 So a few days ago, I made a video where I talked about how I was going to distro hop from Arch to fedora and I Tried to make it clear in that video that this was for a good period of time because I was Sick of messing up arch and I take full responsibility for my arch system Crapping out on me and I will continue to do that, but I wanted a stable system I was just ready to stop the madness that sometimes comes with arch So I hopped to fedora and there were a few How shall we say snarky comments in the comment section of that video claiming that I would never make it more than a day on Fedora well Here I am like five or six days past that and I'm still on fedora. So Nana Nana boo boo I can't believe I just said that I did just say I Should edit that part out, but I probably won't anyways The point is is that I'm still on fedora and I'm learning some Interesting things I talked a little bit in that video or maybe it was a video after that about how I had gotten away from the idea Or the knowledge of how to actually build packages because I was so reliant on the you are I never had to actually build anything for myself And you are helper just did it for me, right? So over the last few days I've built more packages on Linux than I probably ever have before Because not everything is in the fedora repositories. It's not the you are unfortunately And while I have been somewhat impressed with what is in the fedora repositories There's just some like I said stuff that's just not there So I've had to build quite a bit of stuff but fedora does have a solution for the things that aren't in its repositories and that is called COPR now COPR stands for community projects and when it was first introduced to me I was introduced as the AUR of fedora and in some ways It is like they you are but on fedora in other ways. It's not really they you are in fedora First of all, let's just talk about what it is and then we can talk a little bit about what it isn't what it aims to do is give you access to a community maintained repository or actually a whole bunch of repositories of Software that is never going to make it into the Main fedora repositories so things that are actually Compiled by the community so in that way it's very similar to the AUR, right? That is a collection or a repository of software that is put together by the community and that's exactly what COPR is it is a collection of software put together by the community and Similar to the AUR you're going to find a lot of Libraries on COPR. These are libraries that are maintained by the community that really don't need to be included by Fedora in their repositories and just like they you are you'll also find a lot of software that is Very niche so it's not really needed by a lot of people therefore again not ever going to be put into the main repositories That's the kind of gist and the similarities you're going to have with the AUR You're going to have a wide selection of software according to the COPR website, which I can actually show you right here There are 19,074 projects on COPR now That is pretty impressive. That's a lot of software. I would bet and I have no Backing evidence to support this claim But I would bet that the vast majority of that software is probably lot libraries for software Development I could be wrong about that But from what I've seen like so for example if I search for Rofi emoji here and that will take a minute to come up That's one thing you'll notice about it is that it's very very slow to search But that's kind of beside the point if you see the results when they do come up You'll notice that they are very much Software development related. I mean if you were to look through the AUR You'd probably see that the vast majority of the stuff in the AUR is also software development related just because it's easier for The community to maintain a whole bunch of libraries than it is to have a small group of people at the door to do it So now that that's up you can kind of like I see you can see there's a whole bunch of Python stuff here and stuff like that one thing you don't see actually is Rofi emoji. That's not actually there and That's where we're gonna start talking about the differences just a little bit. First of all, it's not as big as day You are it's never going to be that big. It's not that big now and Like I said, the vast majority of stuff you search for on it is not there Unfortunately, that's just kind of the way it is. I've searched for Rofi emoji. I've looked for NC spot It's stuff like that's there now. There are some exceptions to this. So like uberzug is there so if you don't know what uberzug is that's a plug-in or a Terminal tool that allows you to view images inside of a terminal It's useful for things like Ranger and stuff like that where you can view images inside of Ranger So there are some opportunities for just regular people who use fedora to use the copr and find software that they need So those are golden opportunities because they don't happen all that often Unfortunately, the other place where copr kind of differs from the AUR is that it's not a single repository when I was first introduced to the copr I was really excited because I thought it was like, you know, it can a fedora maintained repository a fedora hosted repository that is maintained by the community like it's Place where people like pool all the software and you can just go there and it's like there you are That's not the way it works. Really every single thing you're looking at here is hosted on their own repositories And when I say hosted I'm not really taking like where the software resides But each one of these is their own repositories. So if you want to add this you do pseudo DNF Enable oh, excuse me pseudo DNF COPR Enable and then the username of the person who's who's created the repository and then the name of the Repository and then you hit that and then you could do pseudo DNF install Whatever it is, right? So for example the uberzug I don't really remember who the username so you just do user and then the name of the repository was uberzug Like so I'd hit that and then I could do after I that was done you could do pseudo install uberzug like so Because it was adding it added that repositories to your list of sources Now if that seems familiar to you, that's because it is familiar to you because if you've ever used Ubuntu Prior to the snap days and you've added a PPA That's the exact process of adding a PPA in Ubuntu You add the repository then you can install the software. That's exactly the way the PPAs work The difference between this and PPAs is that people host their own PPAs It's usually on their own web server as far as I can tell COPR is hosted by Fedora like people will put their repositories on Fedora's or the in this place the Fedora info crowds Website and there's their web server. That's where it's hosted So that's a little bit different than PPAs But the process of adding them is almost exactly the same now Maybe there's some technological things underneath it that are completely different. That's probably the case but the user-facing actions of Doing this is exactly the same as same as PPAs and if you've ever used the PPA You'll know that it has inherent problems So one of the problems and it's the biggest problem is that by doing it this way a lot of the software that you're going to encounter is Really out of date like I'm talking about years and years out of date because the person who created the repository no longer maintains it and It doesn't matter that Fedora hosts the stuff You still have the same problem with people as you do with PPAs in that people will create a repository for pieces of software that They need which is usually the reason why someone would create would create a repository and then they just ignore or forget about it You know in that piece of software will never be updated again now. There is a Mechanism on CPR where it actually builds the software, right? And one of the reasons why that's interesting isn't necessarily because it does anything for the user You still have to get it on your computer, but all it is interesting from a User or consumer perspective in that you'll find a lot of projects that failed to build So whether they're not there to old the build or they rely on a library that is out of date or too far ahead Whatever may be the case you'll find a lot of software that is considered failed And you won't be able to download it or get it to work on your computer So those two things where either the software is significantly out of date or you find packages that just won't run It's pretty common. I've come across several of them that are in that case one of them actually being uber-zug one of the Repositories that I found uber-zug on that was two years old and it wouldn't run because we relied on Python Libraries that were much older and we're farther ahead than that now another aspect of this whole thing being like PPAs is that anyone can create a repository therefore if you search for uber-zug multiple people have uploaded repositories with uber-zug on it and Which one you use is kind of hit or miss because you kind of got to go through them all to find one of them that will finally work and that is kind of a big downside because it takes time to Go through those things now I can hear the people out there who don't like the AUR Already saying well Matt you have out of date projects on the you are all the time. That's absolutely true But the AUR has a very good moderation team that does a good job of marking packages as out of date so that happens all the time And because there's so much software on the AUR You are almost certainly presented with the most update up-to-date stuff when you search for it Because there's just so much stuff there You're never going to find a situation in the AUR where you don't find the thing you're looking for or at least it's going To be very very rare now the whole point of this was I wanted to see if the C OPR Was comparable to the AUR and the bottom line is that it's just not it's just not anywhere close to the AUR And anyone who tries to tout it as a replacement for the AUR is just lying to you because it's just not now It's possible Maybe even likely then There are aspects to the C OPR that i'm missing so maybe it's good for Developers in a way that is just not good for me It's 100 percent possible that if you need a whole bunch of libraries for your fit you for your development project The C OPR is a great place to get it but for mainstream Software that is not available in the main repositories of fedora It's not the greatest thing because just a lot of the stuff isn't there and you can't really blame it It's nice that it exists It's just if you go into it with the expectation like I did of it being a good replacement for the AUR I wasn't expecting one-to-one. I was the AUR is gold standard You're never going to find something that is as good as the AUR But I was expecting it to be at least in the same ballpark. It's not unfortunately. It's just not so that is the C OPR I Like I said, I'm glad that exists and I think that it has potential But it also has some of those same pitfalls that ppa's do And that's just kind of disappointed so that is it for this video if you have comments about this You can leave those in the comment section below If you want to follow me on twitter you can do so at the linux cast you if you want to follow me on Massa on or any of my other social media networks you can do so those links are in the video description below Right below the like button As they say If you want to support me on patreon at patreon.com slash the linux cast you are welcome to do so I truly do appreciate everybody who does support me on patreon and youtube It is just continually blowing my mind that people support me In whatever manner that they can so I really truly do appreciate it and I never have the appropriate words or the Significant amount of words that I would need to say thank you as much as I Need to so thanks everybody for your support. Thanks everybody for watching. I'll see you next time