I’ve been transitioning to Linux recently and have been forced to use github a lot when I hadn’t much before. Here is my assessment.
Every github project is named something like dbutils, Jason’s cool photo picker, or jibbly, and was forked from an abandoned project called EHT-sh (acronym meaning unknown) originally made by frederick lumberg, forked and owned by boops_snoops and actively maintained by Xxweeb-lord69xX.
There are either 3 lines of documentation and no releases page, or a 15 page long readme with weekly releases for the last 15 years and nothing in between. It is either for linux, windows, or both. If it’s for windows, they will not specify what platforms it runs on. If it’s for Linux, there’s a 50% chance there are no releases and 2 lines of commands showing how to build it (which doesn’t work on your distro), but don’t worry because your distro has it prepackaged 1 version out of date and it magically appears on flatpak only after you’ve installed it by other means. Everything is written in python2. It is illegal to release anything for Mac OS on github.
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your distro has it prepackaged 1 version out of date
found the ubuntu user :D
Close, but not quite!
debian?
Right, so Ubuntu
absolute truth, this.
GitHub is a place you can use to easily put a copy of your code online. Many people just want to build a working solution and move on. Building a useful GitHub project, with fancy stuff like releases, is work that isn’t really solving any issues. Many people don’t like doing it. Many people especially don’t want to invest time in proprietary solutions like GitHub. They might not even accept pull requests on GitHub.
Quality assessment though 😄
I don’t understand this experience. I’ve been using Linux for 20+ years and I don’t have this problem.
Maybe I’m just a really boring user.
Edit, on further thought, I know I am a boring user, so ignore this I guess.
If you’ve been using Linux for 20 years that makes sense, as I have a lot of applications I used on windows that are not available on linux and have no alternative in any repo or flatpak, only as weird little projects on github (that don’t work half the time). So I’ve spent a lot of time trying to replicate a resemblance of my work flow and QoL luxuries. Your work flow has been refined over that 20 years with little windows influence.
Truer words have never been spoken before
your distro has it prepackaged 1 version out of date
And the only reason you wanted to install the thing is because it’s a prerequisite for some other thing you wanted to install, which requires the latest version.
God, I hate that.
Then you do a clean up day and start removing shit you don’t know what is or even use. Then a few weeks later something doesn’t work and you don’t know why, but it was probably something you removed, so you go through the entire git journey again, throwing and taking the exact same punches to get things running.
The story of yt-dlp and ffmpeg on my raspberry pi.
Where’s the meme
Yeah. Pretty much.
The worst part about free Linux programs is that they have 0 visibility or marketing.
Almost everything I know of is from other people whom are far more passionate about keeping track of the foss landscape.
Sorry, guys I don’t check AUR every night before bedtime.
Yeah you want to know the funny thing: I ended up on Github a lot when I was new to Linux, but that has happened less and less over time and I think it’s due to two unrelated factors:
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I have assimilated. As a Microsoft emigrant, I was used to doing things a certain way, there were things I didn’t know about Linux, I hadn’t really chosen the hardware I owned for Linux compatibility, etc. So I kept having to go get weird device drivers and weird little software packages to work on my distro and open my old files and such. But as I’ve gotten used to the ecosystem, replaced my old hardware with that which is Linux compatible out of the box etc. I’ve needed to do something weird less and less often.
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Flatpak and Appimages have risen in popularity. It’s easier to get the software you need, that runs on your distro, that is up to date and modern, even if it’s not very popular. Because a variety of software is available in these formats it’s easy to get what I need, be it commercial software, esoteric little stuff for my niche pastimes, etc.
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OP listened to some trolls and unironically picked Gentoo as their first distro.
It’s been a while since I’ve used Gentoo, but aren’t their repos fairly robust? I don’t remember having to use GitHub (or SourceForge back then) for much at all.
in other words your impression of a microsoft run website with the least foss example of git, since switching to linux
Correct! It’s where web searches bring me so it’s what I use until I git gud enough to learn how to find things better.
Use docker
I do in my server! But I didn’t even consider it in terms of a workstation.
As someone who works fairly extensively with all three major platforms… You’re definitely wrong about macOS here. Almost everything on GitHub that works on Linux also works on Mac, aside from GUI applications which are often more OS dependent. The readme pages often just lump Mac and Linux together as they can be pretty similar, especially for things written for interpreted languages (python) where it’s often literally the same.
I recently bought a MacBook Air M1 and I came at it from a classic “ThinkPad with Fedora on it” Linux nerd perspective. I got given a Mac at work a couple of years ago, and I warmed to it. I agree that Macs are great tools for DevOps work. I used to think they were just for posers but I’ve been converted.
Just home brew everything?
I home brew installed most stuff, yeah. I’m lucky in that I don’t need a whole lot of stuff installed. Just a couple of JetBrains IDE’s, a couple of browsers, iTerm2 and a handful of popular CLI utilities.
I really miss a consistent package manager on Windows when I have to use it for work. The website download and install method just grinds on me. I guess some of this is still prevalent on Mac and for CLI stuff I guess home-brew comes in.
Do you miss any customizability?
Yep. I’m Linux at home but macOS all day at work. My employer won’t let us use Linux workstations (despite everything I work on being Linux…). Both are vastly superior to Windows.
Is it because they can’t run their spyware on a Linux machine ?
Of course.
My employer is the same and it drives me crazy. wInDoWs iS mOrE sEcUrE! Yet literally all of our software runs in Linux environments. We even tell people to build in Windows but target Linux. I had a M2 Max at one point because I finally convinced them to at least let me have that and was forced back to Windows because our stupid MDM software only really works properly on Windows. :(
Came here to say this. Just get home brew up and running. One you have gcc and your other basic tools installed, there’s very few Linux guides that won’t work on a Mac. A couple shell tools have different names, but that’s about it.
Between homebrew and nix, the amount of foss macs can run out of the box is pretty close to some generic Ubuntu (nixpkgs is technically the largest repo out there, but not all of the nixpkgs are available on mac).
And that’s just regarding stuff that’s distributed pre-built with a package manager. Truth is, if you’re down to build stuff from source, you can just follow the Linux guide and everything will work right out of the box far more often than not.
People ask for money from Mac users.
They bought the hardware… So they’ll buy the software too!
Learn to read code (git gud) /s but it’s the only way to be sure (nuke from orbit)
Or, look at the stars…
Or, look at the stars…
Today my horoscope tells me to not use github in particular and avoid compiling any code in general.
That’s what I’ve been trying to tell my boss for the last 6 months…
K, I asked for that apparently, well played…
Was talking github stars though.
