busy ranting, here’s what I think… Too many people are lacking the patience for properly using this distribution, or even GNU/Linux as a whole. And to us moderators ─ and even to our TL3 and TL4 members ─ this becomes very evident whenever there’s some new issue introduced with an update, because…
-
First it’ll be reported on the update announcement thread ─ several times, because the people reporting it can’t be bothered reading the whole thread; and…
-
Then it’ll be reported on a dozen new and independently posted threads, because the people reporting it can’t be bothered reading the update announcement thread ─ where both the issue and the fix for it may have already been posted by @philm in the second post on the thread ─ plus that they also can’t be bothered using the forum’s search function to see whether someone else has also already reported the issue.
It’s all about “me, me, me, me”. You even see this in some of the thread titles themselves ─ “Please help me!!!”. Why does that need to be added to the thread title?! If you’re going to post about a problem with a GNU/Linux distribution on said distribution’s support forum, then doesn’t that imply already that you need help? Or are you adding that to your thread title so as to tell us to drop all assistance we’re providing to our other members just so as to come to the rescue of Your Royal Highness?
And it gets even worse, because some people expect that help to arrive right after posting their thread. If they don’t get a reply within the first 15 minutes, they’ll just post a new thread about the same thing, and/or they’ll even start spamming other people’s threads with their problem.
People can’t even be bothered posting their threads in the proper forum category. Only a few days ago I had to move a thread about problems with Nvidia graphics adapters and multiple monitors out of the #support:network category. I kid you not. 
Likewise, those of our members who prefer posting in another language than English can’t be bothered to post in the respective category for their language. Strangely enough, their English is good enough to pick a forum category from the list, but not good enough to recognize their own language among the forum categories.
Yes, the Pamac GUI has a problem in its code base ─ not a coding bug, but a design bug, which causes problems for the people running the AUR servers ─ and this bug will be dealt with. But the biggest problem is the loose nut between the keyboard and the chair, with their lack of a sense of responsibility, a short or non-existing attention span, intellectual laziness and ─ above all ─ selfishness.
And then I’m not even getting into the newbies who come here with an attitude and a sense of entitlement, demanding to be helped right away, and showing a complete lack of respect for whoever attempts to help them ─ even if it’s a staff member or a Manjaro developer.
Hell, we’ve even got complete newbies signing up here and then spamming the #site-feedback category with how they think Manjaro should be put together, all the while not even knowing the distinction between the work done by the Manjaro developers and packages from upstream, or even from the AUR. They don’t even understand that GNU/Linux is not Microsoft Windows.
The bottom line of this long rant is that what Manjaro really needs right now is an attitude change among a large part of its user base, and especially among the vast majority of the newbies.
But hey, this thread is posted in the #support:aur section, so the newbies won’t get to see it. They don’t even see that huge search box. All they see is that + button for posting a new thread.
</end rant>
P.S.: All those of you with an inclination for slinging mud around and going ad hominem had better start biting their tongue. It takes only two mouse clicks to close this thread, and only a few more to send a couple of people on a short vacation.
11 Likes
libpamac 11.1.1 now doesn’t use anymore the AUR suggest API
Update is on Unstable and Stable-Staging branches for testing, probably will get pushed soon to other branches once it is verified working without issues (don’t forget Testing branch, thanks).
7 Likes
I have to use the AUR after the initial install only to get my Canon printer drivers, mailspring and a few other things. Now that I have those things I have disable AUR for now. I will re-enable to check for updates from time to time.
Jim
Don’t. Whenever there’s an update, simply log out of your GUI ─ whatever it is ─ and log in at a tty. Then, simply run…
yay -Syu --aur --devel
It will update your whole system, including any AUR packages you’ve installed.
If you don’t have yay installed…
pamac install yay
2 Likes
Thank you for the info
Why --refresh option when AUR is targeted?
As I understand it, it doesn’t target only the AUR, but instead it does a full system update and then checks the AUR for updated packages as well. And the --devel option also updates -git packages from the AUR.
Acc. to GitHub - Jguer/yay: Yet another Yogurt - An AUR Helper written in Go --aur means only AUR packages are targeted.
1 Like
Oh, okay ─ I didn’t know that. But then again, I always update with pacman first, given that I do that from within the root account. 
While now then pamac got pretty fix against AUR excessive requests, why it is a bad idea of simply to turn on AUR support with checking for updates, so ordinary AUR usage as was before the issue?
I can’t understand it for a couple of hours.
I’m not sure whether the problem was fixed, but as I said earlier, I don’t use pamac ─ or at least, not the GUI version, because I do use the command-line version sometimes.
I checked the
[2021-10-16T19:12:47+0300] [ALPM] upgraded libpamac (11.1.0-1 -> 11.1.1-1)
[2021-10-16T19:12:48+0300] [ALPM] upgraded pamac-cli (10.2.0-1 -> 10.2.2-1)
[2021-10-16T19:12:48+0300] [ALPM] upgraded pamac-gtk (10.2.0-1 -> 10.2.2-1)
[2021-10-16T21:23:50+0300] [ALPM] upgraded pamac-cli (10.2.2-1 -> 10.2.2-3)
[2021-10-16T21:23:50+0300] [ALPM] upgraded pamac-gtk (10.2.2-1 -> 10.2.2-3)
versions the with local firewall logs: it is perfectly fixed: absolute minimum of requests.
If you go to web-frontend AUR’s page (https://aur.archlinux.org/) and will search for example 5 packages, you will produce a ten times more (about 7x-8x) API requests than current pamac does.
Hope some authoritative person (for example Manjaro team member) will release the news about that users can back to usual use of AUR after they updated the pamac. I have no inside info about current ongoing experiments, plans and final line crossing event.
Is there a way to change the AUR update interval independent of Manjaro repository updates which look like every 6 hours as default. I don’t see anything in the pamac config file or the GUI?
Based on
your and mine review, it is currently absent.
I’m not at all sure about this. I would imagine we rank pretty high in the number of users, but we don’t have accurate numbers of even our own userbase, let alone other arch based distros.
I think there is a fair chance that there are more pure Arch than Manjaro users. But since we don’t have numbers, it is difficult to say.
I’m not really sure about that, for the same reason I believe there are more Ubuntu and Linux Mint users than pure Debian users. [1]
Manjaro is more suited to a general userbase, while distros like Arch and Debian are for more specific needs.
Manjaro consistently tops Arch Linux on DistroWatch’s rankings by a wide margin (I know, not particularly “scientific” but still an interesting observation.)
As someone who used to use Arch Linux in the past, and now fully migrated to Manjaro, I can confidently say I have no plans to switch back to Arch.
[1] “Users”, as in desktop users, not servers or sys admins. 