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

  • BF2040@lemmy.world
    1·
    2 months ago

    I understand appimages. I use them exclusively. Can someone explain what flatpak and SNAP are and how they work? I have autism so please be as clear and concise as possible?

    • Darorad@lemmy.world
      1·
      2 months ago

      The easiest way to think of it is flatpaks are AppImages with a repository and snaps are flatpaks but bad.

      That has benefits and detriments. Appimages contain everything they need to run, flatpak’s mostly do, but can also use runtimes that are shared between flatpaks.

      All flatpaks are sandboxed, which tends to make them more secure. AppImages can be sandboxed, but many aren’t.

      Flatpaks tend to integrate with the host system better, you can (kinda) theme them, their updates are handled via the flatpak repo, and they register apps with the system.

      AppImages are infinitely more portable. Everything’s in one file, so you can pretty much just copy that to any system and you have the app.

  • BigDanishGuy@sh.itjust.works
    1·
    2 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
    • merthyr1831@lemmy.mlEnglish
      1·
      2 months ago

      I much prefer our modern package format solutions:

      1. sudo apt install something
      2. open
      3. wtf this is like 6 months old
      4. find a PPA hosted by someone claiming to have packaged the new version
      5. search how to install PPAs
      6. sudo apt <I forgot>
      7. install app finally
      8. wtf it’s 2 months old and full of bugs
      9. repo tells me to report to original developer
      10. report bugs
      11. mfw original dev breaks my kneecaps for reporting a bug in out of date versions packed with weird dependency constraints they can’t recreate
  • RmDebArc_5@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    0·
    2 months ago

    I’m currently on a atomic distro, so how I get my software from favorite to least favorite is this:

    1. Flatpak
    2. Appimage
    3. Fedora distrobox
    4. rpm-ostree