The Curious Case of AUR Updates Fetching 30 GB of Data for Electron

When you run these applications, you are basically running a web browser underneath, and not everyone likes that. But it is easier to package an application, and the interface looks modern, and that’s why it is popular.To celebrate 13 years of It’s FOSS, we have a lifetime membership option with reduced pricing of just . This is valid until 25th June only.And we need your help to go on for 13 more years. Support us with a Plus membership and enjoy an ad-free reading experience and get a Linux eBook for free.

I did this for demonstration purpose and since I had an existing electron version from another source, it showed me a potential conflict and asked me to remove the existing electron version.I am using electron32 in the example here. Your electron version might be different and thus, you MUST change the commands in the examples here to reflect the correct electron version.yay -S electron32-bin

What’s going on here?

First check what goes on with the troubled electron version. Where was it installed from and which packages require it?It’s FOSS turns 13! 13 years of helping people use Linux ❤️But there is more to it that I would like to discuss.✅In simpler terms, Elecron is a JavScript framework that builds a graphical interface of an application on top of the Chromium web browser. From VS Code to Discord, tons of popular applications are built on Electron.

What should you do in such case?

I am using CachyOS on my primary system these days and pretty content with its performance.This was interesting and gave me the idea that perhaps it was of no use getting electron’s other version using AUR. So, what I did was to exclude electron from the AUR update.

yay -S electron32-bin

When you are in a situation where AUR is downloading GBs of electron/chromium source code, you should do this:pacman -Qi electron32

Instead of getting the entire source code and then building the binaries from it, you can directly install the binary itself.While updating, it showed me a few packages that required upgrades.I did not pay attention as there was nothing alarming and pressed the usual enter keys one after another.

Hope this helps some of you awesome readers 😸

It was trying to download GBs of data for Electron.

Summary

Since it is based on Arch Linux, I am using a few software installed from the Arch User Repository (AUR) with Yay AUR Helper.

• See if you can exclude electron from the AUR update and the rest goes fine.
• Otherwise, install the binary of the required electron version instead of getting the source code.

And as I had guessed, rest of the three packages were updated without any issues. I wonder why AUR wanted to get it in the first place.