So, I can’t install aur packages via pacman?

Nope, you have to do it manually or using an helper that abstracts the manual work away.

AUR packages, or to be more precise the PKGBUILD files, are recipes to compile or download stuff outside from the official repositories, manage their deps and installing them on the system.

You should always only run PKGBUILD files that you trust, they can do basically anything on your system. Checking the comments of the package in the aur repo is a good practice too.

Also Are you quoting certain nExT gEn gAmE guy?

…maybe

Also in wiki they didn’t mention anything about OpenSSL?

Sorry, that was my bad, I wrote OpenSSL instead of openvpn. That one is probably needed too, but you should not have to pull it manually.

Generally speaking the ArchWiki is one of the best, more structured and well maintained source of information about Linux things even for other distros, but it can too be outdated, so you should always check if the info is valid. In this case it seems so.

In theory you should be able to just install proton-vpn-gtk-app using one of the many AUR helpers and it should Just Work™. Paru and yay are the most commonly used ones - as far as I know - and they wrap around pacman too, so you can use them to do everything packages related. Usually Arch related distro use one of them, for example EndeavourOS have yay already installed.

At worst when you try to start protonvpn the GUI will not appear or immediately crash: if that happens, usually, you can try and run the program from the Shell and see what kind of error it returns and work your way from there. Checking if the deps listed in the wiki are installed is always a great first step.

Reading rorschac’s comment I assume both OpenSSL and wireguard are already installed on CachyOS, or anyway pulled by the aur package.

If you want to make sure you can install them explicitly before protonvpn:

paru openvpn wireguard-tools

or using yay or the vanilla pacman -Syu --needed openvpn wireguard-tools (it will sync and update the system too) or how it is suggested for CachyOS to install packages. I repeat I’ve no direct experience with that one.

If you are scared to mess things up you can always spin up a VM with CachyOS and try to install it inside that. If it all works you can then do the same on your main OS.

As a general advice, only run in your shell commands that you are sure about.

I can attest that this AUR package, which is the one indicated in the wiki, works fine on EndeavourOS, but I had to add the gnome key wallet (IIRC) to handle the VPN keys. I think that was fixed.

I have no experience with CachyOS.

Actually Obtainium is mentioned (but thank you, checking back I saw I had a typo in the github link that I had missed, and I’ve now fixed it!), but this is the first time I hear about Accrescent: is it this App store?

You are right, and I forgot to add the link to it in the opening post. I’ll edit it in!

Silverbullet is like that. It is not an electron or native app, you have to run a server and then get to it from the browser.

TLDR it is best run with docker or podman, but IMHO it is pretty good.

I wish they used them all, especially XDG_CACHE_HOME which can become pretty big pretty fast.

disable this system security feature temporarily,

This should be - if I’m not mistaken - possible using the pip env var I posted about earlier, like this:

PIP_BREAK_SYSTEM_PACKAGES=1 sudo apt install howdy

Or exporting it for the current shell, before running the installation

export PIP_BREAK_SYSTEM_PACKAGES=1

But I personally highly discourage it, because - AFAIK - if it even works it will mess up the deps in your system.

I’m no python expert but reading around it seems your only real solution is using a virtual environment, through pipx or venv as you already had found out, or using the

--break-system-packages

* Allow pip to modify an EXTERNALLY-MANAGED Python installation

  (environment variable: `PIP_BREAK_SYSTEM_PACKAGES`)

pip flag which, as the name suggest, should be avoided.

EDIT: After rereading I got your problem better and I was trying to read the source for Howdy to see how to do it, so far no luck.