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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • Would it be enough to be able to run .deb packages on fedora?

    Unpacking a .deb on Fedora, or unpacking an .rpm on Ubuntu isn’t a big deal. The files inside are often actually identical.

    But would not be useful because the files inside usually rely on shared libraries, which may or may not already be installed. Those shared libraries are installed in different places on each Linux distro. Figuring out which ones to ask for (and making sure the program can find them) is the real work that the .Deb or .RPM installers do.

    A fun way to try this out is with Portable Apps. Anything called a “portable app” either doesn’t use additional libraries, or carries the libraries it needs with it.

    If you find a portable app for Ubunutu, there’s a good chance the Fedora version is an identical file, and works fine on Ubuntu. There’s lots of reasons it might not work, but it can be fun to try.

    For the most part, the only reason any Linux program is unavailable on a different version of Linux is that no one has bothered to build the necessary installer for that combination of program and OS.

    .RPM was supposed to solve this by being universal, since any other OS can implement it to match .Deb was supposed to solve this by being universal, since any other OS can implement it to match (about 60% actually do). I think Flatpacks and Snaps might solve this by being universal, at some point…

    Source: I’ve built installer packages for various operating systems.













  • MajorHavoc@lemmy.worldtoMemes@lemmy.mlunholy software..
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    10 months ago

    First: Linux is the street racing scene of the PC world. You can customize everything, and it’s going to be faster and more responsive. Also if someone just wants to build a really cool custom experience, there’s very cool stuff possibld do on Windows, but that road eventually leads to Linux.

    Second: Linux is the long haul huge truck engine of the Internet. Big data processing only runs on Linux*. I’ve met one Windows supercomputer and one Mac supercomputer. Both are long retired now.

    *The interesting exception to this is payments processing, which has a lot of Windows and Mainframe still. But while that workload is big, it’s dwarfed by the Internet backbone and supercomputer jobs that run on Linux.

    Something like 99.9% of the Internet now runs on Linux.**

    **Please no one reply to me about your .Net shop. I’ve worked at them too, but they’re a substantial minority now, and they still mostly deploy to Azure which is mostly running Linux.

    Third: Free stuff. Most open source software is written for Linux, and only ported to Windows after it gets really popular. So on Linux, your options for good free software are much nicer.