In any Linux distribution, software can be installed through various methods. One is via official repositories, but we can also use Flatpak, Snap, and AppImage packages, among others. In addition to all this, Arch Linux has the AUR, a community repository where we can find virtually all the software available for Linux, and which, if we don't know how to compile, we can manage with yay . For example, in the AUR we find extensions for GIMP that we would otherwise have to search for, making it the envy of other distributions. To try and fill this gap in Ubuntu, there's Pacstall.
On paper , Pacstall looks very promising. It's supposed to be a tool for automating the installation of software hosted on GitHub or GitLab on Ubuntu . It was launched a little over a year ago, so we could say it's still in its early stages, but, at least for now, users of an Arch-based operating system can only find it amusing because of the enormous difference.
Pacstall has its own repository and more can be added
The Pacstall team is uploading packages to the project's official repository , and this is the main difference compared to the AUR . The Arch community repository has been around for years, and you can find everything there. In what is intended to be its Ubuntu equivalent, they've only been uploading packages for a very short time, so the list of available packages is limited.
My question after trying it out and skimming the documentation is what it will be like in the future. This package manager allows you to add repositories , but currently the installation fails because the pacscript file needed to install the packages is missing. If they fix this in the future (or if I'm doing something wrong and someone knows what it is, please let me know), it might not be an AUR, but it's still a very interesting tool.
And how it works?
The first thing to do is install it, something that we will achieve by opening a terminal and typing these commands:
sudo apt install curl sudo bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://git.io/JsADh || wget -q https://git.io/JsADh -O -)"
From there, the rest is like apt, pacman, dnf, etc, but in its own way:
- pacstall followed by:
- -I: will install the package.
- -R: will remove the package.
- -S- Will search repositories.
- -A- Will add a GitHub or GitLab repository.
- -U: will update the pacstall scripts.
- -Oops: will update the packages.
- -h: help.
If we want to uninstall it, what we have to write is the following:
bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://git.io/JEZbi || wget -q https://git.io/JEZbi -O -)"
It would be great if Ubuntu had its own AUR, and I don't know if Pacstall will ever even remotely resemble it. For now, there are packages like Android Studio and Google Chrome. If the community continues to contribute, we'll see how far this project goes.