[craggyjaggy]

I'll be coming up on 10 years as well, mostly just because of the AUR. Whatever obscure/proprietary program you might need, there's a decent chance some helpful person has packaged it up. Also has the advantage of easily being able to uninstall the weird 10 year old perl/python/mono version the thing needed to run that would otherwise probably stay on my machine forever.

[encryptluks2]

What I love about the AUR is that if it doesn't exist, it is extremely easy to create a package. Debian packaging and Red Hat packaging were just not very intuitive. PKGBUILDs are simple and effective. Alpine also has similar packaging as Arch.

[flaviut]

100% agreed.

I've spent quite a bit of time modifying deb source files and rpm source files to do upgrades/downgrades/patches.

I could never start from scratch in making a package. I'd be so incredibly overwhelmed by all the different options and obtuse syntaxes and level of background required.

Writing a batch script that installs everything into a `$pkgdir` directory is so much easier to understand and get started with. And if you publish to the AUR and have some small issue, someone will eventually show up and tell you what's wrong with your script.