Part of what’s making learning Linux so difficult for me, is the idea of how fragmented it is. You can install programs with sudo apt get (program). You can get programs with snaps. You can get programs with flatpaks. You can install with tar.gz files. You can install with .deb files. You can get programs with .sh files. There’s probably more I don’t know about.

I don’t even know where all these programs are being installed. I haven’t learned how to uninstall them yet. And I’m sure that each way has a different way to uninstall too.

So that brings me to my main question. Why not consolidate all this? Sure, files CAN be installed anywhere if you want, but why not make a folder like /home/programs/ where it’s assumed that programs would be installed?

On windows the programs can be installed anywhere, but the default is C:/windows/Program Files x86/ or something like that. Now, you can change it all you want when you install the programs. I could install it to C:/Fuckfuckfuck/ if I wanted to. I don’t want to, so I leave it alone because C:/Windows/Program Files x86/ is where it’s assumed all the files are.

Furthermore, I see no benefit to installing 15 different programs in 7 different folders. I begrudgingly understand why there’s so many different installation methods, but I do NOT understand why as a collective community we can’t have something like a standardized setting in each distro that you can set 1 place for all your installation files.

Because of the fragmentation of distros, I can understand why we can’t have a standardized location across all distros like Windows has. However I DON’T see why we can’t have a setting that gets set upon each first boot after installation that tells each future installation which folder to install to.

I would personally pick /Home/Programs/, but maybe you want /root/Jamies Files/ because you’re Jamie, and those are your files.

In either case, as we boot up during the install, it would ask us where we want our program files installed. And from then on, no matter what method of install you chose, it would default to whatever your chosen folder was.

Now, you could still install other places too, but you would need to direct that on a per install basis.

So what’s the benefit of having programs each installed in seperate locations that are wildly different?

  • GHiLAEnglish
    1·
    1 day ago

    Consider each distro like a house of kung-fu.

    We are all hitting dummies, we are all practicing falls, drops, and stances, but we have different names, cultures, methods and ideas of getting those same goals done.

    So what’s the benefit of having programs each installed in separate locations that are wildly different?

    Installing an Appimage or flatpak almost entirely leaves that program inside your Home folder, meaning, if you were to reinstall your base system, even a different distro… within reason, those apps would still continue to function, all of their libraries and connections made within a folder that didn’t change.

    Linux is about aversion to risk. On Windows, you’d backup and restore your entire system. Linux brings into question what you consider “your system”. Some distributions can be entirely rebuilt from the ground up via a text file’s instructions and nothing else.

    My main desktop can be back up and running from a complete SSD failure in 20 minutes, a combination of backups and a saved Archlinux installation config for that system.