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0 pointsvladvasiliu4y ago0 comments

You could do that if software vendors bothered to provide the option.

To your example, you can download Elasticsearch as an archive from their website [0], unarchive it, and you're off to the races.

JetBrains IDEs work the same way, grab a zip, unzip it, and bam, you're good to go. They can even keep themselves up to date on their own. It will also install a shortcut in your DE's menu.

Ditto for Zoom and 1Passowrd, who even support more "exotic" distributions, such as Arch, on top of Snaps and Flatpaks.

While I think that in practice the issues you describe do exist, I think the cause is mainly that Linux is still a second-class citizen and not a priority for vendors to support properly. But hey, at least they try, as opposed to others who don't give a damn at all.

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[0] https://www.elastic.co/downloads/elasticsearch ; also available as a .deb or .rpm download

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dTal4y ago

People seem to think Linux has a technical problem with just distributing binaries, but it really doesn't - it's a cultural problem. Even many pieces of free software don't bother to provide archives you can just unpack and run. I heave a deep sigh when I find an interesting program I want to try but my options are "run Ubuntu <version> and install the .deb" or "build from source". If Zoom, JetBrains, Arduino, Blender, Firefox, Julia, VSCode, SALOME, and X-Plane 11 can just give me a binary, why can't you?

Yet we still see discussions like this, where people think packaging is some major roadblock on Linux: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30777172

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dTal4y ago

Yet we still see discussions like this, where people think packaging is some major roadblock on Linux: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30777172

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse