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Jason’s cool photo picker, or jibbly, and was forked from an abandoned project called EHT-sh (acronym meaning unknown) originally made by frederick lumberg, forked and owned by boops_snoops and actively maintained by Xxweeb-lord69xX.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how to build it (which doesn’t work on your distro), but don’t worry because your distro has it prepackaged 1 version out of date and it magically appears on flatpak only after you’ve installed it by other means.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.

  • @ArcaneSlime@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    1•3 months ago

    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!

    • @superkret@feddit.org
      4•3 months ago

      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 using sbopkg, 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.