Package managers: ecosystem is fragmented, requiring a long list of distro- and package-manager-specific instructions. Many scripts already install through package managers, they simply make the user’s life easier.
Flatpaks: These are clearly designed for desktop applications, with CLIs treated as an afterthought. They may be the best long-term hope, but today they are definitely not as convenient or widely available as a simple script.
If you care about adoption, `curl | sh` is the only real option today, which is why virtually all project show it as the first option.
The "like an adult" is what has and will continue to hold back linux on the desktop. Always gatekeeping less technical users instead of acknowledging adoption and ease of use are critical.
i dunno, nothing about most computing is particularly easy to use or intuitive.
what has worked over time is having computers of various types in schools, where teachers teach students and let them play with it.
nobody teaches about the command line, so nobody knows what to do with it. its also inscrutible without a useable help view, unless you already know how to use the terminal
A lot of those scripts are wrappers around package managers. Creating them is extra work for distributors, but they still do it because package-manager installs are not truly one-liners and offer far less control over the installation experience.
Users need to figure out which of the 10+ package managers they should be using, then run several commands. If something fails, the error messages are often cryptic and not easily configurable by the distributor.
And that’s before getting into the many rough edges of package managers. Most of them flat-out refuse to handle configuration and leave that part to the end user. Now you also need to document how to edit YAML and restart a systemd service. With an install script this is also solved.
For power users, this always looks trivial. In practice it raises the barrier to entry and can meaningfully affect adoption if your product is often used by less technical people.
In what world does a user have to choose between 10 package managers? Each distro has exactly one. There are also only about three, maybe four main package managers out there.
A shell script being piped into bash has so many more ways to break than a package. And if yhe theory is that package managers are fickle (they aren't), then how does adding more complexity help?
It is much simpler, much safer, and easier to maintain a package than an install.sh, eapecially for a big project.
Configuration can be handled by a script, yes. Here's a crazy idea: Your package can include scripts for configuring the software. It's almost as if most packages do. The scripts/utilities could even restart a systemd service for you.
Unless you're talking about configuring your build, in which case we're dealing with an experienced developer who will have no trouble just cloning the repo and building from source.
My biggest issue is: if we're dealing with someone who can't use a package manager, we're dealing with someone who doesn't have the capacity to judge how safe a script downloaded off the internet is. This does not drive linux adoption, it drives botnet adoption.
The ideas aren't mutually exclusive, and I've never seen an open source project support "curl | sh" without also supporting those methods.
Indeed, plenty of these scripts often act as a "what OS and packager do we have" mux. Just look at the source of this one, for example.
When you support an open source project at scale and/or with less savvy users, you come to see the benefit of "here, just f'ing slam this into your shell and we'll figure it out" installers. I know I have.
Package managers: ecosystem is fragmented, requiring a long list of distro- and package-manager-specific instructions. Many scripts already install through package managers, they simply make the user’s life easier.
Flatpaks: These are clearly designed for desktop applications, with CLIs treated as an afterthought. They may be the best long-term hope, but today they are definitely not as convenient or widely available as a simple script.
If you care about adoption, `curl | sh` is the only real option today, which is why virtually all project show it as the first option.