A sample journey when trying to install software:
- Try your distros repos, it’s either not there or an older version
- Oh wait, you need to add their repo to your list and try again
- Actually, they don’t have a repo, but you can install this deb/rpm from their site
- Nevermind, it actually needs to be installed with pip to get the latest version
- Or wait, it was actually a rust package and needs cargo
- Well, this package is available as a snap
- Screw it, I’ll just build it from source…. Except the dependencies I need take me through the entire journey again
It’s crazy with a large package like mesa. It uses meson, which requires it be installed via pip, and also needs rust which is best installed via a snap, but then there are dependencies it needs that require multiple paths…
On Windows: find the msi or exe and be done with it.
That’s an interesting choice of sample.
95% of the time it’s
Back when I was on Windows and still in denial about the inevitability of my switch to Linux I went on a long rant about how much harder it is to install a font on Linux than on Windows. You sound like me in 2005.
Lots of people new to Linux get recommended Debian-derived distros, and so end up with distro packages that are a long way from bleeding edge. If they’ve just come from Windows, they’d have been using the latest release of everything they use, as most software projects don’t even announce a release until their Windows binaries are ready, and many auto-update. That means that a lot of people have being presented with versions of things they stopped using two to four years ago as their first Linux experience, and obviously they don’t see that as good enough. Most people don’t want to run versions of things that old, especially now there’s so much stuff to package that downstream packagers can’t feasibly backport every bug fix to older versions of every piece of software, so running an old version gets you old bugs rather than a balance of avoiding new bugs at the expense of new features.