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!
One day someone's posts how all Linux programs run forever and Windows creates abandonware
Another day someone complains about the Linux version of his program not tuning anyone so he has to use the Windows version
I'm not sure what's going on anymore
In the unix world, truly great programs tend to stay around for ever.
lesshas been around since 1983.grepwas there ten years earlier. Linux users lovevim. What does the "v" stand for, you ask? "Visual", of course, because it was one of the first text editors to offer support for computer monitors. And before that, when we had teletypes, people useded, which still comes pre-installed with Ubuntu. Not to mention that the modern linux terminal is basically emulating (that's why we called them terminal emulators) an electronic typewriter with some extra extensions for color and cursor support. They're backwards compatible to this day. That's why it says tty (teletype) when you pressctrl-alt-F2.The caveat is that these examples are all low-level programs that have few dependencies. And they are extremely useful, therefore well-maintained. When it comes to more complex programs with a lot of dependencies, unless there is someone to keep it updated with the latest versions of those dependencies, it will eventually get broken.
The reason this happens less often in W*ndows is because w*ndows historically hasn't had a package manager, forcing devs to bundle all their dependencies into the executables. Another part of the reason is that m*cros*ft would lose a lot of business customers if they broke some obscure custom app with a new update, so they did their best to keep everything backwards compatible. Down to the point of forbidding you from creating a file named
AUXin order to keep support for programs written for qdos, an OS from before filesystems were invented.Thanks that's pretty informative
Why isn't there a way for Linux users to automatically install every missing dependency for a program? Not sure if this will net me a ban here but the W*ndows way kind of looks superior here. Having old programs break with updates is a massive pain.
There's pros and cons. On one hand, packing your dependencies into your executable leads to never having to worry about broken dependencies, but also leads you into other problems. What happens when a dependency has a security update? Now you need an updated executable for every executable that has that bundled dependency. What if the developer has stopped maintaining it and the code is closed source? Well, you are out of luck. You either have the vulnerability or you stop using the program. Additionally bundling dependencies can drastically increase executable size. This is partially why C programs are so small, because they can rely on glibc when not all languages have such a core ubiquitous library.
As an aside, if you do prefer the bundled dependency approach, it is actually available on Linux. For example, you can use appimages, which are very similar to a portable exe file on windows. Of course, you may run afoul of the previously mentioned issues, but it may be an option depending on what was released.
Do you happen to know what (if any?) technical advantages appimage has over "portable" applications (i.e. when the app is distributed as a zipped directory containing the executable, libraries, and all other resources)"? As far as I understand, appimage creates an overlay filesystem that replaces/adds your system libraries with the libraries that the packaged app needs? But why would that be necessary if you can just put them in a folder along with the executable and override
LD_LIBRARY_PATH?Thanks