How do you guys get software that is not in your distribution’s repositories?

  • BigDanishGuy@sh.itjust.works
    1·
    7 months ago

    Why not just stick to what we’ve always been doing?

    1. wget something.tar.gz
    2. tar something.tar.gz
    3. man tar
    4. tar xzf something.tar.gz
    5. cd something
    6. ls -al
    7. ./config.sh
    8. chmod +x config.sh
    9. ./config.sh
    10. make config
    11. Try to figure out where to get some obscure dependency, with the right version number. Discover that the last depency was hosted on the dev’s website that the dev self-hosted when it went belly up 5 years ago. Finally find the lib on some weird site with a TLD you could have sworn wasn’t even in latin characters.
    12. make config
    13. make
    14. Go for coffee
    15. make install
    16. SU root
    17. make install
  • Dop@lemmy.world
    0·
    7 months ago

    Linux noob here, can someone ELI5 why snaps are bad? And how does .deb works?

    • Lettuce eat lettuce@lemmy.ml
      1·
      7 months ago

      Snaps are a standard for apps that Ubuntu’s parent company, Canonical, has been trying to push for years.

      The issue that most people have with them, is that Canonical controls the servers, which are closed source. Meaning that only they can distribute Snap software, which many Linux users feel violates the spirit & intention of the wider free and open source community.

      Appimages and Flatpaks are fully open source standards, anybody can package their software in those ways and distribute them however they want.

      .deb files are software packaged for the Debian distribution, and frequently also work with other distros that are based on Debian, like Linux Mint.

    • lengau@midwest.social
      01·
      7 months ago

      I don’t think snaps are bad (and when someone tries to explain why they are, about 85% of the time they say something wrong enough that I suspect they’re probably just parroting someone else rather than actually knowing what’s going on). It’s sad, because if we could get rid of the bullshit we could actually have decent discussions about the benefits and shortcomings of snaps (and how to fix those shortcomings).

      On the .deb front: it’s a package format made by Debian. Each archive contains a data tarball, which has the files in the package in their full structure from /, and a control tarball, which contains metadata such as name, version and dependencies as well as pre-install, pre-remove, post-install and post-remove scripts, which are used doing any setup or removal work that can’t be done just by extracting or deleting the files.

      The upside of deb files is that they tend to be pretty small. The downside is that this typically comes from having a tight coupling to library versions on the system, which means upgrading a library can break seemingly unrelated things. (This is why you get warnings like this page: https://wiki.debian.org/DontBreakDebian) Many third party distributors (e.g. Google with Chrome) take care of this by packaging most dependencies inside the deb, inflating the size.

      Another major difference between packages like debs and rpms and newer formats like snaps and flatpaks is that the latter have confinement systems to prevent apps from having full access to your system.

  • cley_faye@lemmy.world
    0·
    7 months ago

    Native package manager > Native binaries > AppImage > Flatpak.

    Yes, snap isn’t even on the scale.

    • Kusimulkku@lemm.ee
      1·
      7 months ago

      Not a fan of AppImages myself. For an universal format it has surprising amount of issues with different distros, in my experience. And the whole Windows style “go to a website, download the AppImage, if you want to update it, go to the web page again and download it again” is one thing I wanted to get away from. At least they don’t come with install wizards, that clicking through menus thing was a pain.

      For one off stuff I run once and never need again, AppImage is alright. But not being built-in with sandboxing, repos, all that stuff, it just seems like a step back.

    • skulblaka@sh.itjust.works
      0·
      7 months ago

      I’m a technically savvy but new to Linux user who installed Mint as my primary OS about a month ago. So far I’ve used Flatpaks and AppImages without any issue and haven’t come across snaps. Would you explain the differences and why I would care about one over another?

      • PotatoesFall@discuss.tchncs.de
        0·
        7 months ago

        IMO flatpaks are the future of installing linux apps. The comment you replied to lives in the past. System package manager should be for system binaries, not for applications.

        • Schmeckinger@lemmy.world
          1·
          7 months ago

          But I like my applications years out of date and I think its good that every distro has to spend manhours on packaging it individually.

            • Schmeckinger@lemmy.world
              1·
              7 months ago

              I see the appeal for the package manager for a lot of things, but space got so incredibly cheap and fast that duplication is way less of a deal than the effort to make stuff work the traditional way. But im not a real linux user. I don’t like tinkering, I want to download something and it works. And the amazing thing is we can have both. If people like spending time to package something be my guest.

              The funniest interaction I had recently. I downloaded a program that isn’t in my package manager or had any sort of flatpack/appimage so I downloaded it as a deb and it didn’t run because of some dependency. So I could clone the git and build it from source which might have worked, but I was too lazy to. So I just downloaded the windows exe and ran it through wine, which worked flawlessly.