I know I said in my last post I’m a noob, and, i still am, I’m just a noob who can follow a YouTube tutorial. I installed Arch, not only for its minimalistic install, but also because I love the AUR. Everything I could ever want to install is there, and anyone who wants to upload their files can. This gives a windows-like install experience, which, pardon my… spanish, is actually pretty good. Any program is free to be uploaded and installed by anyone.
My question to you is: If you do not use an arch-based distro, how do you go about installing software? I’ve heard people say that “the default package manager is enough” but I can’t be the only person who installs niche software. I wouldn’t want to only be able to install packages hopefully approved by my distro. Flatpaks are kind of annoying, in my opinion? It’s not a native install of a package, it’s sandboxed (which can be good in some cases, but in general just an inconvenience.) Compiling from source is too hardcore for me, so props if that is you, however, non-FOSS software has to be moved by hand to its specific folders and .desktop files have to be made by text. If you don’t use the AUR, how do you go about your Linux experience?
P.S. Hope you like the new sux/teal logo!
I use Gentoo. We have what’s probably the most flexible and powerful package manager for Linux.
Adding new packages is trivial; an ebuild script is created which describes how to build the package, along with a little metadata. This is placed into an ebuild repository - I like to contribute to the Gentoo one, but any folder structure will do (however git is by for the most common method). It’s not uncommon for a Gentoo user to package software outside the official repos. These will have all of the features (like configurability via USE flags) that ebuilds in the official repo have.
These repositories, for convenience, may be registered with Gentoo and linked on https://repos.gentoo.org/ where the eselect repository tool can be used to add them by name from the index. http://gpo.zugaina.org/ indexes known ebuild repos and can help you to identify whether or not something has already been packaged.
Fedora has a pretty good amount of software in the repositories, so a lot of the time that’s enough. When it’s not, flatpak with flathub have most gui software covered, and outside of that, if we’re talking about terminal or command line stuff, most of those have their own custom way to install them, or they just have self contained binaries that you can put in ~/.local/bin/.
I haven’t run into many issues with flatpak like it sounds like you have, so that really covers a lot of it for me honestly.
Maybe thats where my noob comes in but flatpak has been more of a workaround than an actual install for me. Things always not running correctly or being unable to do certain things due to containerization. If I was running a server though, and if flatpak is efficient, it seems like a great idea!
Do you know about Flatseal? It’s an application that lets you manage flatpak permissions. Until the portals system is fully working, weakening the sandboxing using Flatseal is what a lot of people do to make the apps work correctly.
Also, if you use KDE, the settings app has flatseal-like functionality built in.
Never heard of it, but it sounds awesome! I’ll definetly be looking more into it. I’m on XFCE, so I’ll have to install it manually. But overall its great that someone has gone out and made a permissions manager for flatpak.
80% of the time, compiling something from source is just a matter of downloading the code, opening a terminal and changing to the directory containing the source and running these commands:
./configure
make
make install
It’s the same 3 commands, 80% of the time.
Installing the prerequisites can be tricky, if the docs are lacking.
Let’s see… “anyone who wants to upload their files can”. “This gives a windows-like install experience”. “Any program is free to be uploaded and installed by anyone”. Read those again and realize what a massive security hole that is.
I use Arch but you are kinda over zealous about how good AUR is. It is completely unmoderated and, as others have said, a security risk. But it can also pretty easily bork your system because of a bad package. I don’t know how long you’ve been using Arch but it’s only a matter of time before you’re pulling your hair out trying to fix a broken dependency.
Arch is also not the only distro with giant repositories. Void has a pretty massive repository but it’s better moderated. The Debian universe is just as big if not bigger but you have to add repositories, it’s not as central. Same with the Red Hat world. Arch just dumps it all in to one chaotic bucket which is very convenient but there are downsides.