This is why you use Arch/Nix because the package is likely in their repos.
The software probably still won’t work, but you can waste more time on it.
No, then you fix the code to work with your current system libraries and upstream the patch and version bump. This happens less on Arch, BTW ;-)
As a non IT person I find Linux way better for installing software. The sort of apps non IT people use. The Software store has most of what I need. There rest I install the Windows way. From a website. Apps with a Linux version almost always detect and offer a Linux button to click to install. I wouldn’t know what to do if that didn’t work. Ditch that application I guess. My distros are pretty standard. Not hacked about. My apps are not too weird. I’ve been doing it this way for 14+ years. Never needed the CLI either.
Glad im not the only one. Thats one thing that makes me go man, people will never leave windows for this, this is insanely complex to juat install a program.
I find it fun to learn tho
Windows; have to search online for correct website, sift through ads to find the download, install while avoiding malware or extra programs that try to install alongside.
Linux; Sudo pacman -S firefox. Done
This is true for some but it doesn’t work like that in reality. Its much easier to install on windows vs linux, thats just how it is.
Don’t even get started on flatpak vs .Deb vs compiling vs snap…explaining that to a windows user makes them about lose their mind.
Windows wins here. Click exe. Install. Done. AND the benefit of being allowed to install to a different hard drive, which linux will not allow without a ton of hoop jumping.
Linux is great but let’s not pretend windows doesn’t do certain things much better.
Also, not being able to see all your installed programs in one place because they are a blend of .Deb, snap, flatpaks, and compiled. It becomes a mess very quick if youre not careful.
It does work like that in reality for almost all programs.
For obscure stuff you can use yay or whatever other user repository you want.
yay “program name”. Done
I’ve been doing this for years without issue.
Also you can list all your installed programs. On Arch it’s pacman -Q and yay -Qm.
It’s so easy a baby could do it. And apparently arch is supposed to be the most difficult.
You’re forgetting, not every program in the world exists in your repository.
When they do, great, but doesn’t always happen. Make mkv for one, you have to get the linux version off their site custom.
Also it seems you may be one of those people driving people away from linux saying normies are idiots and need to rtfm. Maybe work on that.
See, your problems are of your own making. https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/makemkv
You are the only one driving yourself away from linux.
You resort to personal insults, then get blocked. Want advice? Stick to vtech.
if you use any modern distro installing most software is braindead easy. if you have to compile something yourself (which isnt that often) it can get quite funny because one hell of a lot can go wrong.
Things have gotten so, so much better over the last 5 or 6 years.
Flatpak, appimage, docker are just brilliant.
I recently discovered nix and am in that honeymoon phase of trying to hit every nail with that hammer.
Different packages having conflicting dependency versions needed for installation
Edit: distrobox may be a viable solution to this
I at times have to install completely undocumented software. I love ccmake as it lists all available options. I guess there are other ways, but that makes it so easy.
Then it’s just a couple of days figuring out all necessary libraries.
No System Package
Build System Package
Gentoo makes it soo easy.
I installed and then ran Gentoo for about 9 months back when it first came out, before Robbins stepped down. I remember the install was pretty involved, but after that it was a pretty sweet system. I keep saying I’m going to go back to it, but just can’t be bothered anymore. As good as it was 20 years ago, I’m sure it’s even better now.
Yeah, basically handling all the caveats is now automated and you can choose to use binary packages.
damn. that’s literally me.
God bless flatpak for these cases
I honestly can’t remember the last time I’ve come across a package that I needed that so obscure that it wasn’t found somewhere as at the very least an appimage, if not a flatpak. I haven’t had to build from source in I don’t even know how many years now.
General use package? Sure Specialized package to do something specific in a specific field? Good luck.
I still have flashbacks of installing a c++ library which had to be transpired (or whatever the term is) to c# for another library to work, and having to go manually fix several function and type declarations manually to make it work. And we are talking about the golden standard library in the field…
Try making music on Linux. You’ll be compiling obscure shit and tweaking configs all the time.
True. But I was coming at if from the perspective of an every day user coming from Windows. email, word processing, internet, etc… Even gaming and photo editing.
The more professional the needed software gets, of course the more obscure it gets.
What? Its something I do quite regularly.
I think it depends on the distro. Nixos is pretty bad for this if you want to try out a project that is really new. If you wait a month or two a flake usually comes out somewhere.
All I see when I see this is “Linux isn’t quite ready for prime time”.
Hopefully it gets less and less true.
I don’t see that at all. This meme is referring to some niche application or to a person with their fingers all up in the nuts and bolts of their OS.
It’s common for beginner-friendly desktop distros to have Firefox and LibreOffice installed out of the box. For mainstream use that covers the vast majority.
This isnt true. You only have this problem with rather obscure software (which was what I tried to install)
Gimme the repo and I’ll get it to compile on Arch, latest testing packages as per 2025-10-20T22:12:00 on repo.30p87.de/archlinux
What colors are your thigh highs?
Black-white, preferably pink-white. I overcompensate a lot for boymoding.
It’s too funny to me that Arch of all distributions attracts the thigh /Unix socks crowd (for lack of better word). Nothing about Arch stands out for me in that regard, there’s no social statement or anything, and when I was more active in the community, it wasn’t known for that.
I was deep enough into Arch to run my own private repository using aurutils, but no thighs :(
I have them but I use Debian mostly.
mine are pink white too :D
Sadly Im on Fedora.
Distrobox is a wonderful thing
Bad girl!
You didnt waste those hours, you learned something.
Nothing that useful, apart from learning again that reading error messages properly can save you much pain.
That’s a useful lesson to have stick
Both of these two cases are why Flatpaks are so attractive.
Flatpaks are better than Snaps, but properly maintained dependency trees and SBOMs are best, by a wide margin.
They take up so much fucking space though
Are you running on a really space constrained system? I Used an old Chromebook with only 16Gb of storage for a bit, and to me it’s kinda fun to figure out alternative solutions and applications that can make a system like that work. But when I’ve got a system with 500GB+, I say who cares about the space packages take up.
I’m going to be honest to you, I prefer appimages.
I respect your wrong opinion
I rarely encounter them. But they usually work when I do. But, ugh, they’re just kinda gross. Like, is this a .exe? No thank you. Don’t give me windows trauma.
I’m always like, “well, now where do I put this executable?”
But they do work
Clearly in $HOME/Downloads/ and forget that you left it there. Then use app(3).AppImage the next time when you redownload it. Keeps you running the most up to date version. It’s flawless.
I stick them in /home/bin/ like I would for a compiled app. I found a forum for mint saying thats the expectation for user apps with no specific install location, which is pretty much the issue, anyway.
PopOS fucked me up with flatpaks
Gateway drug
TBH if it’s just for that I’d rather use nix packages. But flatpak’s sandboxed app are better for sus packages or proprietary-might-spy-everywhere packages.
Flatpaks are okay for stuff that doesn’t need deep access but they don’t work for many things.
They are extremely effective at preventing PackageKit updates on my steam deck
I’ve had the opposite experience with flatpaks that I have with snaps. I don’t really use them much. But when I see that as an option I use it and it just works. Definitely a fan as a USER of them. I’m sure people have their complaints as users and developers. But I definitely have to say it’s been positive so far. Which is a rare consistency in the life of installing packages.
plus that extra defense-in-depth layer of a sandbox
