I have had so much more trouble with Windows than Linux.

The GUI app stores are much better than any helper script I could write.

apt-search and dnf-search both exist. I have used both. I prefer a GUI for that because they’ll provide things like screenshots, no CLI tool does, neither to TUI tools like Aptitude.

I do both. If I know exactly what I want to install, I’ll install it from the terminal because it’s often more direct. If I go “I need an app that does thing, what’s available?”

So the joke is, you’ve got something you want to install, be it a Python module, Java library, steam game, desktop application, whatever. You want it installed, figuring out which package manager has it and remembering the exact command syntax starts getting to be a pain, so just use this script to try installing it from a variety of sources.

You would evoke it by running ./install.sh package and it will replace all instances of $1 with the string “package” at runtime. The ampersand at the end of each line will run that line as a separate background process rather than in the foreground process, so effectively this will attempt to install “package” or whatever you put in as an argument from a half dozen sources simultaneously in parallel.

These include the old and new Python package managers, the old and new Red Hat package managers, debian/Ubuntu’s APT with and without sudo, cloning a git repo and building from source, and the icing on the cake is curling directly into bash.

Don’t curl directly into bash. You’ll catch genital rabies.

Remember that this is an XKCD comic, it’s a joke. The alt-text says “The failures usually don’t hurt anything and if it installs multiple versions it increases the chance one of them is right. (the ‘yes’ command and ‘2>/dev/null’ are recommended additions.)” “Yes” is a bash command that will spam ‘y’ in the terminal, the point of it is to answer yes to any questions an automated system asks, and 2>/dev/null will stop it from displaying errors. These add an even deeper level of Yolo-ing.

I’m honestly not convinced that’s true.

Yeah, do it 3 years ago.

My favorite thing about TempleOS is it’s written in Holy C.

Gnome is trying to do their whole “Macintosh with a concussion” thing, there’s a handful of tiling window managers that are difficult to describe, but…kinda yeah. Most of us also use QWERTY keyboards that date to the 19th century.

systemd would be a fantastic OS if only it had an init system.

Linux has a wide selection of GUIs. For those comfortable with Windows I would recommend either Mint’s Cinnamon or KDE.

For the point I’m making, that’s close enough.

I will sometimes play with the weirdest little electronics, like a smart outlet or something, and the damn thing will have a little Linux distro running out of Flash and there’s no room to install anything but it’s got Vi on it, often as part of Busybox or Toybox. Nano might not be installed, emacs almost certainly isn’t, Vi or Vim almost certainly WILL be in there. For if you ever need to edit wpa_supplicant.conf on your coffee maker. Because we live in a world that contains that hell sentence.

Someone deliberately chose to break with POSIX compliance?

The reason why I’m on team Vim is because it’s standard. A copy of it is installed on pretty much every Unix-like system out there. Vi is built into Busybox.

Something something Unix Philosophy. Write small programs that do one thing and do it well and then re-use that well tested code as often as you can rather than poorly re-implementing it over and over?

Probably got put into a popular example and then everyone uses it because “that’s how.”

You weren’t there for the Leftpad fiasco, I take it?

You’ll hear Dacron in the aviation industry, to refer to “naked cloth” coverings like you see on ultralights, in contrast to something like poly-fiber which is the modern equivalent of cloth and dope.

Or a Trackpoint driver.

No that would probably be the xfce equivalent.