How do you guys get software that is not in your distribution’s repositories?
But I like my applications years out of date and I think its good that every distro has to spend manhours on packaging it individually.
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.
I don’t like tinkering, I want to download something and it works.
And this is what’s keeping Linux at bay. Normies are that to the extreme. They want something that is as simple and resilient as possible, they couldn’t care less about the dependencies or even know what they are. They want a program an app and just install it from an “app store” if possible.
