1mo ago

Windows VS Linux (part 2)

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Open terminal
See whether the app is in my distro's repos, flathub, or snapcraft (It's not)
Go on the internet, search up the app's name
Download the AppImage (might be a virus)
LibFuse2 is not installed (fuck me)
Install LibFuse2
Install Gearlever to integrate AppImage into my desktop
I can finally launch the app
- Fuck, I hate AppImages so much. Never heard of gearlever, thanks i hope this helps a lot.
  Edit: Ok Gearlever is pretty great! Now I can finally open Heroic normally. That pissed me off for so long.
- doesn't use arch/nix
  "why cant i find my package in the repos?"
  
  Ah yes, downloading builds from unvetted third parties and running their installers as root. Truly the Linux way.
  
  NixOS builds are all vetted
  
  People can also use the Nix package manager on any distro, and run their apps using nix-shell, so that they don't need to install as root.
  
  and this is different to windows how ...?
  u do realize that u can (and should) read the PGKBUILD file? and check the git url which it's cloning. or check the sha if its a binary package.
  
  Most windows stuff can be installed as non-admin these days.
  
  Clicking yes on the windows prompt for elevated rights for the installer to move things forward. Truly the Windows way.
  People don't even read the prompts anymore, clicking yes as soon as it appears. So much better.
- Even if that’s needed, you can update apps w/o reboot usually (when sandboxed), and move opened files around (seriously wtf, Windows)…
  
  When the hell would I need to update my Windows because of an app update? I only restart when there is a system update, which you have to do on Linux too if you want your kernel to stay up to date.
  
  Well, it was what happened the last time I touched Windows in ‘22 (for work) – maybe a policy thing that a corporate app had elevated access and that’s why it forced a reboot on me for (some of the) “regular” app updates?
  
  That's more likely.
  
  Good to challenge misconceptions regularly, so thank you! :D
  On that topic… I assume not being able to move opened files (my “go-to” use case was a PDF in Acrobat) is still unfixed though, right? Seems like that’d require a major OS and applications change to be made possible.
  
  That I can confirm. Windows won't let me move files if any app is using them. I sometimes do it by accident when I'm editin an office document, realize it's in the wrong folder so I try to drag it to Documents. That won't work. But I got used to it pretty quickly.
  
  Why would you want to mv, not cp, a file that is actively opened by a file system. Is that even possible on Linux? I could swear I'm regularly blocked from manipulating things with open file descriptors.
  
  Like tsugu said. Have a file open for editing or whatever and realizing you’d like it to go into another directory. Of course you could just wait until you’re done and then move, or close, move and re-open… but that’s less convenient (e.g. throwing away current file’s edit history) and/or a risk of forgetting to actually do it, at least for me, lol.
  Not sure about Linux, but I grew up on Unix (macOS), which forces applications (at least GUI based ones, CLI apps do whatever they want) to be able to deal with this, so that’s why I expected Windows to be able to do that as well. Alas…
  
  Yes, true.
  The whole "OS update when I want an app update" is because of how dependencies work on Linux. A library is installed once and referenced by any app that wants to use it. This way, an update in the library benefits all apps using it, as bugs het fixed. Also less storage is used when the one library is used by many apps.
  Windows programs keep their own versions of a library and hard link to that one. That makes the app more flexible. You can copy the app and it's dependencies around and it will keep working. In this scenario multiple copies/versions of the same library can exist in the system, which takes more space.
  Of course there is some nuance. Both operating systems can have/use shared or hard linked libraries, but this is the general gist of it.

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