Part of what’s making learning Linux so difficult for me, is the idea of how fragmented it is. You can install programs with sudo apt get (program). You can get programs with snaps. You can get programs with flatpaks. You can install with tar.gz files. You can install with .deb files. You can get programs with .sh files. There’s probably more I don’t know about.
I don’t even know where all these programs are being installed. I haven’t learned how to uninstall them yet. And I’m sure that each way has a different way to uninstall too.
So that brings me to my main question. Why not consolidate all this? Sure, files CAN be installed anywhere if you want, but why not make a folder like /home/programs/ where it’s assumed that programs would be installed?
On windows the programs can be installed anywhere, but the default is C:/windows/Program Files x86/ or something like that. Now, you can change it all you want when you install the programs. I could install it to C:/Fuckfuckfuck/ if I wanted to. I don’t want to, so I leave it alone because C:/Windows/Program Files x86/ is where it’s assumed all the files are.
Furthermore, I see no benefit to installing 15 different programs in 7 different folders. I begrudgingly understand why there’s so many different installation methods, but I do NOT understand why as a collective community we can’t have something like a standardized setting in each distro that you can set 1 place for all your installation files.
Because of the fragmentation of distros, I can understand why we can’t have a standardized location across all distros like Windows has. However I DON’T see why we can’t have a setting that gets set upon each first boot after installation that tells each future installation which folder to install to.
I would personally pick /Home/Programs/, but maybe you want /root/Jamies Files/ because you’re Jamie, and those are your files.
In either case, as we boot up during the install, it would ask us where we want our program files installed. And from then on, no matter what method of install you chose, it would default to whatever your chosen folder was.
Now, you could still install other places too, but you would need to direct that on a per install basis.
So what’s the benefit of having programs each installed in seperate locations that are wildly different?
I think that, while, yes, fragmentation hinders a system, it is also its saving grace, as it also stops a given family of systems from growing into what made the competition problematic.
Taking the Program Files folders as example, they have limited read/write permissions on Windows, so whenever possible, I try to install them onto a folder I make in the root of C:. But more and more, since at the very least Windows XP from what I could observe, Microsoft is training users into using only the users folder, and less and less programs give an option to install elsewhere, installing only on the Program Files folder instead. Meanwhile, on Linux Mint (my distro of choice), if AppImage (my to go medium of programs) isn’t working well, I can always fallback to other means, such APT directly or downloading its .deb files then extracting them, getting from flatpak, compiling it myself, building a custom AppImage, running on a VM or emulator, or in the worst possibility, I make a dual boot between Mint and some other distro.
Also, although there are many package managers, from my experience, they usually work similarly. Some changes in syntax, options and names, but nothing outlandish. It would be, I think, like someone learning a close language to his/her mother tongue. And from experience, you can even organize installations in a more standardized way, although it will take some effort from your part to figure out how, since some adaptations may be needed (java 8 and sdl ptsd intensify).
And lastly, from what I can observe, stuff in Linux more often than not share logic or even methods with a lot other stuff in the system. Dunno if it’s a bit of a bias of someone that’s using Linux for a few years already, but the fragmentation usually feels superficial to me, with distros being more tweaks of the ones they stem from, and major changes being better observable when distros are sufficiently far apart.