 A few months ago when I was doing my musical browsers videos where I was seemingly changing browsers once a week, one of the browsers that I took a look at was on Google Chromium. And one of my complaints about it was that there's not a binary for on Google Chromium in either the standard repose for Argelinix or the AUR, which means that I had to compile it. And for anyone who knows, compiling a browser takes a long time and it could take up to 45 minutes on my hardware, you know, in this main computer. And then if I wanted to do it on like my laptop, which is much older, it took even longer. So that's one of the reasons why I moved on from on Google Chromium. Now the thing is, is in the video that I made about that is several people mentioned something called the chaotic AUR. And at the time, I just did not have any really interest in revisiting on Google Chromium. So I just kind of ignored that stuff. And I had no clue what the chaotic AUR was anyways. But now that I've had a chance to actually look into it, the chaotic AUR is kind of fascinating. So what is the chaotic AUR? So in order to understand what this is, you kind of have to understand what the AUR itself is. The AUR is a repository that is not really controlled by Argelinix. It's oversaw by them, it's in its approved by them, but they don't do any approval of what's in it, right, for the most part, there are moderators to try to keep up bad actors. But for the most part, the AUR is kind of like a wild west, pretty much anything can go on in there. And it's just the way it is, right? But the thing about the AUR that you need to know is that most of the stuff in there, maybe not most of it, but a lot of the stuff in there is stuff that you have to compile yourself. So you download the source code and then compile it with whatever tools that need to be used in order to compile it. Like if you're using C, you're probably going to use make. If you use, if it's a rust thing, it's probably cargo, whatever. It doesn't really matter. You're using probably an AUR helper to compile that stuff. And it's not really that difficult, but it's time consuming, right? Because there's no binaries and you're compiling it yourself, every piece of software you end up downloading, not only has to be compiled that first time, but every single time that you update something, it has to be compiled again. And over time, that can take, you know, that can add up to a significant amount of time. And what the chaotic AUR is aiming to do is to take some of the biggest offenders in terms of compile time and actually compile them on the server side so that when you download them, what you're actually downloading is a binary. The compile time has already happened on the server one time, and then they can distribute that binary to everyone who asks for it. It is something that you see quite often actually in enterprise environments where they'll actually take the program, whatever they're doing, put it on the main system and then compile it on like a server or something, and then push it out to all the clients. That way, every client doesn't actually have to have go through the compile time for whatever it is, right? It's something that happens often there. And it actually makes a lot of sense on Arch Linux, because a lot of that stuff that's in the AUR has to be compiled, it takes a long time. So it makes sense that a binary would not only save that time, but it also save energy for almost everyone because you only have to compile it at one time on the server every time there's an update. So that's something we should talk about is updates, because if you think about it, by compiling it in the server space, what they're then in charge of is making sure that that software is up to date. Now they have several different update schedules. They do three of them every day, morning, afternoon, and night, but they also have one that I think is weekly. So the one that is weekly is for stuff that makes sense to only do stuff weekly. They don't want to go through and compile Firefox every single day. That would take a lot of server resources. It'd be very expensive, and it doesn't really make sense to because Firefox usually isn't updated every single day. So they set the packages to update on the schedule that actually makes the most sense. And it probably saves them some server money or whatever, but also ensure that the stuff that you're downloading, the binaries that you're downloading are as up to date as you would probably expect them to be in the AUR. So the chaotic AUR is quite fascinating, as I said, because it will save you time over a long period of time. Even if you're not talking about browsers and stuff, if you're talking about something that is simple that still needs to be compiled, even if it's just a short amount of time over a vast number of weeks or whatever, that compile time can add up to a significant amount of time. Also costs you money in terms of energy because when you compile stuff, your CPU and your memory tend to be the things that do the compile. And if you've ever noticed when you download some from the AUR, your CPU probably spikes up to about 100% for a long time, especially if it's something that goes on for a while with the chaotic AUR. You don't have to worry about that because what you're downloading is just the binary. Okay, so in order to actually use the chaotic AUR, you have to do several things. Now, the instructions for this are actually really easy to follow. I will link to the commands that I'm going to be using in the video description, and I'll show you them here on screen here in a moment, but there is just like four commands, three or four commands, and it's really simple. I'll explain what's going on here as we go through. So let's go ahead and jump right into actually setting up the chaotic AUR. And I'm going to do this without my face on the screen so that you can actually see this. So the first thing you'll need to do is receive the PGP key that will enable Arch to check the packages that are being downloaded. So that's done with this command here. So we copy this and do sudo and then paste that command. So all the three of these commands that are at the top here will require sudo, even though there's no sudo here and ignore the hash sign here. Usually when you indicate a command for the terminal, you use a dollar sign, not a hash. I'm just going to point that out. Dollar signs usually indicate comments, but it doesn't really matter. So once you've done that hit enter, it's going to ask you for your password. In my case, I've already authenticated, but the point is, is that it'll ask you for your password and then it will give you these three lines or a variation of these three lines. For me, it'll say not changed simply because I've already actually done this. But for you, it probably won't say that, but you should get three lines of output for that one. And the next one you want to do sudo, comment this. Now what this does is actually signs that key with your personal PGP key or with your Arch Linux PGP key, I should say with the Arch Linux key ring. And then paste that to enter. It will give you again, three lines of output. Now the next one, what this one does is that actually gets the mirror list for the chaotic AUR. And what the mirror list is, is it tells Pac-Man where to get the packages from, where to check for the packages and so on and so forth. What packages are available. So again, you're going to need sudo, paste that hit enter. And for me, it's going to tell me actually reinstalling you hit yes. Hey, just like that. It'll look like it's actually installing something, but really what it's doing is just downloading that mirror list and putting it in the appropriate place. Okay. Once that's done, then the next thing we'll want to do is edit this file right here. So first do sudo and then do your favorite text editor. So in my case, I'm going to use nvim and then do etsy slash etsy slash pac-man.com hit enter. And then what you're going to do is go down here to the bottom. Now I've already entered this in here, but what you want to do is copy these two lines, these two lines right here. And what this does is it just tells pac-man where that mirror list is and tells it to always check the AUR when you either search for something, do an update, try to install something. You'll check this mirror list, see if there's a package there from there and then give you an option to install from that particular repository. So you do these two lines here. Now, one of the things that you'll see down here is this says that you must have multi-lib repository enabled. I don't know whether or not that's true, but you probably should have it enabled anyways. Most people probably do because you need multi-lib in order to use Steam. So if that's the case, just make sure these two lines here are uncommented. These are actually included in the standard pac-man.com, but they're commented out. So just remove the hash sign at the beginning. One thing you should do while you're here, it just completely unrelated is up here at the top, you want to make sure this line right here is uncommented. Yours will probably say five. Just make sure parallel downloads equals something is uncommented. That way you can use parallel downloads. It's not default on Arch Linux yet, but you can actually use that easily enough. So once that's done, you want to save this. So colon WQ and Vim. And then what you can do is actually use the chaotic a you are. So what we're going to do first is do an update. So pseudo pac-man, if you can type again, s, y, u like that. And what you'll see, and you may have updates here to actually do. But the point is, is that you can see that there's a line here now that says the chaotic a you are is up to date. You'll probably notice that if you've downloaded stuff from the a you are in the past, that some of the stuff is actually moved from the actual a you are to the chaotic a you are. So we'll actually download the binary and replace it. That's kind of cool. It means that there's no more compiling for those programs. It did that for a couple dependencies for me during the first time that I tried this. So once that's done, you can actually install something from the chaotic a you are. Now, one of the things that I happen to know is actually there is on Google Chromium. So we'll do pseudo pac-man dash s on Google Chromium, hit enter, hit yes, and it will download it and install it. That's exactly how it does. Now, it went a little bit faster than normal for me because I'd actually already installed it once. So it was in the cache. But the point is, is that it's really, really fast. There's no more compiling and stuff. Now, you can also do a search. So pseudo pac-man dash s small dash capital s, small s, and then something like Firefox ESR, you'll see that that is also in the chaotic a you are, and you can install it just like you would any other program using pac-man. Now, that's one of the biggest differences that you'll find with the chaotic a you are is that you're actually using the standard Arch Linux package manager to install this stuff. You're not using a you are help or something like Paru or yay. And that's simply because they are helpers are meant to compile stuff. That's what they're kind of meant to do. Now, they do all the things as well. They'll install binaries and stuff like just like pac-man does, but they're meant to also look for all the stuff that you'll need in order to compile a program when it's coming from the you are. That's no longer needed here. This is treated as an actual Arch Linux repository and can be used with pac-man. Now, one of the things you'll probably be wondering is how do I find out what packages are actually available? So you can actually do that at this website here and I will put those in the description as well. There's the link to this on the video description as well. And this link here will tell you all the stuff that is actually available in the chaotic a you are. And then as you can see, there's quite a bit of stuff here. Most of the stuff to me looks like it's like dependency stuff, but there's also big things like brave is here. A lot of the breeze packages stuff is here. Things like divangie resolve is here and so on and so forth. There's a lot of stuff here that you'd normally have to compile that now has a binary that you can just download. So I have to say that I'm mightily impressed with the chaotic a York and one of the things that's great about it is that it's set and forget. So once you've set this up, you don't actually have to ever use it again, but it's there if you need it. It's not something that you have to remember that you have and then go searching for as long as you're always using pac-man to download and search for stuff through in the terminal, it's there for you. Now, I'm not sure how this would work with graphical front ends for pac-man things like PAMAC and discover or whatever. I'm not sure how well this would work with those if it would even tie in at all. I'm not sure I don't use those things, but if you are someone who install stuff from the terminal and using pac-man, this is just something that you can set up and it's just there for when you need it. If you happen to be downloading something that has something available from the chaotic you are, you can then install it from there and you don't have to worry about moving over to a AUR helper, compiling stuff and so on and so forth. So that is the chaotic AUR. I have to say I'm pretty impressed not only with how easy it is to set up, but also how much time it actually has the potential to save me because a lot of the stuff that I download is from the AUR and this means I no longer have to compile those things. So that's actually really cool. So if you have questions, you can leave those in the comment section below. You can follow me on Twitter at Linuxcast. You can support me on Patreon at Patreon.com. So let's Linuxcast before I go. I'd like to take a moment to thank my current patrons. Robert Sid Devon, Patrick Fred Kramer, Megalyn Jekstein, Tool Steve A. CybergoodLinux, Gary, Samuel, KB, TGB, Mitchell, J-Doug, CarbonData, Jamie, Sean, Odin, Martin, Andy, Ross, Eduardo, Merrick, Kamp, Joshua Lee, Peter, Crucible, DarkBand is Six, Primus and PM. Thanks everybody for watching. I'll see you next time.