That’s awesome! I wish more OS-es follow, especially Debian. Having support for an OS that can cover the whole perceived lifecycle of the hardware is something that was once (in the 2000s) the standard. This is something crucial for businesses, but it’s also great for home users.
Indeed - the general configure, build install steps are fairly universal and the configure script doesn’t have to cover from autoconf. We still have that and Makefiles as a wrapper around a meson based setup to keep the process familiar.
Hell maybe I do need to learn some shit, because I was under the impression that you cd into the folder after you untar it, then type ./configuremakesudo make install, but the last two packages I attempted to install from source like this just did nothing.
Maybe. But maybe they did nothing because there was no ./configure script and you had to use another tool, e. g. one of that I mentioned, so you need to learn another shit.
BTW installing anything from source like this is the right way only in (B)LFS.
But you definitely don’t need to learn this if you are a developer and starting a new project in 2024. You can use cmake or write plain makefiles, even shell scripts if you want, but as you value life or your reason keep away from the autotools. It is a nightmare to debug thousands lines of scripts they generate and put into your source tree.
I’m a Linux mint user for my main system and am no beginner. As others have said, it’s friendly to both beginners and advanced users, it’s good to see you’ve made that choice.
That being said, don’t stop there. Whether it’s in a virtual machine or some old laptop, also try one of the “from scratch” systems. I went with Gentoo and that is the root of where a ton of my Linux knowledge started. It’s my favorite distro simply because it has that history for me. You’ll find everyone has their own favorites for their own reasons, so be sure to explore and find the one that you enjoy and helps you learn.
How do you survive on in Debian/Ubuntu flavor? Whenever I would need a software that was not in the repo. Have to put PPA in place to get it. To many times it would then not install becuase of package conflicts. I have up and switched to arch based distro and between primary repo nd AUR I havent looked back and been very stable.
Rarely do I find software I need that’s not in the repo, but when I do, I just dusky build it myself. Not at my machine now, but I think I only have one PPA that’s not default added. In the other cases where I don’t want to build the app, it tends to be in Flatpak too.
That being said, although Mint is technically based on Ubuntu, it really doesn’t feel like it at all. I personally can’t stand Ubuntu, but again all personal opinions. If Debian-based systems didn’t work for you and an arch based distro did, then go with it. Everyone’s needs are their own and that’s why we have so many choices :D
non ironically, firefox did a jump in version numbers after firefox 4 because people were seeing the low number compared to other browsers, and would think they were behind technically.
While true & I remember folks actually using this in arguments for ‘slow development’, there is some merit to versioning differently for something expected to get minor updates to perpetually follow latest specs such. I can’t imagine trying to discern what a “breaking change” would be in this context. Or would you make a new version for every visual redesign? Dates might have just made more sense, but maybe ESR is easier to follow with the current scheme.
I recall at one point Windows 10 was going to be the last version of the OS and they would just maintain that. I’m wondering if they said that to get the last of the Windows 7 and XP users to finally move to 10?
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