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  • I don't understand how literally every way of installing a program on Linux is controversial or incredibly confusing

    Windows is just .exe possibly a couple clicks that's it. possibly it's a .msi which is also super easy. 99.5% of the time no issues whatsoever.

    however in Linux there are 27 different ways and none of them work well, so anytime you try to install something to do something incredibly basic it's like "enter these 5 terminal commands you have no idea about" or it just gives you a file with no instructions on what the hell to do with it.

    then there's OSes that don't even support installing things for some reason???

    and whenever you DO manage to get it to run after 2 hours of googling whatever the fuck a program.rpm file is it doesn't even work!!

    maybe I'm just really dumb but how the hell can this be such a simple action in a computer and be so incredibly complicated??

    which one out of 50 are the one I'm looking for? NO IDEA!!

    • It's fundamentally the difference between Linux's modular design and Windows' monolithic design at play.

      Because Windows is closed-source and all OS copies are something which only Microsoft can create, and because Microsoft only officiated the .exe filetype, that's all you've got as an option (this is technically not the only type, though, since you have Python and Java executables as options as well).

      Meanwhile Linux is opensource and relies on the opensource community to add more convenient systems and interfaces. Different design philosophies clash in that space, and OS's additionally try to carve out influence by making exclusive systems, like package management softwares. This creates the splintered environment we see now. It's essentially just politics which does not exist in the more dictatorial design (as in the design is dictated by a very small group within Microsoft) of Windows.

    • Arch is pretty nice because like 95% of things you would want to install are either in the official packages or on the AUR. And either way is very simple to do, you just look up "____ package Arch", see what it's called, and then run sudo pacman -S ____ or yay ____

    • yay flameshot

    • Not sure why they have multiple debs and RPMs when meta package dependencies can solve that.

      Otherwise?

      It's because Windows only has an x86_64/amd64 CPU architecture.

      Here there's ones for multiple ARM CPU architectures going back to the first raspberry pi.

      If Windows was readily available for those you can bet it'd be just as confusing with "wait am I armv6 or armhf? Or oh shit am I armv7??"

    • Forget everything anyone told you about Linux, think of each distro as its own OS.

      Flatpak and Snap are the ones that work with everything and are the closest equivalents to .exe files. App images are kinda like the portable apps that were popular like 10-15years ago on windows. (Anyone remember using portable Firefox on a flashdrive?)

      In addition to these each distro has its own kind of package format. (.DEB, .APK, .RPM, etc)

      Just because 2 distros share a package format doesn't mean they are compatible, in the same way a winxp .exe might not work on win11.

      Idk if windows still has a 32bit version, or if it has an ARM version, but that's what the .amd64 and .arm64 thing is for. Most people want .amd64.

      Except for the .RPM package (which is presumably a Fedora package) all of these are clearly labeled by distro (Debian 10, Debian 11, Ubuntu, etc).

      If you have a 64bit CPU and run Debian 11, you want:

      debian-11-amd64.deb

      but why run this over flatpak,snap,or appimage?

      Disk space. System packages like this do not bundle the dependencies to run the application with it. Instead the dependencies are installed on the system a single time and shared between all applications.

      Nowadays there is a push to migrate to using things like flatpak and snap but some old school Linux heads don't really want to for either political reasons or just because it's different than what they are used to.

31 comments