this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2024
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I use Arch btw

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My impression of github since switching to Linux (lemmy.world)
submitted 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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I've been transitioning to Linux recently and have been forced to use github a lot when I hadn't much before. Here is my assessment.

Every github project is named something like dbutils, Jason's cool photo picker, or jibbly, and was forked from an abandoned project called EHT-sh (acronym meaning unknown) originally made by frederick lumberg, forked and owned by boops_snoops and actively maintained by Xxweeb-lord69xX.

There are either 3 lines of documentation and no releases page, or a 15 page long readme with weekly releases for the last 15 years and nothing in between. It is either for linux, windows, or both. If it's for windows, they will not specify what platforms it runs on. If it's for Linux, there's a 50% chance there are no releases and 2 lines of commands showing how to build it (which doesn't work on your distro), but don't worry because your distro has it prepackaged 1 version out of date and it magically appears on flatpak only after you've installed it by other means. Everything is written in python2. It is illegal to release anything for Mac OS on github.

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[–] [email protected] 27 points 2 months ago (2 children)

If your distro was arch, you most likely have the nightly build available on the AUR

[–] [email protected] 26 points 2 months ago (5 children)

Aur and pacman are 90% of why I use arch.

Also fyi to OP: never install software system-wide without your package manager. No sudo make install, no curl .. | sudo bash or whatever the readme calls for. Not because it's unsafe, but because eventually you're likely to end up with a broken system, and then you'll blame your distro for it, or just Linux in general.

My desktop install is about a decade old now, and never broke because I only ever use the package manager.

Of course in your home folder anything goes.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Also fyi to OP: never install software system-wide without your package manager. No sudo make install, no curl .. | sudo bash or whatever the readme calls for.

And that is why Linux isn't ready for mass adoption.

I had to fuck around for hours to make my wifi adapter work and everyone was referencing this one project on GitHub and the way to install it and what actually worked was to sudo make install.

You're the first person I see that's saying not to do that, I had to use instructions from the Linux Mint forum to try and get it installed the first time and no one mentioned that, I found alternative projects but none of them had clear instructions "You must have installed X, Y, Z first" without any explanation how to do it.

So, for new users, Linux is all about blind trust in strangers to make stuff work and if you have no interest in learning programming that's what your experience will continue to be.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I guess you had to install lwfinger’s rtw88 backport? If true, then the problem was the outdated kernel used in mint (I guess 1.15.y at the time) should work now out of box with the new kernel update ubuntu (and therefore mint as downstream as well) released some months ago.

I think, it is 6.2.y now and in 6.2 rtw88 got a massive update.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I'm running Mint 22 (the one that just came out) so the kernel shouldn't have been an issue and it worked with Bazzite (but I had GPU issue with that distro) 🤷

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

😮I see

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

Parsing poorly documented c spaghetti code is not a good vehicle to learn programming anyway though. The root issue here is the fact that interop between open source software and other oss, closed source software, and firmware is a headless beast where each user has to take on the project manager role.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Absolutely. Funky installs go in ~/bin. (Ok, plus the valve directory)

Everything else comes from standard repositories.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago (1 children)

never install software system-wide without your package manager.

What's the alternative of sudo make install and curl | sudo bash if a package is not available in AUR? I am unfamiliar with make install .

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Well personally if a package is not on aur I first check if there's an appimage available, or if there's a flatpak. If neither exist, I generally make a package for myself.

It sounds intimidating, but for most software the package description is just gonna be a single file of maybe 10-15 lines. It's a useful skill to learn and there's lots of tutorials explaining how to get into it, as well as the arch wiki serving as documentation. Not to mention, every aur or arch package can be looked at as an example, just click the "view PKGBUILD" link on the side on the package view. You can even simply download an existing package with git clone and just change some bits.

Alternatively you can just make it locally and use it like that, i.e. just run make without install.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

😁I prefer yay to search and install stuff from AUR using a single command 🥰 and if you choose the endeavour flavour of arch, then you have yay preinstalled 😋👌🏻

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (2 children)

How the fuck do you have a decade old arch installation? I have to reinstall it about every half a year because something breaks and its to complicated to fix it so I just choose to reinstall everything. In the 18 Months or so that I used Arch I had to reinstall it about 4 times. I don't even install that much stuff and I also don't go absolutely wild with configuration, but Theres A lot of stuff breaking in my system.

I also got used to just ignoring problems because I'm to lazy to reinstall everything or spend hours upon hours fixing my system.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Everyone on Lemmy: "Just use Arch! Why are you using anything but Arch! Arch is the best! Arch is better than everything else!"

Also Lemmy users: ∆

Me: So my Ubuntu Server, which has been the same install for well over 10 years, hasn't needed a reinstall ever... even through corrupted RAM, multiple hardware changes, and drive upgrades, I've just cloned it and kept on trucking...

...and yet everyone says Ubuntu is the worst...

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

Arch is great. I absolutely love it and the AUR. The only problem is, that it seems to produce a shit load of Errors for me.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Thanks for reminding me of my nearly forgotten Gentoo PTSD

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

You're welcome :)

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Really love arch and the AUR. I've been tempted to get nix set up for the rare cases when there's no AUR package or the AUR package is unmaintained. I figure if there's no package in the AUR or nixpkgs, it's probably not worth running.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago

I yet hope to find a unmaintained arch package to have a reason to write my own PKGBUILD file😁