A sample journey when trying to install software:
- Try your distros repos, it’s either not there or an older version
- Oh wait, you need to add their repo to your list and try again
- Actually, they don’t have a repo, but you can install this deb/rpm from their site
- Nevermind, it actually needs to be installed with pip to get the latest version
- Or wait, it was actually a rust package and needs cargo
- Well, this package is available as a snap
- Screw it, I’ll just build it from source…. Except the dependencies I need take me through the entire journey again
It’s crazy with a large package like mesa. It uses meson, which requires it be installed via pip, and also needs rust which is best installed via a snap, but then there are dependencies it needs that require multiple paths…
On Windows: find the msi or exe and be done with it.
I install my OS and gui with system packages (minimal setup mostly) and everything else with flatpaks. It’s not perfect. There’s bloat and cleanup evolved, and some packages I didn’t trust. And sometimes you still need to build an app from source. But it fixed a bunch of issues you mentioned. It’s also nice to limit permissions on apps.
Yeah, plus one for Flatpaks here as well! A good way to keep up-to-date apps on a ‘stable’ distro. I use Debian and am super happy with it as the underlying system, but plenty of applications have fairly old versions in the Debian repos.