So I recently installed Cachyos and I am now met with this problem.
There are kind of 2 main contenders here and I’m split between them. What do you use?
There is pacman + aur and then there is flatpak. Pacman has deep system integration and is much more lightweight but it has deep system integration and requires sudo to install. flatpak has sandboxing and easy permission management but it’s bloated and possibly less performant?
Of course if the package isn’t available on flathub then I will have to use the aur but when both are available it’s hard to decide.
pacman + yay + appman (in cases where appimage is more convenient)
If you need something from AUR, Chaotic AUR builds some of them.
Technically I also use managers for certain languages and environments, so sometimes cargo, pip, luarocks, … whatever.
I did try to use flatpak in the past, but I just found it annoying. If you do not explicitly need it’s capabilities for a certain app it is mostly makes accessing app’s config and data a major annoyance imo.