In Bazaar is unusable @lostitall found that installing NordVPN through layering had kept his system from updating. I wanted to reply there, but since the topic was closed I thought I’d just share what I was going to say in a new topic.
I’ve been using NordVPN with Aurora for several months now by way of a lightly customized distribution created with BlueBuild. I highly recommend BlueBuild for anyone needing packages at the system level, particularly those that aren’t well suited for the other methods like Homebrew and Distrobox.
If anyone would like to copy my approach, you can see my custom distro on GitHub here: GitHub - jlandahl/aurora: A customized Aurora DX image
The main things to know about are the nordvpn.repo file (here) and the common-nordvpn.yml mini-recipe (here). You can see where that module is included in the main recipe here. I’m working on a separate uCore disto, where you can also see it included here.
The BlueBuild docs are very good, and it shouldn’t take more than an hour or two to setup and switch to your own custom distro. I’m really glad I did, because it gives me all the flexibility I could ask for without messing things up with package layering. After setting it up months ago it has worked flawlessly, and I get updates to my extra packages as soon as they get published. It’s the best of both worlds.
Update: I forgot to mention that the recently released nordvpn-gui package is installed separately from the common-nordvpn.yml mini-recipe, because I don’t need it in uCore. This requires BlueBuild’s optfix approach (it gets installed to /opt and needs to be moved to /var/opt), which is very simple (here). You can see the package itself being installed here.