A non-YouTube link to the same video:
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It is not really an exaggeration. As stated by the Manjaro devs, the AUR is the Arch User Repository (not the Manjaro User Repository), so any AUR PKGBUILD assumes you are on Arch Linux and since Arch and Manjaro use different repos, this may lead to problems for some users when installing/updating AUR packages. Any experienced user will most likely never have any issue, but any new user might and that’s where the cusp of the problem is. New users aren’t using yay or paru, new users are using Pamac almost exclusively.
He’s just giving a warning or a heads up if you will about this, he’s not claiming anything that isn’t true. The Manjaro devs have even had talks considering disabling the AUR in stable branch for Pamac. And why would they do that? Because the AUR is unsupported and it leads to issues when (new) users treat it like it’s just another repo. It’s great you never had a problem with it, but that’s not the case overall that the Manjaro devs had to put out numerous statements talking about using the AUR responsibly because new users weren’t doing that.
In practice, it is an exaggeration. Most users will either never have a problem or occasionally have minor issues where a package doesn’t update for a short period of time. It is a potential issue that is rarely a big deal.
I don’t think experience makes much difference here. Nor does using pamac vs yay/paru. In most cases, everything works just fine.
Most AUR packages don’t have any issues. It is typically only an issue when there was a breaking change to a library. In those rare cases, you can just wait for the repos to catch-up.
Have you used Manjaro for an extended period of time and had these issues? Please keep in mind, that due to events that occurred in the past, there are some members on this forum who have some significant anti-Manjaro/pamac bias.
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It is absolutely exaggerated. The worst case for a Manjaro user is that an AUR package can not be updated until the next Manjaro release. But is that really an issue?
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When I am saying I don’t think it’s an exaggeration, I am reminded of these issues that were brought up before (this is mostly in regards to Pamac + AUR):
My only takeaway from the video is just to be careful when using the AUR. And that’s equally true for any other distro that uses it really. And yes I have used Manjaro for a while in the past, and during that time I did come across a handful of issues. I switched not long after there was some sort of systemd update that broke a lot of users desktops, unless you updated using a TTY or something like that.
Those are both from a single person and neither are precisely in reference to the exact issue being described here.
Yes, that actually is an issue. If a user has an AUR package that they need, but it stops working, so they’ll have to wait a week or two for it to start working again. But what if that AUR package they are using is crucial to their workflow, then that kind of is an issue.
It usually won’t stop working, it will just not update to the latest version because it will fail to build.
In the rare cases where it did stop working the user could typically install the old version again from their package cache. That being said, I never had that happen in all the time I was using Manjaro.
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If I have an AUR package installed and the app works. Why would it stop working? The scenario that is being discussed here and in the video is that Manjaro is holding back library packages etc. due to their release cycle. That would not stop an application from working. This can only prevent an update of the AUR package if the package relies on newer libraries. In that case the user has to wait for the new libraries to hit Manjaro stable. Again, this is not a significant issue for me. This is how it is with all the other non-rolling release distros.
And what is your point now? That every OS works for you and your family? Congratulations!
I’ll be the first to admit that I might have some anti-Manjaro bias (I won’t admit to having any anti-Pamac bias: Pamac is just bad, that’s not my fault 
), but in some 2 years of using Manjaro, and installing programs from the AUR, I’ve never encountered a package from the AUR not building because of the dependencies having a version mismatch between the Arch and Manjaro repos. During that time, I was also regular on the forum, I read pretty much all the posts, and I don’t remember noticing that this was ever a big issue. If it were a problem on the large scale, I would almost certainly remember it.
Theoretically, it makes sense, but in practice, it’s really not an issue.
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Dumb luck on particular packages, i had at least 4 serious issues with AUR back on Manjaro also in about 2 years 
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Same here. I was using Manjaro for about 3 years and don’t recall having any issues with AUR packages. I must say that I was on testing and unstable branches though and didn’t really have a lot of AUR packages…
Regarding pamac:
Only used it in the beginning and then drifted towards pacman/yay. Mostly because I just became more and more terminal-centric. But there were also issues here and there with pamac.
Regarding pamac’s “AUR incidents”:
Incident #1: Flooding the AUR with REST API calls
Somewhat unfortunate. The AUR was (and still is not) prepared for the huge number of requests that were generated by pamac. Pamac got more and more features over time so that the number of API calls it made, increased quite a bit. At the same time the userbase grew and grew until aurweb broke down due to the sheer number of requests.
Could that have been foreseen? Maybe. Still I wouldn’t blame anyone. Shit happens. At least Manjaro reacted and tried to get things fixed relatively quickly.
Incident #2: Flooding the AUR with REST API calls - take 2:
Now this one I don’t really understand from the Manjaro side: Knowing that a high number of requests could kill the AUR, the “suggest” API stuff has been implemented (or reactivated; don’t remember how it was exactly…). WTF. Each keystroke from a user causes an API call. No wonder aurweb was killed again.
Incident #3: Exhausting the aurweb traffic quota
Pamac was changed in a way that it downloads the whole package metadata file instead of doing selective API calls in order to retrieve package information. This file is about 8,5 MB in size and aurweb refreshes it every 5 minutes. You can do the math what happens if there are a 100K clients doing a couple of refreshes over the day… At least Manjaro is hosting that file themselves now. Still a total waste of bandwidth. There are better solutions for this.
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You could always use … you know Snaps if pamac isn’t cutting it.
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Gobble gobble manjaro
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Well said! 
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You bring up a really good point. Well said.
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I think the solution is easy, **Manjaro should take AUR out of Pamac, since they **
provide enough software through their own repository not to mention flatpak and
**snap ( who needs snap by the way : - ) ) , **
the normal user is provided enough, the power user does not need pamac to manage
aur packages.
Case solved : - )
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I’ve had issues with Manjaro and AUR.
Virtualbox was the primary one, you had to wait until a Virtualbox update landed in your branch before updating virtualbox-ext-oracle from AUR. Not waiting could bork Virtualbox and you’d have to roll the AUR package back to continue.
This one caught out new users all the time.
There was also the odd occasion where a minimum package dependency version was introduced in an AUR package after an accompanying Arch update. These were pretty rare though, and only happened a couple of time I can remember.
But yeah, once made aware of these sorts of issues most users knew which AUR packages to wait for … most.
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