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Jason’s cool photo picker, or jibbly, and was forked from an abandoned project called EHT-sh (acronym meaning unknown) originally made by frederick lumberg, forked and owned by boops_snoops and actively maintained by Xxweeb-lord69xX.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how to build it (which doesn’t work on your distro), but don’t worry because your distro has it prepackaged 1 version out of date and it magically appears on flatpak only after you’ve installed it by other means.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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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 😄
Interesting how we live in different bubbles ✌️
Yes the world of github and linux is vast and I am like a newborn baby. I hope to visit your bubble one day my friend.
My bubble is mostly lm, which comes in two flavors:
(1) useless repo made up entirely of jupyter notebooks and 28363 requirements achieved via pip freeze
(2) simple, friendly, well documented, runs
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.
I find shit for macOS on GitHub all the time lmao.
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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wait, does apple let users access github?
Yes, why would they block a website?
Well, they have blocked a mobile phones connection when you held it in your hand sooooo
“You’re browsing it wrong”
/s
Antennagate happened 14 years ago. A lot users are too young to remember that
I have never heard of that before
Iphone 4 had a shitty antenna design. This was the first iphone with a metal frame around, on the sides of the phone. If you holded it with your left hand you could easily accidentally short the two parts of the antenna, basically cutting all signals.
This was definetily a design fault, there was even class action lawsuit against Apple. When they asked Steve Jobs about this, he replied:
“You are holding it wrong.”
It’s a joke
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.
The story of yt-dlp and ffmpeg on my raspberry pi.
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.
Wait until you install some package and then scratch your head not knowing how to run it.
Then think “I’ll figure it out later” but you never do. Only to be reminded of it a month later when you happen to see it scroll by in an apt-or-whatever package upgrade.
“Oh yeah, I forgot about that. I should check that thing out again” you think to yourself. But you never do. Repeat for eternity.
If I install a package, I don’t even know what it installed and/or where.
I can’t believe Linux can’t even tell you what it installed where - even Windows can do that.
Most package managers have a way to list all the files a package will install
Helix Editor did this to me. They have so much documentation on their site about how to use the editor, how to extend it, theme it, etc., etc. What they didn’t seem to document, though, is that the binary is named
hx, nothelix:/When I’m confused like that, I check https://packages.debian.org and open the file list for the package. That way I know what binaries are installed.
There is also a dpkg command for that. Grep it for /bin/ and you’ve got your executable.
Ooh, I’ll keep that in mind for next time, thanks!
Or you could just do
dpkg-query --listfiles <packagename>
Dunno about that.
https://docs.helix-editor.com/install.html
Download pre-built binaries from the GitHub Releases page. Add the hx binary to your system’s $PATH to use it from the command line
Checking web.archive.org, it has mentioned the
hxbinary at least since 2021, which is the oldest version of the page it has. The usage documentation mentions thehxbinary as well. So it looks like you may have skipped over a few things.Also if you know how to use your package manager, it’s trivial to check which binary it installed. Binaries go in
/usr/bin, so just look through the file list of the package and grep for/usr/bin. That’s a pretty basic life skill on any distro.Of course, and no offense intended, wanting to use a 170MB PoSt-MoDeRn vim clone written in Rust instead of learning to use the sensible default editor that came with your system is a bit of a telltale sign of n00bness, and wanting to run before you can walk :)
Who pissed in your muesli?
I don’t know, who pissed in yours?
Congrats on expressing that in the most passive-agressive and gatekeepery way you could’ve. I’ve been using Linux for the better part of a decade now, and know my way around the
usrdir - however things work a bit different on NixOS, whose package manager doesn’t involve installation steps beyond adding the word “helix” to my packages list. I’m not great at reading though, so I absolutely would’ve missed something as obvious as the Installation page 😅 As for your beliefs about postmodern Vim clones, what’s the point (and fun) in the freedom of choice Linux offers if I can’t install and try out the latest fun spin on an old fave from time to time?Friend, and I say that unironically, I think you are attaching a lot of emotions to my post that aren’t there.
I’m not trying to gatekeep, you keep doing what you want! I’m just making an observation about new users who often jump head over heels into All The New Shiny Things and then run into snags because they lack some fundamental knowledge. And of course, you would be using NixOS 😂
The fun part is that as a dev, you don’t really know that either. It’s just the file name of the executable. Anyone can rename that.
And even if it’s not renamed, you still don’t know, if your users need to call it with justhxor with./hxor some other path.Obviously, you should mention somewhere that the executable is likely called
hx, but because that requires an explanation, there’s certainly a tendency to not mention it very often…
Devs who make the -h command actually useful are modern day saints.
I think they meant you don’t know what the binary is called because it doesn’t match the package name. I usually list the package files to see what it put in
/use/binin such cases.
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.
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 ?
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.
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).
your distro has it prepackaged 1 version out of date
found the ubuntu user :D
Close, but not quite!
debian?
Right, so Ubuntu
When I first moved to linux I felt this same way. It gets better. Now days I fucking love those 15 page ReadMes and I’m not bothered if there’s no steps for my distro. The sheer volume of documentation surrounding linux packages is insane. There’s often a ton of ways to configure and manage the to fit your needs. That freedom is what I love so much about linux.
As for the ones with 2 lines, I don’t think I’ve seen that as much. I generally would avoid them unless the source was clear what the project did.
At any rate there will come a day when it starts to click. It’s just a marathon not a sprint.
Learning to read docs is basically learning how to learn. If good docs exist and you have the skill of reading them, your life will get significantly easier.
You get used to how to find the right way of doing stuff. If you’re still in the Windows biased search results space, everything FOSS is made to look sketchy. Those search results are not deterministic. That bias is intentional. Eventually Microsoft stops biasing you or bribing Google to do the same and your search results will be better. Then you stop using the search results all together for the most part. You’ll figure out that the ways you did things in the past were inefficient and usually wrong. There are better ways that you’ll discover and those repos are self hosted or on gitlab or elsewhere. You eventually just use RPM fusion, or you setup distrobox with Arch and the AUR, or you toss on the Nix package manager and start using flakes. The vast majority of my initial headaches were due to trying to replicate Windows workflows. Then I learned all of that was weird and pretty backwards.
Guy, nobody is making FoSS pages and documentation hard to find or read. The developers take care of that themselves. You’ve invented a story that had no basis in reality. At least the other posters admit it’s lack of time and some overworked dude in his basement.
Be the change you want to see in the world.
I’m currently in the process of updating Slackware’s documentation, some of which hasn’t been touched in 12 years.
It’s completely out of date, so no one uses it anymore.
And because no one uses it, no one updates it.You’re doing “Bob’s” work son, thank you for your service!
As a devout SubGenius myself it is my destiny to use Slackware one day but alas I fear it is currently above my skill level, more documentation will help people like me greatly! PRABOB!
It’s easier to install and administer than Arch, and won’t break on updates.
But yeah, the current state of the documentation is discouraging.I’m more worried about package management I guess. Though I suppose now with flatpak that may be less of an issue. Still I use some weird shit, some of it is only packaged as a .deb or .rpm on their site, like the Brother printer drivers.
And yeah the documentation lol. I rely heavily on that or places like lemmy for linux help, which is why to start I picked a really popular distro with good documentation (fedora). It’s definitely something I’ll try one day though!
You can have a look at slackbuilds.org to see if what you need is available. It’s Slackware’s AUR equivalent.
You can install packages from there usingsbopkg, which does handle dependencies.It does have the Brother drivers: https://slackbuilds.org/repository/15.0/system/brlaser/
Up-to-date documentation comes in the form of easy to understand text files written by Pat himself, that are installed with the distro. For questions, linuxquestions.org is the place to go. The main devs of the distro read and post there regularly.
That’s also what I love about Slackware. I wrote one of the main devs an e-mail and got a helpful, friendly reply half an hour later. That’s what Linux used to be like.Thanks! This inspires confidence! Seems like it won’t be so bad!
Look at the brightside: there’s no risk of an update resetting your progress
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.
Where’s the meme
