God bless flatpak for these cases
no system package
install distro that has it on a chroot
When the dependencies need dependencies and then those dependencies need dependencies, the rabbit hole is endless!
I honestly can’t remember the last time I’ve come across a package that I needed that so obscure that it wasn’t found somewhere as at the very least an appimage, if not a flatpak. I haven’t had to build from source in I don’t even know how many years now.
Try making music on Linux. You’ll be compiling obscure shit and tweaking configs all the time.
True. But I was coming at if from the perspective of an every day user coming from Windows. email, word processing, internet, etc… Even gaming and photo editing.
The more professional the needed software gets, of course the more obscure it gets.
What? Its something I do quite regularly.
I think it depends on the distro. Nixos is pretty bad for this if you want to try out a project that is really new. If you wait a month or two a flake usually comes out somewhere.
so true
and yeah i can confirm i’ve been using linux for 7 years…
make: error: libX11.so permission denied or not found make: failed, something something finishing remaining jobs.
dear god what does it mean
I get that your issue was probably more nuanced than that, but what’s so confusing about inatalling missing build dependencies? If projects have a build guide sometimes they’ll straight up give you an install command for your distribution. If not, it’s up to you to find the package names corresponding to what you need to install since they can differ from distro to distro.
pfft. ln -s new_library.4.4.7 old_library.4.2.8
all done!
If it would be that easy. The problem I had was, that I installed a dependency using my package manager, but to compile my originally wanted software I had to provide a cmake file (of the dependency I installed via my package manager) to the compiler, which I of course did not have.
You didnt waste those hours, you learned something.
Nothing that useful, apart from learning again that reading error messages properly can save you much pain.
That’s a useful lesson to have stick
More like:
No system package -> installing from user repos -> appimage -> flatpak -> creating your own package -> using a VM with a distro that has the package -> not installing packageIf after that you still don’t have it,
it wasn’t meant to beit’s probably just not very good software.Sorry, what does “not installing something” mean? Is it literal?
Giving up on installing the package
Ah, thank you! Something about the wording tripped me up.
It means that I did not installed a certain software due to the dev not providing any binaries or at least making it a little bit easier to compile it myself.
nix-shell is great too. sort of like a “demo” of something before actually committing to it or if you just want to use something one off without adding it to your config and rebuilding.
As a dev it’s fantastic for testing also. can just try something on a bunch of browsers without actually installing the browser. love it.
All these different package manager systems.
I think we just need to consolidate and make a standard one
I know you want to see this comic again:
Gimme the repo and I’ll get it to compile on Arch, latest testing packages as per 2025-10-20T22:12:00 on repo.30p87.de/archlinux
What colors are your thigh highs?
Black-white, preferably pink-white. I overcompensate a lot for boymoding.
It’s too funny to me that Arch of all distributions attracts the thigh /Unix socks crowd (for lack of better word). Nothing about Arch stands out for me in that regard, there’s no social statement or anything, and when I was more active in the community, it wasn’t known for that.
I was deep enough into Arch to run my own private repository using aurutils, but no thighs :(
I have them but I use Debian mostly.
mine are pink white too :D
Sadly Im on Fedora.
Bad girl!
Both of these two cases are why Flatpaks are so attractive.
They take up so much fucking space though
Flatpaks are okay for stuff that doesn’t need deep access but they don’t work for many things.
TBH if it’s just for that I’d rather use nix packages. But flatpak’s sandboxed app are better for sus packages or proprietary-might-spy-everywhere packages.
I’m going to be honest to you, I prefer appimages.
I respect your wrong opinion
I rarely encounter them. But they usually work when I do. But, ugh, they’re just kinda gross. Like, is this a .exe? No thank you. Don’t give me windows trauma.
I’m always like, “well, now where do I put this executable?”
But they do work
I’ve had the opposite experience with flatpaks that I have with snaps. I don’t really use them much. But when I see that as an option I use it and it just works. Definitely a fan as a USER of them. I’m sure people have their complaints as users and developers. But I definitely have to say it’s been positive so far. Which is a rare consistency in the life of installing packages.
Flatpaks are better than Snaps, but properly maintained dependency trees and SBOMs are best, by a wide margin.
PopOS fucked me up with flatpaks
Gateway drug
They are extremely effective at preventing PackageKit updates on my steam deck
plus that extra defense-in-depth layer of a sandbox
Last week was the first time I think I’ve ever got a random Internet tarball to
configure,makeandmake install. Program even did what it was supposed to too. I was amazed.Cue the Kelsey Grammer growl.
WHAT FRESH HELL IS THIS?!
