I’ve been transitioning to Linux recently and have been forced to use github a lot when I hadn’t much before. Here is my assessment.

Every github project is named something like dbutils, Jason’s cool photo picker, or jibbly, and was forked from an abandoned project called EHT-sh (acronym meaning unknown) originally made by frederick lumberg, forked and owned by boops_snoops and actively maintained by Xxweeb-lord69xX.

There are either 3 lines of documentation and no releases page, or a 15 page long readme with weekly releases for the last 15 years and nothing in between. It is either for linux, windows, or both. If it’s for windows, they will not specify what platforms it runs on. If it’s for Linux, there’s a 50% chance there are no releases and 2 lines of commands showing how to build it (which doesn’t work on your distro), but don’t worry because your distro has it prepackaged 1 version out of date and it magically appears on flatpak only after you’ve installed it by other means. Everything is written in python2. It is illegal to release anything for Mac OS on github.

  • Vash63@lemmy.world
    21·
    4 months ago

    As someone who works fairly extensively with all three major platforms… You’re definitely wrong about macOS here. Almost everything on GitHub that works on Linux also works on Mac, aside from GUI applications which are often more OS dependent. The readme pages often just lump Mac and Linux together as they can be pretty similar, especially for things written for interpreted languages (python) where it’s often literally the same.

    • thebestaquaman@lemmy.world
      1·
      4 months ago

      Came here to say this. Just get home brew up and running. One you have gcc and your other basic tools installed, there’s very few Linux guides that won’t work on a Mac. A couple shell tools have different names, but that’s about it.

      • farcaller@fstab.sh
        2·
        4 months ago

        Between homebrew and nix, the amount of foss macs can run out of the box is pretty close to some generic Ubuntu (nixpkgs is technically the largest repo out there, but not all of the nixpkgs are available on mac).

        • thebestaquaman@lemmy.world
          1·
          4 months ago

          And that’s just regarding stuff that’s distributed pre-built with a package manager. Truth is, if you’re down to build stuff from source, you can just follow the Linux guide and everything will work right out of the box far more often than not.

    • Violet_McQuasional@feddit.uk
      6·
      4 months ago

      I recently bought a MacBook Air M1 and I came at it from a classic “ThinkPad with Fedora on it” Linux nerd perspective. I got given a Mac at work a couple of years ago, and I warmed to it. I agree that Macs are great tools for DevOps work. I used to think they were just for posers but I’ve been converted.

      • Vash63@lemmy.world
        3·
        4 months ago

        Yep. I’m Linux at home but macOS all day at work. My employer won’t let us use Linux workstations (despite everything I work on being Linux…). Both are vastly superior to Windows.

        • Zeddex@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          1·
          4 months ago

          My employer is the same and it drives me crazy. wInDoWs iS mOrE sEcUrE! Yet literally all of our software runs in Linux environments. We even tell people to build in Windows but target Linux. I had a M2 Max at one point because I finally convinced them to at least let me have that and was forced back to Windows because our stupid MDM software only really works properly on Windows. :(

        • _____@lemm.eeEnglish
          1·
          4 months ago

          Is it because they can’t run their spyware on a Linux machine ?

        • Violet_McQuasional@feddit.uk
          1·
          4 months ago

          I home brew installed most stuff, yeah. I’m lucky in that I don’t need a whole lot of stuff installed. Just a couple of JetBrains IDE’s, a couple of browsers, iTerm2 and a handful of popular CLI utilities.

          • beeng@discuss.tchncs.de
            1·
            4 months ago

            I really miss a consistent package manager on Windows when I have to use it for work. The website download and install method just grinds on me. I guess some of this is still prevalent on Mac and for CLI stuff I guess home-brew comes in.

            Do you miss any customizability?

  • _hovi_@lemmy.world
    71·
    4 months ago

    I have 2 plugins for rofi on Linux and it’s true, no releases - best I can do for you is tags, take it or leave it

      • Deckweiss@lemmy.world
        14·
        4 months ago

        Well, they have blocked a mobile phones connection when you held it in your hand sooooo

        “You’re browsing it wrong”

        /s

            • infeeeee@lemm.ee
              6·
              4 months ago

              Iphone 4 had a shitty antenna design. This was the first iphone with a metal frame around, on the sides of the phone. If you holded it with your left hand you could easily accidentally short the two parts of the antenna, basically cutting all signals.

              This was definetily a design fault, there was even class action lawsuit against Apple. When they asked Steve Jobs about this, he replied:

              “You are holding it wrong.”

  • j4k3@lemmy.worldEnglish
    146·
    4 months ago

    You get used to how to find the right way of doing stuff. If you’re still in the Windows biased search results space, everything FOSS is made to look sketchy. Those search results are not deterministic. That bias is intentional. Eventually Microsoft stops biasing you or bribing Google to do the same and your search results will be better. Then you stop using the search results all together for the most part. You’ll figure out that the ways you did things in the past were inefficient and usually wrong. There are better ways that you’ll discover and those repos are self hosted or on gitlab or elsewhere. You eventually just use RPM fusion, or you setup distrobox with Arch and the AUR, or you toss on the Nix package manager and start using flakes. The vast majority of my initial headaches were due to trying to replicate Windows workflows. Then I learned all of that was weird and pretty backwards.

    • IsThisAnAI@lemmy.world
      82·
      4 months ago

      Guy, nobody is making FoSS pages and documentation hard to find or read. The developers take care of that themselves. You’ve invented a story that had no basis in reality. At least the other posters admit it’s lack of time and some overworked dude in his basement.

  • leo85811nardo@lemmy.world
    73·
    4 months ago

    While I do see most of the listed stuff happened to me before, they only appear once in a while and it’s often just one sentence in the list is true. I think OP is trying to make an exaggerating slander where it’s extremely unlucky to have more than 5 sentences is right

    • TheRedSpade@lemmy.world
      1·
      4 months ago

      It’s been a while since I’ve used Gentoo, but aren’t their repos fairly robust? I don’t remember having to use GitHub (or SourceForge back then) for much at all.

  • BlackLaZoR@fedia.io
    101·
    4 months ago

    Wait until you install some package and then scratch your head not knowing how to run it.

    • NostraDavid@programming.dev
      13·
      4 months ago

      If I install a package, I don’t even know what it installed and/or where.

      I can’t believe Linux can’t even tell you what it installed where - even Windows can do that.

    • SanicHegehog@lemm.ee
      44·
      4 months ago

      Then think “I’ll figure it out later” but you never do. Only to be reminded of it a month later when you happen to see it scroll by in an apt-or-whatever package upgrade.

      “Oh yeah, I forgot about that. I should check that thing out again” you think to yourself. But you never do. Repeat for eternity.

    • Darohan@lemmy.zip
      38·
      4 months ago

      Helix Editor did this to me. They have so much documentation on their site about how to use the editor, how to extend it, theme it, etc., etc. What they didn’t seem to document, though, is that the binary is named hx, not helix :/

      • Ephera@lemmy.ml
        8·
        4 months ago

        The fun part is that as a dev, you don’t really know that either. It’s just the file name of the executable. Anyone can rename that.
        And even if it’s not renamed, you still don’t know, if your users need to call it with just hx or with ./hx or some other path.

        Obviously, you should mention somewhere that the executable is likely called hx, but because that requires an explanation, there’s certainly a tendency to not mention it very often…

        • Darohan@lemmy.zip
          81·
          4 months ago

          Congrats on expressing that in the most passive-agressive and gatekeepery way you could’ve. I’ve been using Linux for the better part of a decade now, and know my way around the usr dir - however things work a bit different on NixOS, whose package manager doesn’t involve installation steps beyond adding the word “helix” to my packages list. I’m not great at reading though, so I absolutely would’ve missed something as obvious as the Installation page 😅 As for your beliefs about postmodern Vim clones, what’s the point (and fun) in the freedom of choice Linux offers if I can’t install and try out the latest fun spin on an old fave from time to time?

      • UnityDevice@startrek.website
        5·
        4 months ago

        I think they meant you don’t know what the binary is called because it doesn’t match the package name. I usually list the package files to see what it put in /use/bin in such cases.

    • Alk@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      531·
      4 months ago

      Yes the world of github and linux is vast and I am like a newborn baby. I hope to visit your bubble one day my friend.

      • ???@lemmy.world
        5·
        4 months ago

        My bubble is mostly lm, which comes in two flavors:

        (1) useless repo made up entirely of jupyter notebooks and 28363 requirements achieved via pip freeze

        (2) simple, friendly, well documented, runs