[22SAS]

Currently on Emacs 28, on my personal machines. I see that there is a Emacs 29 pretest version available, for Windows. Are all Linux users building Emacs 29 from source?

[tmalsburg2]

I'm building from source because I want the latest features and bug fixes. It's really not that complicated. On Ubuntu, the following builds and installs Emacs into your home directory:

    sudo apt-get install build-essential
    sudo apt-get install libgtk-3-dev libtiff5-dev libgif-dev libjpeg-dev libpng-dev libxpm-dev libncurses-dev libgccjit-11-dev libgnutls28-dev texinfo

    git clone https://git.savannah.gnu.org/git/emacs.git
    cd emacs
    ./autogen.sh
    ./configure  --with-native-compilation --with-cairo --prefix=$HOME/usr
    make -j 4
    # testing:
    ./src/emacs -Q
    make install

To update:

    git pull
    make clean
    ./autogen.sh
    ./configure  --with-native-compilation --with-cairo --prefix=/home/malsburg/usr
    make -j 4
    # testing:
    ./src/emacs -Q
    make install

[klibertp]

Building from source. I have a bunch of patches in the lread.c to make Clojure-style #f(+ % 1) lambdas work, so I don't have much of a choice. Recently (this year), the reader was rewritten to be non-recursive, so I had to modify my patches too. Other than that, dnf builddep emacs && ./configure && make generally work well. It's worth looking at config options, some interesting things are still disabled by default (last I checked, modules, threads, and xwidgets; though it might have changed in 29).

[Syntonicles]

I'm on Windows but use WSL exclusively. It opens the frame seamlessly. I'm about to build 29 from source because my Ubuntu ppa doesn't have a prepackaged 29 build.

I personally believe it's a good thing for a developer to have an intimate relationship with the construction of their primary tooling. It feels right to me, even if it hurts adoption.

[NoGravitas]

Mostly, probably. There's a ppa for Ubuntu and a copr for Fedora; I wouldn't be surprised if other distributions had 3rd party emacs-snapshot repositories, too.