I’m looking for the opinions and experience of unbiased Linux enthusiasts whose daily driver uses an arch based distro.
When I was using and learning EndeavourOS I frequently (enough) came across posts and videos that stated that although the AUR is useful, but it’s use should be limited to keep your system stable. If someone was having issues or a discussion about stability came up, there was always a seemingly condescending tone of “well my system has always worked fine, just don’t install too many AURs and it won’t break”.
However, whenever I see posts that relate to package managers, I always see praises for the AUR that seem to imply that there aren’t really any issues.
Adding to other comments with a little example: A friend of mine wondered why xfce always crashed on login. Turns out it was an out of date AUR package that somehow messed the unrelated xfce up. Removing it solved the crashing problem.
This was relatively benign since it was easily fixed, but I definitely recommend keeping only as many AUR packages installed as necessary. And if something is wrong, it might just be one of those pacakges.