[dheera]

There are also these "AppImage" files. They launch, but there is no guidance on how to install them to the system.

Launching Chrome: I click the Chrome icon.

Launching PrusaSlicer: Start a terminal and type

    chmod 755 ~/Downloads/PrusaSlicer-2.2.0+linux-x64-202003211856.AppImage
    ~/Downloads/PrusaSlicer-2.2.0+linux-x64-202003211856.AppImage

That doesn't seem like progress to me from a UX perspective.

[mnm1]

And flatpack. So now there's apt, snap, appimage, and flatpack. 4 fucking systems that need to be maintained just to update apps on an OS. Frankly, it's ridiculous and the apps from all those alternate systems all have some issues too. None work as well as apt. I don't understand what is wrong with apt. If they want newer packages provide a repo for newer shit. Problem solved.

[ppseafield]

Apt is great as long as what you want is available in the repo. Over the years I have had a few issues though.

Often apt's versions trail behind the newest versions. There are some good reasons for this, but it can get in the way sometimes.

I have had to ad a lot of PPAs to get some of the software I wanted. The Aurora channel PPA for Firefox stopped getting updates at one point (they discontinued it), and I didn't realize until a few versions later. I don't think any of these package managers have that problem figured out, but PPAs are commonly maintained by third party community/unofficial folks. I had the same problems with Arch's AUR.

I believe it's fixed now, but for a long time Steam required a lot of 32 bit libraries, which meant two versions of several dependencies were installed on my machine.

Additionally we were using an older version of Ruby at work which required OpenSSL1.0 for certain libraries, and a Ruby upgrade (from an old version to a less old version) broke my development environment.

Not that the others are perfect. Just for example the Spotify snap package from the software center doesn't even work. The Deb had problems on my machine which I couldn't resolve. I finally installed Flatpak to get a working version.

[uhnllon]

I think this thing about apps not available for apt is in the past. I specifically use Ubuntu because there are .debs for everything. Most of the new apps for linux published on Internet "need" to have a .dev available, if they want to became popular.

Well, I have found some strange, out of common, software - mostly comercial stuff - which doesn't have any .deb available nor ppas, nor nothing.

It is clearly a decision from somebody who said "no, we are not spending hours packaging our app, if they want it, they will try to install it with the methods we will provide"

Kind of nonsense, except that if you're in Linux looking to install a comercial app, special snowflake, is probably because you have zero chances to do otherwise, then you bit the bullet and try whatever crazy method to deploy their app they have put in place.

Most common stuff I found: - Just download my zipped binary, you know how to deploy it - Just run this command line, "sh something" giving it root credentials to run code from the Internet (YEAH I KNOW TOO, as much insecure as it gets)

Having said that, many comercial apps are there for to be easyly downloaded as .debs (they should just install with a GUI right out from the link, in old-Ubuntu behavior). Or they even offer you detailed instructions to configure a ppa (to manually install with apt).

Heck, nowadays it is common sense and good netiquette to make your installation scripts in the downloaded .deb to just deploy the ppa for apt, so next upgrade happens automatically.

If you ask me and I wouldn't dreaming to control the app-deployment infrastructure in Linux, I would say "yeah, you need to contact EVERY software not providing the .deb format and start working with them, providing them free support, even free scripts to handle the packaging"

I remember in the 90s, there was LOTs of shareware because Microsoft knew this stuff from the 70s and 80s: if you want you're software in use, you need to talk directly with those who could probably use it.

No, links hanging in some flashy website won't cut it, nor repos in github half sharing some code.

[dheera]

I think the main problem with apt is that the traditional way of using it is to depend on other libraries installed by apt, so if two pieces of software want two different versions of something that are not forward/backward compatible then you have issues. However, I don't see why they can't statically compile OR containerize and still use apt. Just have the .deb install an appimage to /usr/bin and create the necessary .desktop files. The .deb would then have almost zero dependencies. Problem solved.

[freedomben]

I have the same problem, except I also add Brew for Linux to that list D-:

[RealStickman_]

From the limited experience I had with an AppImage I found they usually create a .desktop file to make the program searchable. Though I have to agree that there is no really simple, gui way to install AppImages.

[dheera]

Yeah mine used to in 18.04 and now they don't in 20.04. No release notes about the removal of that feature, no workarounds, nothing. Not that it's a big issue for me to create a .desktop file myself but the apt-get experience is slightly nicer still because everything just works.

[e2le]

If you want a centralised repository of AppImages you might as well just use the distributions package manager for that.

[aj3]

  $ sudo install ~/Downloads/PrusaSlicer[tab] /usr/local/bin/PrusaSlicer
  $ PrusaSlicer