So I recently installed Cachyos and I am now met with this problem.
There are kind of 2 main contenders here and I’m split between them. What do you use?
There is pacman + aur and then there is flatpak. Pacman has deep system integration and is much more lightweight but it has deep system integration and requires sudo to install. flatpak has sandboxing and easy permission management but it’s bloated and possibly less performant?
Of course if the package isn’t available on flathub then I will have to use the aur but when both are available it’s hard to decide.
Personally, I use pacman when possible and flatpak when it’s not. I try to avoid the aur as I have had too many problems with missing dependencies or version conflicts. Plus, I don’t generally need things that are not in the repositories so it rarely comes up.
“But flatpaks are not lean!” While this is true, I find flatpaks don’t break my system. Flatpaks do use more resources, from storage to RAM, but I have plenty of both so it’s not really a concern.