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lpln3452 | 4 months ago

Admittedly, a distro agnostic equivalent to the PKGBUILD or Nix Flakes would have been great. But it's hard to excuse them when so many better alternatives are available. Even apps that could easily be built into a single binary use these odd installation methods.

And while Flatpak gets a lot of criticism, I honestly think it's far better than these `script| bash` methods.

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IshKebab|4 months ago

> Even apps that could easily be built into a single binary use these odd installation methods.

Yeah because the curl bash script can deal with automatically selecting the right binary (even on Mac) and adding it to your PATH.

> And while Flatpak gets a lot of criticism, I honestly think it's far better than these `script| bash` methods.

I agree but does Flatpak actually work for CLI tools (which is where I see most use of curl-bash). E.g. could I install Rust using Flatpak? My understanding was it's more suited for sandboxed GUI apps.

ac29|4 months ago

> I agree but does Flatpak actually work for CLI tools (which is where I see most use of curl-bash). E.g. could I install Rust using Flatpak? My understanding was it's more suited for sandboxed GUI apps.

Distrobox is basically flatpak for CLI apps. Not exactly, but it accomplishes a similar goal.

lpln3452|4 months ago

No. It is absolutely ridiculous to suggest that one must read some unknown script just for the simple task of adding a binary to the directory on PATH. Unless, of course, you're the type of person who just runs any script without verification.

Furthermore, for files installed 'automatically' like that, it's nearly impossible to remember what was done and where. This means that to remove it, you have to find and read 'that specific version' of the script you ran, and then delete the files. It's not like the script is always in a place with a persistent history, like a git repository. Good luck with that.

simoncion|4 months ago

Yeah, honestly, package your thing up as either a .DEB or an .RPM. 'alien' [0] will handle converting from one to the other, and that will take care of like 90->98% of the Linux users out there.

The "OMFG there's no standard way to package things on Linux!" complaint kinda sucks.

[0] <https://wiki.debian.org/Alien>

lpln3452|4 months ago

Actually, I don't use Debian or Ubuntu either, and I don't think it's a good idea to only support those methods.