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

  • BigDanishGuy@sh.itjust.works
    0·
    8 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 we self-hosted when it went belly up 5 years ago. Finally find the lib on some weird site with a TLD you’ve 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
      0·
      8 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 mfw original dev breaks my kneecaps for reporting a bug in out of date versions packed with weird dependency constraints they can’t recreate
    • PenisDuckCuck9001@lemmynsfw.com
      0·
      8 months ago

      We should normalize programs that don’t use such exotic and impossible libraries that you have to do anything besides type “make” and “make install” for it to work.

      In theory it’s a no brainer. In practice not so much.

  • Dop@lemmy.world
    0·
    8 months ago

    Linux noob here, can someone ELI5 why snaps are bad? And how does .deb works?

    • Lettuce eat lettuce@lemmy.ml
      0·
      8 months ago

      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.

      • lengau@midwest.social
        0·
        8 months ago

        Some further context on this that @Dop@lemmy.world might want to know:

        While Canonical’s snap store is proprietary (which, to be clear, I don’t really like), all the client software is open source and the API is well documented (though a bit janky). Their snap store relay app (which is open source) has a full implementation of it. There was a fully functional open snap store for a while, but the project died out of a lack of interest. You can also distribute snaps through another mechanism and install them locally on the machine (though you then lose the benefit of snapd’s auto updates). You can even do this with snapd still checking the signatures of the snaps.

        The standard for snaps is fully open, as is snapd itself.

        There’s no need to oversell the negatives to the point of being wrong.

        • merthyr1831@lemmy.mlEnglish
          0·
          8 months ago

          Interesting, didn’t know it was feasible to make the distribution open.

          That doesn’t give me much to complain about in theory, but canonical has lost way too much good faith to give people a reason to keep open snap distribution going for free. They should definitely consider hosting an open store just to get people on board again.

          • lengau@midwest.social
            0·
            8 months ago

            It was being done by a group of snapd developers at Canonical, IIRC, but after a couple of years of exactly zero interaction from anyone outside Canonical I think they just gave up and decided it wasn’t worth it because they were getting accused of trying to monopolise whether they had an open store or just an open API.

            Of course, you can also distribute snaps without using the snap store API. I’ve used this for airgapped machines in the past. You can either just grab the .snap file (which is just a squashfs file with a meta/snap.yaml in it so snapd knows how to treat it) and install it with --dangerous, or you can include an assertion file for that snap signed by a certificate that your machine’s snapd trusts and not even have to do that. (Those airgapped machines trusted our own certificate so we could ensure that the snaps came from our CI process and weren’t a developer’s random test snap).

    • lengau@midwest.social
      0·
      8 months ago

      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.

      • emiellr@lemm.eeEnglish
        0·
        8 months ago

        Worth noting that the confinement of Flatpaks and Snaps can have major drawbacks. It has been a major pain in the ass to get Flatpaks working nicely with fractional scaling (think tiny cursor, huge text, tiny text etc etc)

        • merthyr1831@lemmy.mlEnglish
          0·
          8 months ago

          Nothing in theory makes that an issue of flatpaks and snap, just that both rely on different means to interact with the host system that have been woefully slow to implement. If enough protocols are developed a flatpak or snap should be as capable as a native app with the safety benefits for free.

      • merthyr1831@lemmy.mlEnglish
        0·
        8 months ago

        Honestly if not for the convoluted Linux FS layout, debs would be pretty serviceable and aren’t really different to the Windows solution. The fs layout makes installations way too fickle to clashing with other applications.

        That and dependency hell, which distros should have never been allowed to touch beyond the core dependencies required to get your desktop running.

    • merthyr1831@lemmy.mlEnglish
      0·
      8 months ago

      Nothing necessarily at the tech level. They’re more capable than Appimages or flatpaks to the point that you can use it to build a reproducible system hardened against tampering or defective updates.

      The downside is that it’s controlled entirely by canonical, has limited abilities (if any?) for hosting storefronts/packages outside of their ecosystem, and said ecosystem is insecure and has already allowed multiple waves of malicious apps to reach end users because of poor moderation of listings masquerading as legitimate versions.

      Canonical has also been increasingly hostile to flatpaks - removing it from Ubuntu and derivatives by default to push users towards snap.

      The whole loopfs thing is just an annoyance, but the aggressive posturing by canonical as well as the closed nature of the storefront that has led to malicious attacks on end users is enough to give it more than a few haters.

    • pixelscript@lemm.eeEnglish
      0·
      8 months ago

      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.

    • kalpol@lemm.ee
      0·
      8 months ago

      The snap store is some proprietary store Canonical runs, and snaps are friggin huge in size. I don’t really know though as I don’t use Ubuntu anymore

      • lengau@midwest.social
        0·
        8 months ago

        The first two snaps I compared sizes of on my system are uv and bitwarden. The uv snap is 9.5 megs vs. the wheel’s 12.2 megs, and the bitwarden snap is 97 megs vs. the Deb’s 79 megs and the AppImage’s 114 megs. These seem pretty reasonable - doubly so since snaps also have delta updates.

        • kalpol@lemm.ee
          0·
          8 months ago

          OK that’s better than what I’ve seen. Notepadqq I think was 2.4gb and I said no to that one. But again I don’t run Ubuntu.

  • lengau@midwest.social
    0·
    8 months ago

    I pretty consistently find the snaps to be the best trade-off of being up-to-date and stable for me. Especially for CLI tools and services.

  • Petter1@lemm.ee
    0·
    8 months ago

    I don’t really like neither of the 3, personally. But I understand the need and the benefits

    • emiellr@lemm.eeEnglish
      0·
      8 months ago

      I feel like that’s a pretty good take. As long as you’re getting the software in an elegant way that doesn’t break the dev’s back, we’re good.

  • deczzz@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    0·
    8 months ago

    .deb first and then flatpak if not available as on deb repo or if deb version is outdated. Never used appimage or snap. Rpm just as good as deb when I use Fedora. Flatpaks are much larger in size which is why I first go with the deb version.

  • communism@lemmy.ml
    0·
    8 months ago

    Artix repos > Arch repos > existing AUR package > create my own AUR package

    No need to use any of these flatpak/appimage/snaps when I can just make a package for my distro. Most software is not difficult to package.

    • Zyratoxx@lemm.ee
      0·
      8 months ago

      This may be true from your perspective but won’t sway over many newbies / plebs who don’t have the knowledge (yet) or who simply do not have or want to take the time for self packaging.

      And flatpak, snap and appimage tend to become the standard to get verified, tried and tested software hosted & supported by the official maintainers or the company behind the software.

      Now to the personal part:

      There was a time when I was motivated enough to get packages from user repos - I actually never was motivated enough to do self packaging so maybe I have missed something world changing - but I got so tired of having to figure out the missing “optional” dependencies that meant the software wasn’t working as expected and having to trust 3rd party maintainers when most stuff on flathub was “install & ready” and officially supported or at least hosted by a “verified” source. And maybe distro xyz has a mindblowing solution to all my problems but for the moment I am happy with what I have and not looking for yet another distrohopping and yet another point was whilst distrohopping it was soo easy that I could use the same install.sh containing all my favourite flatpak apps & the “applications” folder containing my favourite appimages no matter if I was on a Debian, RedHat, Arch, … based distribution.

      • communism@lemmy.ml
        0·
        8 months ago

        I never claimed I was trying to “sway over newbies”? Do what you want, this is just my personal preference.

  • Mwa@lemm.eeEnglish
    0·
    8 months ago

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

    Since i use a gaming arch based distro (Cachyos) the aur

  • RmDebArc_5@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    0·
    8 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
  • boredsquirrel@slrpnk.net
    0·
    8 months ago

    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