How did loose installers even become a thing? Package managers are so much more convenient for the user and the dev but some still insist on not using them.Are there even any realistic downsides to them?
>>106451777Czech'dAll we need are AppImages in /opt/.
>>106451809this
>>106451809???arent appimages vendored with their deps?
>>106451777I think installers/appimages/flatpaks straight from the dev are better because you don't have to trust a bunch of package maintainers, you only have to trust the dev. If everything was an appimage/flatpak you also wouldn't need an army of package maintainers for all the distros.
>>106451875This. Life without having a “daddy” package manager decide which version I get to use is one of the joys of sticking with Windows.
>>106451875This sux because the faggot dev never updates dependencies, leading to vulnerable packages.
>>106451809I was more asking about OS's in general. Windows and macos included. If a dev can host a installer i don't see why a repo would be any harder. They could save the effort on the update process and still have everything start nicely in the browser like with flathub. After a couple of years using linux i just don't get any other way. Yes there is winget now but why doesn't anyone use it? The apple people are a little better in that regard but its 100% package manager like here still.
>>106451995>but its 100% package managerits not i mean
>>106451777cringe take
>>106451777decentralized > centralized
>>106453750repositories are hosted on many different servers and everybody can run their own independent one.
>>106453842you technically can, but normies always ruin it in the long runyou can also install your own .apks and host your own "app store" but in reality developers eventually stop publishing .apks on their own websites and normies think software comes from play store and then google decides you can no longer install anything outside play store and we're here
>>106451777They are notStandalone installers are the most portable and useful way to distribute software
>>106453960>host your own "app store"Its more like providing a f-droid repo. Most devs that have one also share .apks btw. I just mean that stuff like PPAs or something like the AUR are more convenient. It can all be as simple as a .apk, flathub also publishes 'binaries' that just add the software to flatpak, but at the same time have all the benefits of a package manager.
>>106451777With traditional linux packaging standards (deb, rpm), the convention is that every library an application depends on should be linked dynamically and distributed as a separate package. It's usually not possible to install multiple versions of a library simultaneously, so if my program needs libfoo 2.8 but the distro only packages 2.6 then my program won't run on that distro. Same issue if I need 2.4 but the distro has already switched to 2.9.(Strictly speaking I don't think anything actually prevents me from creating a deb/rpm that just bundles everything I need into /opt/myprogram and fucks with LD_PRELOAD to make it work, but it's against convention and would probably make various maintainers upset.)Recently Flatpak and Snap have emerged which take a different approach, encouraging the application to bundle everything it needs. Unfortunately these standards also enforce new security rules which are incompatible with many types of application. For examplehttps://github.com/cboxdoerfer/fsearch/wiki/Flatpak-version-limitationshttps://github.com/cboxdoerfer/fsearch/wiki/Snap-is-no-longer-officially-supportedThen there's AppImage, which seems to address many of these problems but the few times I've tried to actually use AppImages the experience has been very poor. Last I checked, no major distro or DE allows you to treat an AppImage as an "app" (meaning you can create desktop icons for it, search for it in the launcher, pin it to the taskbar, etc) unless you manually create a .desktop file for it.Docker is great but only suitable for very technical users who are already familiar with using it.So basically the situation is still completely fucked and there's still no good way to distribute Linux software.
>>106454507The appimages I've used seem to just werk and it makes me wonder why it's not the standard. Download, double click, just werks. No ppa, aur, enable this or that repository, or whatever tinkering. Just. Werks. What you said about .desktop file is true. I managed to just drag it into KDE start menu but it doesn't look great. Doesn't seem like a huge problem though.
Just make a fucking static binary holy shit
