I’ve been using arch for a while now and I always used Flatpaks for proprietary software that might do some creepy removed because Flatpaks are supposed to be sandboxed (e.g. Steam). And Flatpaks always worked flawlessly OOTB for me. AUR for things I trust. I’ve read on the internet how people prefer AUR over Flatpaks. Why? And how do y’all cope with waiting for all the AUR installed packages to rebuild after every update? Alacritty takes ages to build for me. Which is why I only update the AUR installed and built applications every 2 weeks.
on my arch-based systems, i use repos first, aur second. appimages third. i do also have a couple minor things (that are self-contained with no dependencies) that were just ‘unzipped’ into their own directories and links added to menus where appropriate. note that i don’t game on these systems. i don’t have a lot of aur packages installed, so updates and subsequent recompile time isn’t an issue.
i have yet to run into anything i want or need that isn’t available in those. so no flatpaks or snaps.