What do you guys do when you want to run unmaintained programs?

I recently wanted to run tegaki, and my experience is pretty much summed up by the meme. I consider myself fairly tech-savvy, but I just couldn’t figure out how to compile it. So I just gave up, downloaded the .exe and put it into a fresh wine prefix. After installing CJK fonts, everything ran fine. Now I’m trying to get gpaint to work. My distro recently dropped support for gtk+2 (which I am fairly pissed about, since it’s the last good version of GTK+), so I have to set that up manually as well. [[[ EDIT: gtk2 is alive and well. I was just being and idiot and searching for gtk2, when the package is actually called gtk+2. ]]] I installed all of the dependencies that ./configure told me to, but I still kept getting obscure errors when running make.

So, here’s my question: what tools make the process of running abandonware easier? Docker containers? Also, what can I use to package abandonware in order to make it easy for other people to run? Flatpak? Appimages? Any advice is appreciated!

Also, inb4 “just find a modern alternative”. That would be a reasonable solution. I don’t want reasonable solutions!

devfuuu,

Nix or guix are the proper solution.

marcos,

Yep, if you manage to make it run on them, you are set forever.

observantTrapezium,
@observantTrapezium@lemmy.ca avatar

Pull a docker image of an old distro into an apptainer sandbox, install what you need within, then make a .sif image, should work pretty much in perpetuity. You can also try to make an Appimage.

sturlabragason,

That’s what DistroBox is for: github.com/89luca89/distrobox

huskypenguin,

I was coming here to post this.

renzev,

TIL about sif. Thanks, will give it a try!

2xsaiko,
@2xsaiko@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

First thing I’d try is to use a “period-correct” nixpkgs commit for the libraries. It might even have the package already.

renzev,

Hmmm I’m a bit hesitant about nixpkgs, since when I last tried using it (outside of nixos), many (modern) GUI apps were broken, at least on my distro, But I’ll give this a try if u/observanTrapezium’s suggestion doesn’t work. Thanks!

2xsaiko,
@2xsaiko@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

If the app uses OpenGL in any way, you need to use nixGL: github.com/nix-community/nixGL

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