Because you realize you don’t need it anyway.
As a non IT person I find Linux way better for installing software. The sort of apps non IT people use. The Software store has most of what I need. There rest I install the Windows way. From a website. Apps with a Linux version almost always detect and offer a Linux button to click to install. I wouldn’t know what to do if that didn’t work. Ditch that application I guess. My distros are pretty standard. Not hacked about. My apps are not too weird. I’ve been doing it this way for 14+ years. Never needed the CLI either.
This is why you use Arch/Nix because the package is likely in their repos.
The software probably still won’t work, but you can waste more time on it.
Glad im not the only one. Thats one thing that makes me go man, people will never leave windows for this, this is insanely complex to juat install a program.
I find it fun to learn tho
Windows; have to search online for correct website, sift through ads to find the download, install while avoiding malware or extra programs that try to install alongside.
Linux; Sudo pacman -S firefox. Done
This is true for some but it doesn’t work like that in reality. Its much easier to install on windows vs linux, thats just how it is.
Don’t even get started on flatpak vs .Deb vs compiling vs snap…explaining that to a windows user makes them about lose their mind.
Windows wins here. Click exe. Install. Done. AND the benefit of being allowed to install to a different hard drive, which linux will not allow without a ton of hoop jumping.
Linux is great but let’s not pretend windows doesn’t do certain things much better.
Also, not being able to see all your installed programs in one place because they are a blend of .Deb, snap, flatpaks, and compiled. It becomes a mess very quick if youre not careful.
WARNING MAY SEEM A BIT HARAH,
this is a meme community, so pls take this as satireAs if you would see all your installed apps on one place in windows, lol
Only most, but that is the same on Linux. Only if you go to Linux thinking it should be complex it will go complex
If you just stay at the install way your distro wants you to use, you will get no mess.
Arch -> yay Opensuse -> gui and https://software.opensuse.org/packages Fedora -> flatpak Ubuntu -> snap Debian -> APT Nix -> the nix file thingy
My opinion is to pick distro based on how you want install apps preferably as main deciding factor
Result will be same as on windows, most apps will use the standard way and will all be listed on the same place, and you will have some obscure apps from cocky devs who think that only their preferred install way is correct and that everyone say something else is stupid
It does work like that in reality for almost all programs.
For obscure stuff you can use yay or whatever other user repository you want.
yay “program name”. Done
I’ve been doing this for years without issue.
Also you can list all your installed programs. On Arch it’s pacman -Q and yay -Qm.
It’s so easy a baby could do it. And apparently arch is supposed to be the most difficult.
You’re forgetting, not every program in the world exists in your repository.
When they do, great, but doesn’t always happen. Make mkv for one, you have to get the linux version off their site custom.
Also it seems you may be one of those people driving people away from linux saying normies are idiots and need to rtfm. Maybe work on that.
See, your problems are of your own making. https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/makemkv
You are the only one driving yourself away from linux.
You resort to personal insults, then get blocked. Want advice? Stick to vtech.
if you use any modern distro installing most software is braindead easy. if you have to compile something yourself (which isnt that often) it can get quite funny because one hell of a lot can go wrong.
No, then you fix the code to work with your current system libraries and upstream the patch and version bump. This happens less on Arch, BTW ;-)
Different packages having conflicting dependency versions needed for installation
Edit: distrobox may be a viable solution to this
I at times have to install completely undocumented software. I love ccmake as it lists all available options. I guess there are other ways, but that makes it so easy.
Then it’s just a couple of days figuring out all necessary libraries.
All I see when I see this is “Linux isn’t quite ready for prime time”.
Hopefully it gets less and less true.
I don’t see that at all. This meme is referring to some niche application or to a person with their fingers all up in the nuts and bolts of their OS.
It’s common for beginner-friendly desktop distros to have Firefox and LibreOffice installed out of the box. For mainstream use that covers the vast majority.
This isnt true. You only have this problem with rather obscure software (which was what I tried to install)
Gimme the repo and I’ll get it to compile on Arch, latest testing packages as per 2025-10-20T22:12:00 on repo.30p87.de/archlinux
What colors are your thigh highs?
Black-white, preferably pink-white. I overcompensate a lot for boymoding.
It’s too funny to me that Arch of all distributions attracts the thigh /Unix socks crowd (for lack of better word). Nothing about Arch stands out for me in that regard, there’s no social statement or anything, and when I was more active in the community, it wasn’t known for that.
I was deep enough into Arch to run my own private repository using aurutils, but no thighs :(
Sounds like you really missed out
I have them but I use Debian mostly.
mine are pink white too :D
Sadly Im on Fedora.
Bad girl!
Distrobox is a wonderful thing
Both of these two cases are why Flatpaks are so attractive.
They work most of the time and I liked them, until I installed my first app that did not work because of the container thing and learning about and using flatseal ate so much of my time, that I never did it again.
I only use yay to install stuff now. And if not on AUR I make (copy and adjust existing) my own PKGBUILD, or find one on a random page of a user who did not publish to AUR yet.
Flatpaks are better than Snaps, but properly maintained dependency trees and SBOMs are best, by a wide margin.
PopOS fucked me up with flatpaks
Gateway drug
They are extremely effective at preventing PackageKit updates on my steam deck
I’m going to be honest to you, I prefer appimages.
I like appimages that are packages on AUR installed and updated using yay, so that I never ever learn that it is in fact a appimage disguised as repo package.
I respect your wrong opinion
I rarely encounter them. But they usually work when I do. But, ugh, they’re just kinda gross. Like, is this a .exe? No thank you. Don’t give me windows trauma.
I’m always like, “well, now where do I put this executable?”
But they do work
Clearly in $HOME/Downloads/ and forget that you left it there. Then use app(3).AppImage the next time when you redownload it. Keeps you running the most up to date version. It’s flawless.
I stick them in /home/bin/ like I would for a compiled app. I found a forum for mint saying thats the expectation for user apps with no specific install location, which is pretty much the issue, anyway.
plus that extra defense-in-depth layer of a sandbox
They take up so much fucking space though
Are you running on a really space constrained system? I Used an old Chromebook with only 16Gb of storage for a bit, and to me it’s kinda fun to figure out alternative solutions and applications that can make a system like that work. But when I’ve got a system with 500GB+, I say who cares about the space packages take up.
Flatpaks are okay for stuff that doesn’t need deep access but they don’t work for many things.
TBH if it’s just for that I’d rather use nix packages. But flatpak’s sandboxed app are better for sus packages or proprietary-might-spy-everywhere packages.
I’ve had the opposite experience with flatpaks that I have with snaps. I don’t really use them much. But when I see that as an option I use it and it just works. Definitely a fan as a USER of them. I’m sure people have their complaints as users and developers. But I definitely have to say it’s been positive so far. Which is a rare consistency in the life of installing packages.
You didnt waste those hours, you learned something.
Nothing that useful, apart from learning again that reading error messages properly can save you much pain.
That’s a useful lesson to have stick
Last week was the first time I think I’ve ever got a random Internet tarball to
configure,makeandmake install. Program even did what it was supposed to too. I was amazed.If it’s in the AUR you can use a arch distrobox container
I’d be really careful with the AUR since it is the wild west
PKGBUILD is not sooo hard to read… And, there is Voting and comments, and, you can be sure people would complain if something is fishy
I mean technically so are repos to some extent. Many of them have very few maintainers and you are basically just blindly trusting that they won’t both miss anything malicious nor be the cause of it.
A little safer but not some ultimate Bastion of safety
Not really as repos go thought testing and most distros have reproducible builds.
AUR packages can be submitted by anyone with no testing or validation for the most part.
The last picture in the meme always bothered me, because the sequence doesn’t make any sense physically. (Popping the rake from mid air and doing the wrong flip and such)
So, I went on to find the sequence that I believe it was drawn from.
you think the sequence doesn’t make physical sense, but skateboarding on a rake is fine?
It’s like flying on a broom. Perfectly logical.
I know it’s completely off-topic, but anyway. No, I’m fine with the rake. That’s what’s makes it funny.
It’s the drawing of the skater that is too good, and that doesn’t add up with the other details being wrong. Someone who can draw a skater that good wouldn’t make the other things that wrong or even random.
The rake is drawn as doing a frontside shove-it, popped from mid-air and failing because of gravity suddenly changing in the middle of the sequence. The skater is “obviously” doing a varial heelflip instead of a frontside shove-it.
So that’s the clue to why I thought it was drawn off an actual picture. That the background is also a copy of the original only reaffirms my theory.
In hindsight I can also see that the skater is obviously Andrew Reynolds. The tuck and landing is his signature style.
I honestly can’t remember the last time I’ve come across a package that I needed that so obscure that it wasn’t found somewhere as at the very least an appimage, if not a flatpak. I haven’t had to build from source in I don’t even know how many years now.
General use package? Sure Specialized package to do something specific in a specific field? Good luck.
I still have flashbacks of installing a c++ library which had to be transpired (or whatever the term is) to c# for another library to work, and having to go manually fix several function and type declarations manually to make it work. And we are talking about the golden standard library in the field…
What? Its something I do quite regularly.
Try making music on Linux. You’ll be compiling obscure shit and tweaking configs all the time.
True. But I was coming at if from the perspective of an every day user coming from Windows. email, word processing, internet, etc… Even gaming and photo editing.
The more professional the needed software gets, of course the more obscure it gets.
I think it depends on the distro. Nixos is pretty bad for this if you want to try out a project that is really new. If you wait a month or two a flake usually comes out somewhere.
