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.

Who’s next?

It is just how I prefer to do my computing. I tend to live on the command line and pipe programs together to get complex behavior. If you don’t like that, then my approach is not for you and that’s fine. As for your analogy, I see it more as “instead of driving down the road in a car, I like to put my own car together using prefabs”.

Option 4: levy existing tools such as gpg and git using something like pass. That way, you are keeping things simple but it requires more technical knowledge. Depending on your threat model, you may want to invest in a hardware security key such as a yubikey which works well with both gpg and ssh.

Can’t forget to bash snaps too!

Bruh, we’re on linux 6 now!

That threw me for a loop!

OpenFOAM. I needed powerful software to do CFD that was free, as in free beer, and found OpenFOAM. To run it on windows, the installation instructions first step was install linux on a vm then follow the linux installation instructions. I did that and started using the vm for other stuff until I found myself using the vm for most tasks, but kept using windows for gaming. To learn more, I got myself a pinebook, which replaced most of the usage of my vm. When windows decided to self destruct, I had learnt enough to install and configure arch with minimal help. Now, nothing can persuade me to go back.

Apart from your favourite distro of course!

Borg has worked well for me. Also supports compression, encryption and deduplication.

I would have taken a deep dive into docker and containerised pretty much everything.