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#+TITLE: paru vs yay — 2026 Evaluation
#+DATE: 2026-06-10
#+DESCRIPTION: AUR helper comparison. Verdict: stay with yay; the maintenance picture inverted.
* Question
Should an Arch user running yay (interactively and in an unattended installer) switch to paru as of mid-2026?
* Comparison
| Dimension | yay | paru |
|----------------------+------------------------------------------------------------+-----------------------------------------------------------------------|
| Language | Go | Rust |
| Last release | v12.6.0, 2026-06-07 (days ago) | v2.1.0, 2025-07-08 (11 months ago) |
| Last repo push | 2026-06-09 | 2026-01-09 (5 months dormant; final commits were translation merges) |
| Commits, past 12 mo | 104, ongoing through June 2026 | 79, all before mid-January 2026 |
| Maintainer health | Jguer personally authoring/merging (11 of last 30 commits) | Morganamilo largely absent from the repo since January |
| Issue triage | 182 open; active dependency + feature flow | 192 open; #1468 (stable fails vs libalpm 16.0.1) open 6 months, unfixed |
| libalpm tracking | Releases track pacman/libalpm promptly (June 2026 release) | Stable predates libalpm 16; source build broken, paru-bin breaks on soname bumps |
| Review workflow | Per-package Diff/Clean prompts (--answerdiff/--answerclean)| Single file-manager-style review step; stricter PKGBUILD review default |
| News reading | No | Reads Arch news before upgrade (interactive nicety) |
| Devel handling | development.json, -Sy --devel | devel.json, --devel; roughly equivalent |
| Batch interaction | All questions up front | All questions up front; BatchInstall builds all, installs once |
| Performance | Fast; recent search-ranking improvements | Marginally faster in some ops; irrelevant at this scale |
| Migration cost | n/a | Low for hands; real cost is installer bootstrap + paru.conf + devel-db re-init |
| Third options | pikaur, aura, trizen exist; none has overtaken these two; pacman still has no AUR support | same |
* Automation flags
The installer line maps as follows, but note the asymmetry:
- yay: =yay -S --noconfirm --answerdiff None --answerclean None=
- paru: =paru -S --noconfirm --skipreview=
paru has no --answerdiff/--answerclean; its single review step replaces both prompts and --skipreview suppresses it entirely. --noconfirm passes through to pacman identically. Optional hardening: --nosudoloop/--sudoloop and --removemake behave as in yay. The mapping is clean — automation flags are not the blocker.
* Verdict
Don't switch. The deciding factor is the maintenance inversion: the old "paru is the actively developed successor" narrative is stale as of mid-2026. yay shipped v12.6.0 days ago with the maintainer personally committing, while paru has had no release in 11 months, no commit in 5, and its stable source has been unable to compile against current libalpm since December 2025 (issue #1468, still open). For an installer that must bootstrap the AUR helper unattended on a fresh system, paru is currently the one helper that can fail to build at install time; yay is the one that demonstrably keeps pace with pacman releases. Revisit only if Morganamilo resumes releases and paru regains a libalpm-current stable — even then the gain (nicer review UX, news reading) is interactive polish, not installer value.
* Sources
- https://github.com/Jguer/yay (releases: v12.6.0, 2026-06-07; GitHub API)
- https://github.com/Morganamilo/paru (releases: v2.1.0, 2025-07-08; GitHub API)
- https://github.com/Morganamilo/paru/issues/1468 (libalpm 16.0.1 compile failure, open)
- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Morganamilo/paru/master/man/paru.8 (flag verification)
- https://www.slant.co/topics/1447/~best-aur-helpers-for-arch-based-linux-distributions
- https://itsfoss.com/paru-aur-helper/
- Repo stats pulled live via the GitHub API, 2026-06-10.
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