How do you guys get software that is not in your distribution's repositories?
There is no software that is not in AUR. I use arch, BTW.
My software, QuickDAV, is not in the AUR. It’s open source, and I release it only as an AppImage, because I am lazy.
I guess we should have added the word “notable”
I’m terribly sorry, you left the door wide open ;)
I’m curious, what makes AppImage a good choice for the lazy developer? Is it easier to create?
Ouch. xD
It’s super easy to create. And you distribute it on your own, so it’s basically like an installer exe on Windows. In my mind it’s one step above only offering source code.
If you don't compile from source, do you even Linux?
Linux From Scratch user detected
Or Slackware
Or gentoo.
Ah ... yeah ... totally. I would never use some filthy peasant distro like Mint. No sir! Never never ever!
Native package manager > Native binaries > AppImage > Flatpak.
Yes, snap isn't even on the scale.
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.
I ran into the same issues, mentally, when trying out AppImages for the first time - but my attitude changed once I found and started using this tool: https://github.com/ivan-hc/AM
App images are a very Windows way to do things. They bundle everything so they are big
They are windows, but the linux version of dll-hell across distros and distro versions makes windows dll hell look quaint.
If someone had addressed that better it would be one thing, but binary interoperability is infinitely broken, so app image is actually an improvement.
Why not just stick to what we've always been doing?
I much prefer our modern package format solutions:
I’m currently on a atomic distro, so how I get my software from favorite to least favorite is this:
Native repos > AUR > compile from source > Flatpak
Mine is
AppImage > Native repos > AUR > Manually compiling from source > Finding an alternative
I don't like installing software that doesn't need to be installed, thus I like AppImage. Pretty portable. That also applies to compiling from source. Yes, my home directory is a mess.
If I wanted snap, flatpak or appimages, I would use windows. Shared dependencies or death.
Appimages are crap too, but at least there is progress with AppMan, repos and that sandboxing solution.
Snaps are only sandboxed with Apparmor and snapd only allows a single repo (which contained malware multiple times) so get the hell off my lawn XD
Just use flatpak. It runs and installs local but still has the benefits of a package manager
I hate fucking snap. It might be enough to make me switch distros if Ubuntu keeps up with it (which I am sure they intend to).
The continual "you have new snaps" or whatever it was message every time I'm just trying to have a web browser open made me eventually figure out how to install firefox for real on all of my computers.
EDIT: I think you may have convinced me to try out Debian on my next OS installation.
The Firefox snap was the reason I left Ubuntu. (Or, the last straw, at least.) Fedora has been wonderful.
Try debian, they improved so much over the past decade, they're a better Ubuntu than Ubuntu now without any bullshit.
curl
AUR. If it doesn't exist on AUR (very unlikely, but happens sometimes), I make a package for it.
On non-arch distros, I often use LURE.
as it should be, nobody likes proprietary vendor-locked formats that get shoved down your throat
AUR or flatpak.
Honestly the longer I spend daily driving Linux the more I enjoy using flatpaks...
Linux noob here, can someone ELI5 why snaps are bad? And how does .deb works?
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.
The primary thing I hate about them is that every snap package appears to your system as a separate mounted filesystem. So if you look in your file explorer, you can potentially see dozens of phantom drives clogging up your sidebar.
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.
Compile from source.
Hint: :q!
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