• MCk3@lemmy.worldEnglish
    85·
    9 months ago

    What software only works on Arch? If anything I see stuff that’s packaged for arch but can be installed from source on other distros without issue.

    Ubuntu-only software, on the other hand, is infuriating

    • seaQueue@lemmy.world
      35·
      9 months ago

      There’s a lot of content packaged for the AUR that isn’t readily available to people using less enlightened distributions.

      I use Arch BTW.

      Seriousposting: a lot of software just isn’t packaged as deb or rpm because no one has taken the time to do it. The AUR is really fucking convenient as an end user. And yes, you should always skim AUR packages to be sure they’re doing what they claim to do and aren’t garbage, anyone can post anything. I have seen a lot of trash uploaded to the AUR.

  • TimeSquirrel@kbin.social
    71·
    9 months ago

    There are many things that can stop me from running a program but what distro I’m using is not one of them.

    Become distro-agnostic. Don’t be afraid of source code.

    • dhtseany@lemmy.ml
      34·
      9 months ago

      Seriously, look at what the pkgbuild is doing on Arch and replicate it by hand on your distro of choice. That’s all a pkgbuild is: a simple bash installation script.

      • sloppy_diffuser@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        4·
        9 months ago

        AppImage and Docker has resolved a lot of that for me if its not in my distros package manager. It’s my goto for the same reason of just not wanting to deal with it.

          • sloppy_diffuser@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
            3·
            9 months ago

            Premade AppImage or self-contained binary, I’ll usually drop it into ~/.local/bin.

            Something I have to compile, I’ll usually do in a dockerfile tracked in my dotfiles repo.

            Only thing I’ve compiled from source on my host in the last year is https://github.com/werman/noise-suppression-for-voice.

            Could just be my use cases now compared to 10 years ago, but I’ve just found I’m rarely compiling these days on the host system. At least the configure-make-install or ninja variety. I’m sure I install a package here or there that does it in the background. Numpy comes to mind or an AUR package with Arch.

    • rtxn@lemmy.worldEnglish
      6·
      9 months ago

      timely updates

      You mean I shouldn’t git pull; git checkout HEAD; sudo make install every day?

      • Tschuuuls@feddit.deEnglish
        2·
        9 months ago

        Just add trap ‘echo “"${last_command}" No updates available at this time”’ EXIT afterwards, in case the build fails ;) Might take a second to determine lol

  • MalReynolds@slrpnk.netEnglish
    31·
    9 months ago

    Distrobox is your friend. Me, I like an immutable OS (kinoite) but I still want the AUR…

    distrobox-create --name arch --image archlinux:latest
distrobox enter arch
install yay as normal
yay -S vscodium
distrobox-export --app vscodium
yay exa
distrobox-export --bin /usr/sbin/exa
exit [back to kinoite]
exa [works]
vscodium [works, has icon in application launcher]

    Try it, you might like it !

    • Sh1nyM3t4l4ss@lemmy.world
      8·
      9 months ago

      Also great when you get some software as a deb for old Ubuntu and don’t want the trouble of manually making it work on a new system. Just make an old Ubuntu distrobox.

    • SimplyTadpole@lemmy.dbzer0.comOPEnglish
      3·
      9 months ago

      Ooh, a fellow Kinoite user!

      I’m actually aware of Distrobox, but the thing I had in mind was for managing gaming wheel drivers, so I don’t think it’d work on distrobox. It’s not really that big of a deal honestly, I just made this meme to poke fun at it ^^’

      • MalReynolds@slrpnk.netEnglish
        2·
        9 months ago

        Fair enough, but CUDA stuff works surprisingly well for e.g., I’d give it a go if it’s just USB.

        Kinoite Represent!

    • intelati@programming.dev
      2·
      9 months ago

      I use Arch BTW.

      But also I feel like handing a AUR manager to a person is like giving them a block of C4 and a detonator and saying “good luck”

      Stupidly powerful, but you can blow your hand or foot off in a second if you’re not aware

  • Blackmist@feddit.ukEnglish
    24·
    9 months ago

    You Linux people are funny.

    I just download the Windows versions and run them with Wine.

    • Comment105@lemm.ee
      5·
      9 months ago

      I don’t understand any of this, my windows install is on a 120GB SSD, it’s full now and I can’t update my graphics driver.

    • BaroqueInMind@kbin.social
      8·
      9 months ago

      Very very very rarely some stuff on it is sometimes orphaned or outdated, but it’s really fucking great to simply “paru” and the thing I want.

  • mlg@lemmy.worldEnglish
    22·
    9 months ago

    finds complete updated AUR package

    am running Fedora

    Proceeds to unpack AUR and reverse engineer what it does so you can get what you need

    True story for some stupid ethernet driver patch: alx-wol-dkms

  • Smokeydope@lemmy.worldEnglish
    22·
    9 months ago

    TFW you’re caught between being an average person and tech nerd wizard, just competent to copy/paste ubuntu-based install instructions in the terminal but get a headache trying to compile from source. I use Mint, btw.

    • Ignotum@lemmy.world
      12·
      9 months ago

      I consider myself relatively familiar with linux, people come to me when they have issues or need help setting something up

      But compiling stuff from source? That still gives me headaches 😩

      AUR is love, AUR is life 🙏

  • czech@lemmy.world
    18·
    9 months ago

    This is what always leads me back to arch. I can follow an outdated 12-step guide to installing the software in Debian or I can install it with one command from AUR.

  • frippa@lemmy.ml
    13·
    9 months ago

    I’m a noob, isn’t every (open source) program aviable for every distribution if you compile it from source? It’s all Linux in the end (i never compiled a program from source, so I don’t know if it’s easy at all)

    • deadcade@lemmy.deadca.de
      7·
      9 months ago

      Some programs may use libraries or tools specific to a distributions package manager. For example, yay, an AUR helper/pacman wrapper. You would have a very hard time getting it to work on Debian.

      Other programs might only include build scripts for a distro specific build system. For example, a program might skip using a Makefile, and do everything in the Arch-specific PKGBUILD.

      Generally though, most software uses a standard cross-distro (or even OS) build system. In this case, compiling from source would be an option on any distro. The program might still only be packaged for Arch/NixOS/Gentoo (or others), as it is a very simple process to do so.

    • thelastknowngod@lemm.ee
      3·
      9 months ago

      Usually the only tricky part of compiling from source is tracking down dependencies. The package manager does that for you normally but you’re not using the package manager when compiling from scratch. The actual building (even compiling a kernel) isn’t all that complicated.

          • uis@lemmy.world
            2·
            9 months ago

            Dependencies almost always are present in distro repos. What’s tricky?

            • thelastknowngod@lemm.ee
              3·
              9 months ago

              If you need the python header files, depending on your distro, you may need to install python3-dev, python3-devel, python3, or some other variation on the name. For a novice, this might not always be obvious and they might not know things like apt-file are helpful for figuring it out.

              • uis@lemmy.world
                1·
                9 months ago

                Huh. Shouldn’t apt install header dependencies too? I’m using system where every package comes with headers, so I don’t install headers separately.

                • thelastknowngod@lemm.ee
                  1·
                  9 months ago

                  Debian and RedHat based distros typically do not bundle them together. The have separate -dev and -devel packages for headers.

    • PainInTheAES@lemmy.world
      18·
      9 months ago

      The AUR has more eyes on it though and can be more up to date. Getting OBS plugins “wrapped” was a pain in the ass in NixOS and they were out of date. But I’ll admit it’s a pretty niche example.

      • iopq@lemmy.world
        1·
        9 months ago

        Nixpkgs is up to date on unstable

        https://search.nixos.org/packages?channel=unstable&from=0&size=50&sort=relevance&type=packages&query=obs

        it’s on 29.1.3 which is the latest non-beta release

        The plugins:

        https://github.com/exeldro/obs-3d-effect

        3d-effect-0.0.2 is the latest one

        https://github.com/obs-ndi/obs-ndi

        obs-ndi 4.11.1 is the latest one, so nixpkgs is two versions behind

        https://github.com/phandasm/waveform

        1.7.0 is the latest

        • PainInTheAES@lemmy.world
          1·
          9 months ago

          Yeah I was on unstable. This was a few months ago and the plugin was obs-backgroundremoval which was several versions out of date and missing out on a CPU core restriction feature that I needed. The maintainer actually had updated the package in his personal repo but it hadn’t been pushed to nixpkgs unstable because it was waiting on some graphics library that hadn’t been updated. I’m a huge Nixos noob and no matter how I tried to install the package from the maintainer’s repo I couldn’t get it installed or properly wrapped and the documentation sucked. I spent several days trying to resolve the issue.

          I installed Endeavouros, ran yay -S obs-backgroundremoval and boom installed, latest version, no problems.

          Don’t get me wrong I actually love the ideas behind Nixos and I’ve tried to run it as my daily driver a few times now but I always seem to run into some problem. I’m more than happy to chalk it up to skill issue. This is my daily driver though that I use for school. It doesn’t necessarily need to be stable but I need it to work and I need to understand it.

          • iopq@lemmy.world
            1·
            9 months ago

            That’s basically just some software is not up to date. I did the pull request to package it myself, it wasn’t so difficult. The best part is I used an overlay so I could run it and use it while the pull request was being commented on

            • PainInTheAES@lemmy.world
              1·
              9 months ago

              Well I’m glad you’re able to figure it out. I might give it another go next summer when I have more time to look into things.

      • iopq@lemmy.world
        1·
        9 months ago

        well, you can’t INSTALL the old versions on another system if the dependencies don’t match the old version